Today Merwyn D’Cruz, my
brother, celebrates his golden birthday.
Among his several talents, he is also
blessed with storytelling skills. Whenever our cousins get together, we
remember how as kids he kept us amused with his stories about Skeletor. We were
held spellbound with his voice modulation and we suspected that he made up the characters as the
story progressed.
After all these years,
Merwyn agreed to pen down a Skeledon story for our reading pleasure. It will be
presented here as a series and this post will be updated regularly as we go
along...
I
Skeledon has ninety-nine
bones in his body. He needs one bone to complete the structure and magically
become a very powerful human.
Whenever he sees a dog eating a bone, he goes
crazy and orders its arrest, but the dog is never caught and so Skeledon remains a very odd arrangement of bones.
Skeletee, the wife of Skeledon,
is obsessed with looking pretty. She is in search of a good parlour and a beautician
who can make her face the prettiest in this world.
Skeletoo, a two-year-old
boy, and Skelethree, a three-year-old girl, are their children.
Skull is the name of their
dog.
This family lives in a very
strange place called The Coffin.
Skeledon holds a crooked
stick in his hand. It has a skull on the upper side where he keeps his hand.
When he gets angry, the skull glows red, and his dog, Skull, starts making
strange noises.
Skeletee sits with a
beautician for three days and three nights to get ready for a party. The parlour has empty shelves and the
wastebasket is full of used things. The beautician has used up all resources in
the shop to satisfy Skeletee and somehow make her look beautiful – Beautifool!
Finally, she is ready.
Skeledon is eager to meet
his ‘Beautifool’ wife. A long golden wig, pounds of creams and pastes, hundreds
of pins and nets, marbles, cotton balls, toothpicks, ear buds, waste tissue
paper, glue, beads, thread, and other things have made her look completely
different.
A hundred years ago,
Skeledon and his family were humans.
They were foodies and liked junk food. One
night, when the sun, the moon, the earth, and the stars formed a straight line,
they went on a food adventure.
They started with a Rumble Jumble Roasted Egg
followed by Wild boar meat in thick purple curry and Pinacolada icecream with
crispy dried ants topping to complete the meal. The result was very strange.
All of them felt like a fully loaded washing machine dancing on the floor.
Skeledon immediately
consulted their doctor who advised x-rays for further diagnosis. But a shooting
star and the flash of the x-ray machine coincided and the outcome was terrible.
The doctor could not believe what he saw and was dumbstruck.
Something complicated the
x-ray process and four skeletons emerged out of thick smoke with their clothes
on!
Walking-talking skeletons
with no flesh.
After a long examination,
the doctor advised them to wait for a hundred years when the sun, moon, earth,
and stars would form the same straight line and a shooting star would strike.
They needed to take another x-ray to get their skins back.
Till then,
they had to keep all their bones intact. Even the loss of a single bone would
affect the reversal process.
(To be continued...)
