Ah, excellent. The sluice gates have opened, and the ketchup slides rampant down the mountainside, mingling the hot summer ice with the hard-packed seed fluff from the rabbits. The purple-wood fern trees are unraveling their blooms, and the crickets pour down all-aplenty. Sensing prey, the great walruses heave themselves out from their underground slumber, rattling stone and fork alike, and trundle over the ketchup flow, drinking deep through their hollow tusks. Overhead, the great owls and eagles fly from their nests, where they have painstakingly handcrafted tiny motorbikes every Tuesday for three years, and joyously fling the fruits of their labor into the red flow, ready for another mating season at last.
In the nearby town, the handsome residents have put their slippers in the oven and hung the windows outside to absorb the moisture from the sun. The capitalists solemnly distribute bread to every cat owner (except Randall, naturally) while the communists desperately flock to the banks to hide their gold from the prying eyes of the cabbage dingos. The hungry, shadowy shape that no one talks about that lives in the well that no one uses slinks back down to the deepest point that no one knows about, stifled once more by the ketchup tide above. Its cymbals fall silent for the first time in twelve decades, and it must wait a full moonfall more to steal buttons. Around the well, children and button vipers dance together in celebration, their typical enmity forgotten now for a while. Every closet is soon filled with glass (except for Randall's, naturally), and the beds have vanished entirely.
Behold, the clock bleats! The minute is at last upon us! There will be no more fish-wrestling this year, and our chariots await!
—doctorlit, he who casts down the mustard