T!st

[Brandon Burt]

WIDE SHOT, EXT. A CITY STREET. Men with hats and briefcases, and women with gloves and pocketbooks, stride this way and that, each intent upon some ill-defined errand. We hear the cheerful strains of a vaguely familiar UPBEAT MID-CENTURY RIFF, probably appearing in the stock-music catalog under a heading like "Hustle and Bustle!" or "Busytown."

A small, furry creature slinks in from stage left, fully scruffed and wearing a negligee.

"Wait ... that can't be right," he says, stopping in midstride. "Why am I wearing a peignoir in the middle of the day?" he wonders. "Why, in fact, am I wearing a peignoir at all?"

This exclamation startles a passer-by—this one of the hat-and-briefcase variety—right in the middle of doing that thing passers-by always do, so that, before doing it, he blurts out, "Nice pig!" and scampers off, thereby completing his mission, upon which he receives the contractual +1UP before falling into a Yawning Chasm.

This confuses the otter to no end. "No, that can't be right, either," he says. "Because, eventually, I'll forget all about it and stop being confused, whereas 'to no end' implies a never-ending, permanent state of confusion."

"Not necessarily," came a reply from a different passer-by, wearing gloves and confidently clutching a pocketbook, who, like the peignoir-wearing Otter, had also stopped mid-stride, apparently for no other reason than to argue with him. and was suspended a few inches off the glittering sidewalk, in violation of the laws of physics. "You see, even though a lot of people use 'to no end' in the sense of 'without cessation," it's more correctly used to mean 'with no discernable purp—OOF.'"

"Purpoof? Now that really can't be right," said Otter, but his words could scarcely be heard over the growing commotion as a hapless passer-by, who had stumbled into the floating, purse-clutching one, bent down to retrieve his hat from the glittering sidewalk lest he become a *hatless* hapless passer-by, and unwittingly formed the nucleus of a whole multi-passer-by pileup.

[Ed. Note: Look, Sally, the writer really wants an aerial shot here, he says "to depict the rapidly growing area of confusion radiating outward as all the passers-by trip over one another." But I told him, "Look, we don't really have the budget for anything like that, this is just supposed to be one of those weird, pointless, self-referential stories Otter used to post to Wundee," but he was really insistent. Can we get a drone or something?]

[Ed. Note: And what's the deal with the pig? What pig?]

[Ed. Note: Oh, and then he says it just cuts to 'a tight interior shot of buttered T*st.' Whatever could be meant by that?]

[Ed. Note: And something makes me a little uneasy about this 'suspended a few inches off the glittering sidewalk' business. I think he's planning to bring in a physics cop or something. We're going to need a whistle and a truncheon."]

INT. DAYLIGHT: A CAFE that, moments earlier, was abandoned. The CHEERFUL MID-CENTURY RIFF reaches a crescendo and we DOLLY IN to an EXTREME CLOSEUP of the counter, where butter melts slowly down the side of a stack of crisp, wheat T*st, coming to rest, finally and yellowly, next to an unopened grape jelly packet on the small plate beneath.

—Otter (who thinks a truncheon must be a kind of deep-fried, crunchy battered fish, which sounds delicious, and wonders if that cafe is anywhere nearby.)