On the roof, under a sky bleeding purple and orange, Mooky took a deep breath. He raised the harmonica. He yodeled.
And so, Mooky strapped on his harmonica, grabbed his bucket of cold fried chicken (for luck), and drove his lawnmower—a converted 1972 John Deere with rocket boosters made from old propane tanks—straight toward the Piggly Wiggly. The townsfolk gathered, thinking it was the annual Mulberry Opossum Festival. No one corrected them.
Mooky scratched his chin. “Huh. And here I thought my sinuses were just acting up.”
Prittle sighed. “Fine. But hurry. The Dollys are starting to harmonize, and when they do, the whole multiverse might just break into song and never stop.” francis mooky duke williams
The Memetic Auditor explained the stakes: unless Mooky could perform the “Reverse Shriek of Temporal Rectification” from the roof of the Piggly Wiggly during the next solar flare, reality would fold into a pretzel. Worse, that pretzel would be owned by a sentient hedge fund from Dimension 404, which planned to sell it back to humanity in installments.
Mooky had one condition. “I get to keep the Elvis-botanist dimension. I’ve got a hankering for some of his patented peanut-butter-and-begonia sandwiches.”
“Depends,” Mooky said, not looking up. “Are you here about the harmonica solo or the unpaid parking tickets in Daytona?” On the roof, under a sky bleeding purple
The seventeen Dollys merged into one. The Elvis dimension became a small, harmless pickle jar on Mooky’s counter. And the hedge fund from Dimension 404 evaporated into bad credit.
Prittle unfolded a scroll that stretched across the trailer and curled out the window. “Last Thursday, at 3:17 PM, you successfully yodeled a note so pure it un-caused the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, on Saturday, you used that same harmonic frequency to reheat a meatball sub, which accidentally merged your local timeline with a dimension where Elvis became a botanist. As a result, there are now seventeen versions of Dolly Parton, and all of them are arguing about crop rotation.”
It began on a Tuesday, which Mooky always considered the most suspicious day of the week. He was tuning his harmonica—an heirloom said to have been licked once by Robert Johnson’s ghost—when a shimmering tear ripped open the air above his toaster. Out stepped a three-foot-tall creature made entirely of wet newspapers and indignation. And so, Mooky strapped on his harmonica, grabbed
He lived in a rusted Airstream trailer parked on the outskirts of Mulberry, Georgia, a town so small that the water tower had a stutter. By trade, Mooky was an unlicensed interdimensional handyman. By passion, he was a competitive yodeler. By accident, he had just saved the world.
Francis Mooky Duke Williams—known to most as “Mooky,” to his mother as Francis, and to the IRS as a delightful headache—was a man who believed that any problem could be solved with a bucket of fried chicken, a harmonica in the key of C, and a complete disregard for the laws of physics.
“Are you Francis Mooky Duke Williams?” the creature demanded, dripping ink onto the linoleum.
Mooky grinned. “Best job I never applied for.”
The note was not beautiful. It was ancient. It sounded like a screen door slamming in a haunted mansion. It smelled like ozone and burnt sugar. The solar flare hit. For one terrible, glorious second, every pigeon in Georgia turned into a tiny abacus. Then—pop—reality snapped back into place.