Mia Natelli
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About/Contact
Antarctica: 7 February 1981
American explorer John Davis, steps foot onto the untouched, icy, extremely cold land.
He and his two colleagues step off their wooden boat, almost completely destroyed by the strong currents of the previously named Drake Passage. They’ve finally arrived. A land no man has stepped foot on before this very moment. Antarctica, opposite of the Arctic. Which has already been inhabited and colonized by European settlers, or, the Russian Arctic, ruled by Alexandr Pavlovich I at the time.
The three men knew this new continent would be bitter but didn’t realize the extent to which it was. Ice and snow everywhere, not a single sign of civilization or living creatures around them. Mountains of glaciers ranging in colors from light blue to a murky green. The men are enamored with their surroundings, but know that this will be a difficult journey, unsure of what’s to come.
They collect all their goods from the boat including: food, water, pots, firewood, flint and steel, a canteen full of moonshine, and furs to keep them warm in this dangerously freezing climate, and stuff it into their beaver hide bags. On their first day in Antarctica, they take apart their boat to use as firewood, as they know they are about to trek across God knows how big of a land.
No sleep. Next day.
The men begin their hike. It’s a difficult journey, no doubt about it. With each step their feet drop deep into the snow. There is no sun. The grayness is overwhelming. Each step takes a gallon of energy. There is nothing. Nothing around them but rock hard ice and snow. Only frigid Antarctic, already eating away at these men.
One finger on John Davis’ hand is already frostbitten and has turned into a deep plum hue, about to fall off if he doesn’t amputate it.
On their first day of hiking, they only made it about a mile and a half.
The men are winded, but gasp! In the distance! A sign of life! Thank God.
A little creature, moving slowly, appearing only as a black speck from the distance. The men run! They run! (Although they fall many times.) They run! As fast as they can towards this one sign of life. Existence! Life! A discovery in this new world.
They approach what they saw as the black speck. In front of them, a penguin gingerly waddles by. It stops, turns its head towards the three men, and looks forward again and continues waddling about. The men cautiously follow this penguin, naming it Washington, after the United States’ first president. They follow it until they reach this enclave, a stone cave, with minimal amounts of snow on the ground, a clear space where they are able to create a fire. Warmth and shelter at last.
As they follow Washington deeper and deeper into the cave, they realize that this creature has led them to a whole family of cute, plump penguins. The entire family of penguins simultaneously turns their heads to look at these interesting looking humans.
One penguin emerges from the shadows, a tuft of feathers atop its head, a yellow stomach, similar to the color of a dandelion.
“Stutu yuru numu,” (State your name) the penguin says.
The men jump back. They didn’t realize a creature, something other than human, could speak in a language resembling English. But not quite. They try to decipher what the penguin just said, as it sounds familiar, but the “u” letters, pronounced like “oo,” makes it difficult to translate.
The feathery penguin realizes the men cannot understand it, and gestures for them to come deeper into the cave and sit down. The men ask if they could start a fire because they’re shivering down to the bone. While the penguins could understand English, the three men could not understand the penguins. What seems to be the king penguin nods its head and the men light a fire. The whole penguin family and the three men shimmy towards the fire, warming themselves up.
What do you do around a campfire? You tell stories, and that’s what the men did.
There once was a girl named Carnivorous Yellow. She would spend her days strolling around the neighborhood, smoking on that good ol’ kush. Whatever it was, a joint, spliff, bong, bowl, even an apple, you would never catch her without something smokeable. She was known as the neighborhood freak, or the ultimate stoner girl by her friends. On one of her walks she paused in front of a pothole. (Hah, get it? Pothole.) Now, she wouldn’t normally stop at the sight of a pothole, but this one was different. It was radiating a sort of…odor. A skunk-like odor. She was intrigued by this ditch in the group and absolutely had to investigate. Carnivorous Yellow kneeled to the floor, smelling the sweet, sweet scent coming from this hole, until SLURP! Carnivorous Yellow was sucked into the pothole! Falling, falling, falling for about a minute until SPLAT! She hit the ground with a thundering boom. After Carnivorous Yellow regained consciousness, she looked around at her surroundings and grew a great, big smile. She landed in a field of weed! Like the Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar, she began plucking and smoking all the grass around her. The sweet green leaves soothed her mind and reddened her eyes. After about seven joints, one blunt, and ten bong rips, she decided to invite her friends into the skunk-smelling pothole and join her in this luscious field of kush. Viscous Blue descended first with an aggressive smack into the field. Then came Instantaneous Pink, floating down like an angel. Third and last to come down was Obtuse Orange who could barely squeeze through the pothole and landed like an earthquake. They all were puffing on the endless field around them, getting as high as the International Space Station and beyond. A couple hours and many, many, many blunts later, Instantaneous Pink was about to light a bong bowl when the girls all heard a screaming coming from above. They simultaneously looked up and saw Crustaceous Green falling from the sky. They didn’t like this girl, she once stole weed from Viscous Blue.
And…PLOP! Crustaceous Green falls into the field with the rest of the girls. She looks as green as the kush around her. The girls, being out-of-their-minds high, couldn’t fully comprehend what just happened. Everything is a blur. Green is green, and green is green, and lime green, sage green, forest green, all the greens blur together in this field of endless green kush. Everyone broke out into laughter and Instantaneous Pink packed a little more green into the bong bowl, held up her lighter, and lit it aflame. “OWWWWWwww w w w w w w w!” Tss.
And just like that Crustaceous Green was burnt to a crisp. The sounds of her pain trailing off as she was smoked and inhaled. In the midst of this ultimate grassy haze, Instantaneous Pink must’ve accidentally packed her into the bong and smoked her! The girls, realizing what had happened, broke out into laughter again and Crustaceous Green was no longer heard of.”
The men laugh with each other, sipping on their moonshine, thinking that story was hilarious.
The penguins look at the men in shock, baffled by what they just heard.
“Thusu sturuyu muku nu-u sunsu.” (This story makes no sense.) “Yu-u cunu’tu huvu numusu luku Curunuvurusu Yullu-u or Vuscusu Blu-u.” (You can’t have names like Carnivorous Yellow or Viscous Pink.) “Butu thuyu sumu tu-u unjuyu utu, lut’su guvu thumu unuthuru chuncu.” (But they seem to enjoy it, let’s give them another chance.) Usu lungu usu u gutu sumu munushunu luturu.” (As long as I get some moonshine later.)
The penguins all look to the king to confirm their statement. He nods.
They all look at the humans again, skeptical.
Davis’ colleague, Smith, begins to tell another story.
“Sandra Dee moves to Los Angeles from Australia and meets this bad boy, Danny Zuko over the summer. They have a loving summer before they both head back to school, but little do they know, they’d be attending the same one. Seeing each other again for the first time was a shock, Danny wanted her in a lustful way and Sandy was in love with him romantically. They tiptoe around each other for the first half of the semester until they physically bump into each other and are forced to talk. Danny takes her to the beach that night, where they met for the first time, and tries to fuck her. She squirms away, knowing that if they have sex, he will die. Later in the semester, Sandy changes her personality to become more like Danny, wearing leather pants and red lipstick, her hair down and loose. Seeing Sandy in this new attire, Danny’s lust grows even greater. He wants her, and at the end of the year carnival, he drags her into his black stallion carriage. He locks the doors and starts fucking her, but it’s not going well. Her vagina has teeth in it? Her vagina has teeth in it! Sharp fangs that are just clawing through Danny Zuko’s cock. He begins shouting in pain as his dick is getting chomped into bits by a monstrous pussy. He somehow retrieves his dick from this whatcha m’call it, all mangled and limp. Purple and red veins stick out, the shaft with bloody teeth marks on it. He screams in horror as his manhood has just been eaten by not even the human, but the thing he wanted from Sandy most. He runs out of the car, pants undone, ass exposed. Everyone at the carnival is laughing at him and his busted cock. Sandy then drives away in the black stallion carriage as the sun sets, also cackling at Danny Zuko’s demise.”
End of story.
The men fall back laughing as they chug more on that canteen.
Again the penguins look at each other, confused by the two stories they just heard, and the creatures they heard it from.
They shuffle in a circle to themselves.
“Thu-u numusu uru dupluyu dusturubunugu, huwu cudu churucturusu bu numudu Sunduru Du-u undu Dunnuyu Zuku?” (The names are deeply disturbing, how could characters be named Sandra Dee and Danny Zuko?) “Whutu uvunu usu Usutrulu-u?” (What even is Australia?) “U nududu muru pluto, muru untucuputiunu, muru du-ulugu.” (I needed more plot, more anticipation, more dialogue.) “Umurucunus undu thuru dumnu vu-uluncu, wu’vu sunu thusu ulruduyu.” (Americans and their damn violence, we’ve seen this already.) “U’mu burudu.” (I’m bored.) “Scuruwu thu wunnubu uvuntu-gurudu.” (Screw the wannabe avant-garde.) “Stupudu Unglushu spukungu fuckurusu.” (Stupid English speaking fuckers.) “Ubusulutuly bufflungu, u suyu wu-u kullu thumu.” (Absolutely baffling, I say we kill them.) “Thuyu-llu du-u unu lussu thunu tuwu duyusu huru unuwuyusu.” (They’ll die in less than two days here anyways.) “Undu u dudunu’tu uvunu gutu mu-u munushunu!” (And I didn’t even get my moonshine!)
And so the penguins align themselves single file, horizontally, and in a miraculous turn of events, increase their size to the size of giants. In about five seconds they went from the adorable, little plush muffins into these gargantuan, fat monsters with beady red eyes and sharp fangs, drool dripping from their tips. They surround the three men in a circle, the horror present on each and every one of the explorers’ faces. The penguins take turns aggressively pecking their beaks into the skulls of each of these men, like a game of whack-a-mole, instead now it’s whack-an-English-speaking-fucker.
The men’s skulls crack with each peck until the beaks reach their brains, plucking each and every swirly, gummy, pink and bloody brain fiber out until their eyes roll to the back of their hollowed out heads. The men collapse to the floor. The penguins begin to munch on their corpses. Washington, the first penguin the men met, lifts Davis’ purple, frostbitten finger with its beak and tears it off. The sound of that joint dislocating and popping is audible. All the penguins begin eating at their bodies as the warm fire still burns behind them. Beaks in stomachs, in kneecaps, in shins, groins, livers, hearts, lungs, throats, every single part of the human anatomy is eaten by these size-shifting, Antarctic penguins until they are broken skeletons, scattered across this cave.
The penguins then return to their normal size.
“Du yuru thungu.” (Do your thing) the king penguin says to the seemingly cute and inviting Washington.
He then waddles out of the cave, seemingly harmless, waiting for the next victims in the, yet again, cold, untouched, unexplored Antarctic.
American explorer John Davis, steps foot onto the untouched, icy, extremely cold land.
He and his two colleagues step off their wooden boat, almost completely destroyed by the strong currents of the previously named Drake Passage. They’ve finally arrived. A land no man has stepped foot on before this very moment. Antarctica, opposite of the Arctic. Which has already been inhabited and colonized by European settlers, or, the Russian Arctic, ruled by Alexandr Pavlovich I at the time.
The three men knew this new continent would be bitter but didn’t realize the extent to which it was. Ice and snow everywhere, not a single sign of civilization or living creatures around them. Mountains of glaciers ranging in colors from light blue to a murky green. The men are enamored with their surroundings, but know that this will be a difficult journey, unsure of what’s to come.
They collect all their goods from the boat including: food, water, pots, firewood, flint and steel, a canteen full of moonshine, and furs to keep them warm in this dangerously freezing climate, and stuff it into their beaver hide bags. On their first day in Antarctica, they take apart their boat to use as firewood, as they know they are about to trek across God knows how big of a land.
No sleep. Next day.
The men begin their hike. It’s a difficult journey, no doubt about it. With each step their feet drop deep into the snow. There is no sun. The grayness is overwhelming. Each step takes a gallon of energy. There is nothing. Nothing around them but rock hard ice and snow. Only frigid Antarctic, already eating away at these men.
One finger on John Davis’ hand is already frostbitten and has turned into a deep plum hue, about to fall off if he doesn’t amputate it.
On their first day of hiking, they only made it about a mile and a half.
The men are winded, but gasp! In the distance! A sign of life! Thank God.
A little creature, moving slowly, appearing only as a black speck from the distance. The men run! They run! (Although they fall many times.) They run! As fast as they can towards this one sign of life. Existence! Life! A discovery in this new world.
They approach what they saw as the black speck. In front of them, a penguin gingerly waddles by. It stops, turns its head towards the three men, and looks forward again and continues waddling about. The men cautiously follow this penguin, naming it Washington, after the United States’ first president. They follow it until they reach this enclave, a stone cave, with minimal amounts of snow on the ground, a clear space where they are able to create a fire. Warmth and shelter at last.
As they follow Washington deeper and deeper into the cave, they realize that this creature has led them to a whole family of cute, plump penguins. The entire family of penguins simultaneously turns their heads to look at these interesting looking humans.
One penguin emerges from the shadows, a tuft of feathers atop its head, a yellow stomach, similar to the color of a dandelion.
“Stutu yuru numu,” (State your name) the penguin says.
The men jump back. They didn’t realize a creature, something other than human, could speak in a language resembling English. But not quite. They try to decipher what the penguin just said, as it sounds familiar, but the “u” letters, pronounced like “oo,” makes it difficult to translate.
The feathery penguin realizes the men cannot understand it, and gestures for them to come deeper into the cave and sit down. The men ask if they could start a fire because they’re shivering down to the bone. While the penguins could understand English, the three men could not understand the penguins. What seems to be the king penguin nods its head and the men light a fire. The whole penguin family and the three men shimmy towards the fire, warming themselves up.
What do you do around a campfire? You tell stories, and that’s what the men did.
There once was a girl named Carnivorous Yellow. She would spend her days strolling around the neighborhood, smoking on that good ol’ kush. Whatever it was, a joint, spliff, bong, bowl, even an apple, you would never catch her without something smokeable. She was known as the neighborhood freak, or the ultimate stoner girl by her friends. On one of her walks she paused in front of a pothole. (Hah, get it? Pothole.) Now, she wouldn’t normally stop at the sight of a pothole, but this one was different. It was radiating a sort of…odor. A skunk-like odor. She was intrigued by this ditch in the group and absolutely had to investigate. Carnivorous Yellow kneeled to the floor, smelling the sweet, sweet scent coming from this hole, until SLURP! Carnivorous Yellow was sucked into the pothole! Falling, falling, falling for about a minute until SPLAT! She hit the ground with a thundering boom. After Carnivorous Yellow regained consciousness, she looked around at her surroundings and grew a great, big smile. She landed in a field of weed! Like the Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar, she began plucking and smoking all the grass around her. The sweet green leaves soothed her mind and reddened her eyes. After about seven joints, one blunt, and ten bong rips, she decided to invite her friends into the skunk-smelling pothole and join her in this luscious field of kush. Viscous Blue descended first with an aggressive smack into the field. Then came Instantaneous Pink, floating down like an angel. Third and last to come down was Obtuse Orange who could barely squeeze through the pothole and landed like an earthquake. They all were puffing on the endless field around them, getting as high as the International Space Station and beyond. A couple hours and many, many, many blunts later, Instantaneous Pink was about to light a bong bowl when the girls all heard a screaming coming from above. They simultaneously looked up and saw Crustaceous Green falling from the sky. They didn’t like this girl, she once stole weed from Viscous Blue.
And…PLOP! Crustaceous Green falls into the field with the rest of the girls. She looks as green as the kush around her. The girls, being out-of-their-minds high, couldn’t fully comprehend what just happened. Everything is a blur. Green is green, and green is green, and lime green, sage green, forest green, all the greens blur together in this field of endless green kush. Everyone broke out into laughter and Instantaneous Pink packed a little more green into the bong bowl, held up her lighter, and lit it aflame. “OWWWWWwww w w w w w w w!” Tss.
And just like that Crustaceous Green was burnt to a crisp. The sounds of her pain trailing off as she was smoked and inhaled. In the midst of this ultimate grassy haze, Instantaneous Pink must’ve accidentally packed her into the bong and smoked her! The girls, realizing what had happened, broke out into laughter again and Crustaceous Green was no longer heard of.”
The men laugh with each other, sipping on their moonshine, thinking that story was hilarious.
The penguins look at the men in shock, baffled by what they just heard.
“Thusu sturuyu muku nu-u sunsu.” (This story makes no sense.) “Yu-u cunu’tu huvu numusu luku Curunuvurusu Yullu-u or Vuscusu Blu-u.” (You can’t have names like Carnivorous Yellow or Viscous Pink.) “Butu thuyu sumu tu-u unjuyu utu, lut’su guvu thumu unuthuru chuncu.” (But they seem to enjoy it, let’s give them another chance.) Usu lungu usu u gutu sumu munushunu luturu.” (As long as I get some moonshine later.)
The penguins all look to the king to confirm their statement. He nods.
They all look at the humans again, skeptical.
Davis’ colleague, Smith, begins to tell another story.
“Sandra Dee moves to Los Angeles from Australia and meets this bad boy, Danny Zuko over the summer. They have a loving summer before they both head back to school, but little do they know, they’d be attending the same one. Seeing each other again for the first time was a shock, Danny wanted her in a lustful way and Sandy was in love with him romantically. They tiptoe around each other for the first half of the semester until they physically bump into each other and are forced to talk. Danny takes her to the beach that night, where they met for the first time, and tries to fuck her. She squirms away, knowing that if they have sex, he will die. Later in the semester, Sandy changes her personality to become more like Danny, wearing leather pants and red lipstick, her hair down and loose. Seeing Sandy in this new attire, Danny’s lust grows even greater. He wants her, and at the end of the year carnival, he drags her into his black stallion carriage. He locks the doors and starts fucking her, but it’s not going well. Her vagina has teeth in it? Her vagina has teeth in it! Sharp fangs that are just clawing through Danny Zuko’s cock. He begins shouting in pain as his dick is getting chomped into bits by a monstrous pussy. He somehow retrieves his dick from this whatcha m’call it, all mangled and limp. Purple and red veins stick out, the shaft with bloody teeth marks on it. He screams in horror as his manhood has just been eaten by not even the human, but the thing he wanted from Sandy most. He runs out of the car, pants undone, ass exposed. Everyone at the carnival is laughing at him and his busted cock. Sandy then drives away in the black stallion carriage as the sun sets, also cackling at Danny Zuko’s demise.”
End of story.
The men fall back laughing as they chug more on that canteen.
Again the penguins look at each other, confused by the two stories they just heard, and the creatures they heard it from.
They shuffle in a circle to themselves.
“Thu-u numusu uru dupluyu dusturubunugu, huwu cudu churucturusu bu numudu Sunduru Du-u undu Dunnuyu Zuku?” (The names are deeply disturbing, how could characters be named Sandra Dee and Danny Zuko?) “Whutu uvunu usu Usutrulu-u?” (What even is Australia?) “U nududu muru pluto, muru untucuputiunu, muru du-ulugu.” (I needed more plot, more anticipation, more dialogue.) “Umurucunus undu thuru dumnu vu-uluncu, wu’vu sunu thusu ulruduyu.” (Americans and their damn violence, we’ve seen this already.) “U’mu burudu.” (I’m bored.) “Scuruwu thu wunnubu uvuntu-gurudu.” (Screw the wannabe avant-garde.) “Stupudu Unglushu spukungu fuckurusu.” (Stupid English speaking fuckers.) “Ubusulutuly bufflungu, u suyu wu-u kullu thumu.” (Absolutely baffling, I say we kill them.) “Thuyu-llu du-u unu lussu thunu tuwu duyusu huru unuwuyusu.” (They’ll die in less than two days here anyways.) “Undu u dudunu’tu uvunu gutu mu-u munushunu!” (And I didn’t even get my moonshine!)
And so the penguins align themselves single file, horizontally, and in a miraculous turn of events, increase their size to the size of giants. In about five seconds they went from the adorable, little plush muffins into these gargantuan, fat monsters with beady red eyes and sharp fangs, drool dripping from their tips. They surround the three men in a circle, the horror present on each and every one of the explorers’ faces. The penguins take turns aggressively pecking their beaks into the skulls of each of these men, like a game of whack-a-mole, instead now it’s whack-an-English-speaking-fucker.
The men’s skulls crack with each peck until the beaks reach their brains, plucking each and every swirly, gummy, pink and bloody brain fiber out until their eyes roll to the back of their hollowed out heads. The men collapse to the floor. The penguins begin to munch on their corpses. Washington, the first penguin the men met, lifts Davis’ purple, frostbitten finger with its beak and tears it off. The sound of that joint dislocating and popping is audible. All the penguins begin eating at their bodies as the warm fire still burns behind them. Beaks in stomachs, in kneecaps, in shins, groins, livers, hearts, lungs, throats, every single part of the human anatomy is eaten by these size-shifting, Antarctic penguins until they are broken skeletons, scattered across this cave.
The penguins then return to their normal size.
“Du yuru thungu.” (Do your thing) the king penguin says to the seemingly cute and inviting Washington.
He then waddles out of the cave, seemingly harmless, waiting for the next victims in the, yet again, cold, untouched, unexplored Antarctic.