Taking Tony Down a Peg

(haven't written a story in ages... this one took about 7 minutes. I think it has potential; I especially like the second sentence.)

Depegging Tony van der Meulen

Tony van der Meulen liked to smoke pillows of corduroy fabric in his office. It was the cause of everything else that happened.

Tony van der Meulen was a Pisces, which meant he had fishlike pretentions to wisdom, but it did not mean he had gills. Or even wanted them. But as for corduroy, pillows, and smoking concoctions of the two, it was a vice that led him down many dangerous paths. For instance Tony once took his eyes off the road while trying to light up a corduroy blunt. Days afterwards and he was still cleaning old-lady flesh out of his radiator grill. Ms. Wasabe Fitzsimmons, age 82, of Mississauga, was in a strange coincidence wearing a corduroy shawl that day - although the cloth guilds declaimed all responsibility. After his manslaughter trial, Tony smoked up in prison too. Smoking gave him an awful case of the shits though. Which gave new meaning to the phrase ‘hit and run.’

But I digress. Fast forward 15 years, and Tony was now a manager at AmFast Trucking Solutions Ltd. Eschewing a life behind the wheel, Tony kept to torturing his office staff; he was my boss, and I didn’t like him much - corduroy or no corduroy. I harboured a grudge; when I saw the man it made me want to drive my Buick off a cliff. Luckily Tony was grounded, never to set foot behind the wheel by order of just about every local magistrate with a gavel. And yet my hatred for the man was relentless.

One reason Tony enflamed me so was his insistence on using strike-anywhere matches to light up his corduroy blunts. I was convinced he was merely bowing to pressures of conspicuous consumption – why did anyone need to strike matches on a whim, irregardless of texture or environs? It was like Western consumerism knocked on Tony's door and called him its bitch. Tony was like the Timid Servant, or the Doubting Thomas, or the Man Who Sold the Emperor’s Clothes – basically he was an amalgam of all my most loathèd archetypes. Also, in my other day-to-day observations I had noticed that mankind clearly was getting too big for its britches; Tony exemplified to me all things in the universe and solar system that ought to be taken down a peg. I would de-peg him, I promised myself; I would confiscate his allumettes.

It was a task that would prove easy in the doing, but was a long time in the brewing. Tony’s matches were like an Excalibur in my mind, and it was a high hurdle, to take that step toward symbolic sabre clutchery. I trained myself for weeks to gather nerve to yoink away these matches. I would learn Tai Chi, boxaerobics and even train to be a short-order cook. And my actions regarding Tony would be just that: a short order of revenge. Revenge is what I craved; and my cravings were not to be ignored. For it was the 1980s, and I was indulging my inner child.

It was a lazy Thursday afternoon. Tony was smoking his corduroy blunts in a particularly egregious manner, puffing smoke rings out of his office door into the hallway, polluting the air of the corridor with his stinky old corduroy. I ignored the near-rhyme and

[unfinished of course...]