The night began as normal as any other. The fire crackled with sounds of flaming embers, the television droned its usual mind-numbing barrage of infomercials and announcers that pretend they give a damn about whether you buy their product or not, and make poor attempts at what a maniac on too much heroin might define as acting. I sat at the kitchen table and prepared my thesis on long-term hazardous effects on the subconscious mind due to prolonged exposure to teletubbies when an odd sound began emanating from the front window. I rose from my chair and walked to the living room window ready to chastise one of the local hoodlums for hitting my house with a snowball, (which seemed rather preposterous since it was the middle of July) but when I glanced into the front yard all I saw were plastic garden gnomes attending to an imaginary garden and grass as green as well...grass. I excused the noise as nothing and walked back to the kitchen. I was not two feet from the table when the sound reverberated through the house again. It sounded like a fish being clubbed to death with a wrecking ball. Only this time it was followed by the maniacal laughter that sounded like a thousand hyenas after walking out of a room full of helium. My eyebrows creased in panic as I frantically looked from window to window for the source of the offensive laughter and onslaught of blunt projectiles. Just as I thought the walls of the house were going to give way from the bombardment or the windows (or my eardrums) shatter from the dentist-drill-during-invasive-root-canal-surgery like laughter, I saw the villain standing in my backyard grinning a smile that would make Lucifer himself cower in fear. I dashed outside to get a better look at the infidel. I swung the door open (which is pretty impressive considering it slides open) and spotted my nightmare as he stood there in all his evil reverence. His nose was painted the hellish red of a thousand fires and his face as white as the purest blizzard of the Arctic�s. I glanced fearfully at him curious to know what he was going to do next. Oddly enough, he laughed again and ran off into the shadows. I wiped the sweat from my brow and walked back inside my house. I never saw the culprit after that. But I tell you, to this day I can never look at a circus midget the same way again.
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