One Sentence Or Paragraph At A Time Story

[aTOMiC]

Mallory awoke with a start. His dream within a dream was confusing, disorienting, but he shook off its effects and sat up and groggily peered through blurry eyes at his surroundings. The first thing he noticed was that he was no long aboard Southerland Castle. Mallory lay in an open, grassy field that was so verdant and lush that he barely felt the ground beneath him. There were a number of large oak trees nearby with the limbs of the closest reaching over just enough to block the most direct rays of the afternoon sun with its huge, mossy fingers. The air was cool and there was a steady breeze that brushed by the tender tips of the grass as it rushed along the ground in swirls like an invisible dancer's pirouette. The soft sound of the wind passing through the leaves of the trees was accompanied by the distant whistling of birds joyfully playing in the sky above.
"What the hell?" Mallory whispered.

[Khaliban]

Then he woke from the dream within a dream within a dream within a hallucination (damn dream LSD) to a very harsh wakefulness within a dream within an ambiguous Gestalt state within a zeitgeist. Mallory muscled his way past Leo and opened a door to an interdimensional dream space within a Matrix within a memory within a--

The hell with it. He went back to bed.

[aTOMiC]

Mallory awoke with a start and found himself laying under the tree in the glade again. He was quite confused by his experiences until he noticed that all around him grew the dreaded wacko berry plants which emitted a protective spore that caused dumb mammals like Mallory to hallucinate and become drowsy. Though he was still seeing transparent teddy bears dancing all around him Mallory forced himself to his feet and ran across the glade until he was far enough away from the wacko plants to begin to feel the effects fade but he had the strangest feeling that something large and menacing was creeping up behind him.

[Khaliban]

Indeed, his ex-wife emerged from the woods in full regalia.

[aTOMiC]

And then so did a giant, hairy clown with soiled blue pants, dingy red nose and long blue hair that hung down to his knees in knotted, sticky curls.

[Khaliban]

"Mallory," his ex-wife said, "Boffo and I can't get married until you sign the papers. I've told you that a million times."
"Squeak!" Boffo echoed. "Squeak, squeak."
"Boffo, honey, you left your nose on again. Mallory, stop being a baby and sign the papers."

[aTOMiC]

Boffo then performed a perfect pirouette, smiled a wide toothy grin that exposed his yellow, infected teeth, and then dashed off back into the woods without uttering a single word leaving behind an odor similar to rotting garbage lying in the hot sun.

[Khaliban]

"See that, Mallory?" the ex-wife said. "That's a real man."

[aTOMiC]

Mallory wept.

[wayfriend]

(Jesus wept. Yeesh.)

[Khaliban]

Jesus Cordova finished weeping the "yeesh" and strode from the woods towards Mallory.

[aTOMiC]

With tears still tumbling down his face Mallory watched Jesus' approach carefully. He knew he had to time his move perfectly for it to work and the slightest miscalculation would result in disaster. Whilst attempting to remain as still as possible Mallory gauged the speed and relative distances between Jesus and himself while making second by second adjustments to his calculations. Just as Jesus drew within a stone's throw Mallory squatted down to give himself the maximum advantage and then suddenly launched himself into the air until he reached a height of exactly two-hundred meters.

[Khaliban]

"As if!" his ex-wife yelled. "You're off by point three millimeters!"

[aTOMiC]

Realizing that his ex-wife, of all people, was correct, Mallory immediately plunged toward the ground, out of control and blind as a bat.

[Khaliban]

He realized bats actually weren't blind just in time to see the ground before he slammed into it.

[aTOMiC]

Mallory was stunned to discover he hadn't been killed in the fall. He gasped for breath as he had most likely broken a rib or two.

[wayfriend]

I should never have gone into that damn castle, thought Mallory, as he groaningly raised himself up from the broken earth, and, as he dusted himself off, he could not help but examine his actions from that time to this, which he found he could do very easily, as if they were set down and stored in some strange cloud which yielded then up on demand with buttons, and the more he thought about it, the more he cottoned to the idea that he had acted, somehow, schizophrenically, as if different people at different times had driven the tractor of his will, bulldozing a haphazard trail of flattened aspirations and crushed intentions through the farm of his life, and now, if he didn't take this tractor by the horns, it was going to smash down the barn of ambition and plow into the livingroom of accomplishment, where it would lodge like a mute toad in a bowl of soup, rendering the whole story of his adventures odious and distasteful.

[aTOMiC]

However Mallory was, at heart, a pragmatic individual that never allowed circumstances beyond his control to define his world view. He felt that since there was nothing he could do to alter what had happened in his recent past there was no reason to allow it to change his perspective or his purpose. What did change his attitude toward life was the small bit of broken bone sticking out of a hole in his shirt that was poking out far enough to jab and scrape his under arm just above his right elbow. Mallory stared at the bone and blood surging down the right side of his body as it pooled on the ground next to his shoe. The last thing Mallory heard before he lost consciousness was the sound of high pitched laughter.
"Mallory, you jackass! Hahahahah!"

[Khaliban]

Jesus Cordova stood over Mallory and cackled in his weirdly feminine voice.
"Jesus!" the nameless ex-wife said. "This is no time for laughter. How is he supposed to sign the papers like this?"
"I never understood why he married you in the first place," Jesus giggled. He laughed again. "I'm sorry, but that bone sticking out like that is too damn funny."

[deer of the dawn]

Jesus then genuflected casually over Mallory's still form, instantaneously healing him of his injury. Cordova continued to gesture with his hand, causing an old-fashioned quill pen to float into Mallory's hand and rise into the air. The erstwhile Mrs Mallory caught on quickly, and held the divorce papers under the hand and gloated as it signed. She folded the signed paper off and sashayed off into the woods with a tip of her red velvet fedora in thanks to Jesus.

Jesus smirked. The signature read "When Hellfreezesover". Mallory began to stir and Jesus pocketed the quill, and gave him a hand up.