Loretta Splatts, Human Cannon Ball

If there was one thing Loretta Splatts wasn’t it was . . . well, come to think of it, there actually wasn’t one thing Loretta Splatts wasn’t — at least in her mind anyway.

You see, Loretta didn’t own a car. She preferred to travel everywhere by being shot out of a cannon. Oh sure, there was the small inconvenience of not being able to go anywhere unless she had cab fare home, but Loretta thought it was a small price to pay for having a legitimate reason to wear a cape in public.

Loretta often joked that the trajectory of her life was trending upwards even though nobody ever laughed when she said it.  The sad fact was, nobody listened to a word Loretta said — they were too preoccupied waving away the intermittent puffs of smoke emanating from her slightly smoldering cape or distractedly brushing stray bits of gun powder from her platinum blonde hair to actually listen to what she had to say.

Sometimes Loretta felt like a 40-pound dill pickle that people were compelled to ignore because, let’s face it, a 40-pound dill pickle is just way too much pickle to process at any one time.

Loretta’s only true confidant was her Cannon Ball Igniter, Percival Perplexington, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Cannon Igniters founded in 1323 by King William Blunk VIII÷V who was > King William Blunk VII ÷ VI but not by much.

Percival Perplexington was a jolly sort of fellow who never let the burden his igniting responsibilities eat away at his good-natured heart although he could sometimes feel those same responsibilities late at night nibbling on his spleen. But spleens are expendable!  That was Percival’s motto having stolen it from the Royal Academy of Sciences and Cannon Igniters when he pried it off their front door his first day of class.

Percival graduated with honors and immediately took a position with Loretta Splatts as her official Cannon Igniter.  His fellow graduates where aghast when he accepted such a lowly position with such an inferior human cannon ball the likes of Loretta, but there was just something about the way she raised her hand to signal the lighting of the fuse that Percival Perplexington was mesmerized by or perhaps memorized by.  One of those.

Try as he might, he simply could not look away from Loretta’s pinky.  Whether she was hailing a cab or signaling that he should light the fuse, Percival Perplexington was totally and utterly and completely dedicated to Loretta Splatts.  He even donated his shoes when the people came collecting for the Annual Shoes for Fuse donation drive to aid less fortunate human cannon balls in third world countries.

It was a sad day for Percival Perplexington when his employer Loretta Splatts finally lived up to her name.  She was meeting a friend for lunch at the Riboflavin Rotisserie when she misjudged the location of the outdoor seating area by a skosh and came crashing down in the middle of a cow pasture that as luck would have it was being rented out to a mattress company.  She bounced off one of the mattresses and got temporarily stuck in a tree when a huge gust of wind blew her into oncoming traffic.

Percival Perplexington was positively beside himself with grief. It took him hours and hours  to eat lunch that day at the Riboflavin Rotisserie.

You see, he ordered a forty-pound dill pickle in honor of Loretta Splatts.