Poem: "The Lobster Door"
This is the freebie for today's fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from janetmiles and aldersprig. It also fills the "kidfic" square in my 1-2-14 card for the Trope Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the Schrodinger's Heroes project and is a crossover with Lilo & Stitch fandom. Do not read it with your mouth full.
The Lobster Door
"My cousins are visiting the States," Morgan announced.
"Nani wants to make a side trip for some research
and asked if we'd mind babysitting Lilo for a while.
They're 'ohana. I don't want to let them down."
"No problem," Pat said. "I love kids."
"Yeah, me too," said Chris.
Morgan may or may not have winced a little.
A week later, Nani and David
brought Lilo to the compound.
"Oh, choice! You have a lobster door!"
Lilo squealed, poking at the flap.
"We do not have a lobster door," Morgan said.
"We have a cat door, because Schrodinger is a cat."
"Mrowl," Schrodinger said,
jumping through the door with his mouth full
of something with jointed armor and too many eyes.
"Lobster door," Lilo whispered.
"Alien lobsters. Wait 'til I show Stitch!"
"Who is Stitch?" Pat asked. "I'd like to meet him."
"Stitch is my dog," Lilo said.
Stitch was small and furry,
with big eyes and mobile ears,
wearing nothing but a dog collar --
and there the resemblance ended.
He was blue.
He spoke some language
that nobody recognized but
everyone suspected of being vulgar.
Alex felt fairly certain that he was
concealing one or more extra limbs
somewhere about his person.
"Hi," Stitch said in a breathy voice.
"Hi," Pat said without missing a beat.
He leaned down to shake Stitch's hand.
Then Tim the Tentacle Monster showed up
and offered two of his tentacles to shake.
Stitch's middle arms emerged slowly from his sides
and reached out to make contact.
"Would you mind decloaking the rest of your party?"
Tim asked. "I would like to speak with them
about a matter of interdimensional navigation."
"Uh ... sure," Nani said slowly.
She gave a hesitant wave.
Jumba and Pleakley appeared,
promptly getting into a long technical talk
about where Tim had come from
and whether he might ever get back there.
The two visitors didn't have many ideas on that,
but all three aliens enjoyed the opportunity
to speak with someone else who wasn't human.
"You don't seem surprised by any of this,"
Nani said to Morgan.
Morgan shrugged and said,
"Aliens are everyday stuff around here.
As long as they don't start shooting at us,
nobody's going to mind."
Lilo and Stitch seemed perfectly content
to stay at the Teflon Tesseract
while the rest of their family left for research,
hounding Alex for explanations of quantum physics
until Alex retreated to her office and shut the door.
Chris introduced them to the Texas wilderness
("This is a stick. The stick is your friend.")
and discovered that Stitch was indestructible
even when dealing with rattlesnakes.
Pat made lunch for everyone
and did not complain when Lilo
saved tidbits to feed to someone called Thorn
who, she explained, controlled the weather.
"Hmm," Ash said thoughtfully,
but did not elaborate.
They spent the rest of the day
watching animated movies
and periodically extricating Stitch from
the upper reaches of Schrodinger's cat tree.
That night, Lilo and Quinn
got into an argument that quickly escalated
into a food fight, which ended with Pat
sending them both to bed
without any more supper.
In the morning, they discovered
that Quinn's hair had been dyed dishwater blond,
Lilo and Stitch were nowhere to be found,
and neither was the pickup truck.
"This is all your fault,"
Chris said, pointing at Quinn.
"Pouring my chocolate milk on her head
sounded like a good idea at the time!"
Quinn protested.
Morgan tried to panic quietly
and not imagine too many ways
that Nani would kill her for losing Lilo.
Pat set to work figuring out
where Lilo and Stitch might have gone,
poring over a map of local attractions.
Then the phone rang,
and Chris spent several harried minutes
trying to calm his outraged cousin Luke
before announcing that they'd found Lilo and Stitch.
When they pulled into Waxahachie,
they found a disgruntled Lilo
kicking up dust on the swingset,
Stitch clinging to the monkeybars,
and Luke's son Logan had two black eyes
mostly hidden by a freezer pack of peas and carrots.
"That kid is meaner'n a junkyard dog,"
Luke grumbled to Chris.
"Told ya he's growin' into a bully,"
Chris said heartlessly.
"I meant the girl," Luke said.
Lilo took the cigarette out of her mouth
and blew a smoke ring.
"I'm tellin' Nani you let her little sister
lift your son's smokes," Chris said.
"She's a champion surfer, y'know.
She can crush beer cans between her thighs."
Then he turned from his cousin to Lilo and Stitch.
"Come on, you two hooligans. Time to go home."
Lilo spit out her cigarette into the sand
and left the swingset behind.
Stitch gave one last twist of a pipe
and jumped neatly into the clear
as the entire structure collapsed into ruins.
"So how'd this little dustup happen?"
Chris asked Lilo on the way back to the compound.
"I got bored and Stitch helped me hotwire the truck,"
Lilo said. "Then I steered while he worked the pedals."
"You should've gotten a grownup to drive you,"
Chris said, nevermind what he and Luke
had once gotten into with Uncle Ernie's tractor.
"But everyone was asleep and
we wanted to go to the playground!"
Lilo protested.
"Yeah, well you remember that
when the two of you spend the rest of the day
peelin' taters in the kitchen," Chris said.
"Pat ain't too happy with how you run off like that."
Homemade hashbrowns,
the two miscreants discovered,
required an appalling amount of potatoes to make.
The people around the table
who were actually getting dessert that night
were cutting up the red velvet cake
when the incursion alarm went off
and a torrent of squiggling things
began pouring through the small flap in the door.
With a shrill war cry,
Stitch produced several bright yellow guns
and began blasting away at the vermin.
Lilo grabbed a broom and joined the fray.
Alex and Ash ran for the control room
in hopes of counteracting the incursion.
Most of the adults concentrated on
stopping up the hole in the door.
That left Chris and Kay to confront
the giant red-plated alien that seemed to be
in command of the invading forces.
Sparks crawled up the long V of its antennae
and discharged in a massive lightning bolt that
fortunately missed Bailey as he dove out of the way.
Stitch yelled "A hui hou!"
bounded onto the thing's head,
and grabbed the antennae with all four hands.
Something went sizzle and then CRACK!
Suddenly there were bits of alien everywhere
and no sign of Stitch.
"Okay, what happened to the little blue menace?"
Chris asked as he looked around.
"Don't worry about Stitch,"
Lilo said. "He's indestructible."
Sure enough, he soon emerged
from a steaming pile of alien parts.
"See? That was epic!" Lilo concluded.
"We got the door closed," Alex announced
over the intercom. "Status of invasion forces?"
"Eighty-sixed," Morgan reported,
looking around at the carnage.
Chris picked at his ruined shirt,
removing blobs of pinkish meat
that had a disturbingly appetizing smell.
"How the hell did this even happen?" he said.
"I told you it was a lobster door,"
Lilo said in a smug tone.
"Shut up, kid," groaned Chris.
"You're gettin' on my last nerve."
Just then, Nani and her family arrived
to pick up Lilo and Stitch.
"What happened here?" Nani asked.
"Alien invasion," Lilo said
as she scraped alien guts
into a garbage can.
"Imagine that," Nani said.
"It must be Saturday."
* * *
Notes:
Lilo & Stitch is a Disney movie about a rowdy young girl and her alien friend. I knew as soon as I met Morgan that Lilo and Nani were her cousins, and I've been wanting to bring Lilo and Stitch into the compound ever since.
'Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten.
The alien lobster things were inspired by obapinia.
Homemade hashbrowns may be prepared in several ways.
Red Velvet Cake is now made with food coloring, but was traditionally tinted with beets or a chemical reaction with unprocessed light cocoa powder. Schrodinger's Heroes, of course, rely on the kitchen chemistry.
Stitch's guns appear early in the movie, when he still has his clothes on. He spends most of the movie running around naked.
Browse some of the Hawaiian slang that Morgan and her family use.