Things that come in fours.
The seasons. The number of legs on a chair, or wheels on a car. The cardinal directions, north, south, east, west. The suits in a standard deck of cards. The classical elements, earth, air, fire, water. The principal phases of the moon.
Of course, there were also those four dudes on horseback, Conquest, War, Famine and that, um, other fella …
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
That guy. The one you always wanted at parties.
Anyway, fours, right? Pick your own particular poison.
So welcome to the fourth, and final, installment of more Wordle solutions turned into pointless narratives. It will end pretty much as it started.
As in fill your cup this one last time with regret.
SCARF – CABLE – TACKY – NACHO – VACUI – MACAW
You can’t blame the bird for the crazy shit it shouted. You try living with a flamboyant Tex-Mex drag queen with an S&M fetish and a love of poorly executed gothic art.
CRAMP – POISE – SWIPE – SPITE – SPINE
Melton was not cut out for nude modeling. Much about him resembled a flustered chicken, and the weird poses made his back ache something awful. Not to mention that the last time he dropped top and trou for art, someone stole his clothes, he was sure just out of pure meanness. This made the bus ride home something of a challenge, especially since he hadn’t the fare and so found himself strapped instead outside upon the bike rack, naked butt aloft. That cold wind got into places he would later not willingly discuss.
VELDT – STAIN – TRICK – WITCH – PITCH – HITCH
Agnes Runkins, a blemish on her local coven’s bad name, was banished to wander the earth, her magic viewed as little better than cheap smoke and mirrors. Drunk and humiliated, Agnes finally fell off her broom many miles from home, lost out on the parched plains of far-away Kenya; the broom flew away in disgust.
Alone, hungover and with a broken pointy hat, Agnes attempted to flag down a ride with a few itinerant camel jockeys, but none of them believed her when she said she was simply a visiting U.N. Ambassador fallen on hard times. They all eyed her fancy pointy shoes and suspected her to be another one of those damnable international Mary Kay salespeople instead.
Later, she was stoned to death by a group of villagers when she accidentally turned the local chieftain into a warthog while trying to pull a quarter from behind his ear.
CREPE – LEACH – ENACT
Sure the proposed new British law seemed frivolous and unnecessary, but clearly some bloody continental breakfast chef had given the idea a go.
MINTY – SALAD – QUICK – CREEP – COWER – COVER
Certainly we do not wish ever to rush to judge, but some people are just fucking freaks, OK?
So there was oddball Androgen, as in Androgen Brokus, aka Leafy Pete, aka Greenworks Bill, known recidivist peeper with a pronounced passion for well-presented vegetable charcuterie, all unkempt and wild-eyed as he crouched in the fresh cypress mulch behind the tidily manicured boxwoods outside the bright-lit Cufinger home, in the muting hours of daylight that foretold dinnertime and a friendly sociability common to those of us who are not appalling freaks who should be summarily hunted down and murdered via justifiable mob violence, as the trendy young Cufingers in their matching worn-in leather jackets hosted a few similarly spiffy friends for a few mottled-herb mojitos, ¡olé!, followed by lite vegetarian finger food and perhaps some swinging sex staying well within the acceptable parameters of the ever-trusty missionary position.
When the police hauled sick Androgen away, somewhat pantsless at that point but otherwise fully clothed in the fashionless outerwear befitting his foul ilk, he was heard to mutter “endive” and “radicchio” while gasping in a manner that made fresh-faced Caliope Cufinger noticeably blush.
Parents, let this be a lesson to you. Do not introduce Romaine at your table, nor substitute spinach where simple lettuce will suffice. Do not stray from the known safety of blandest iceberg, lest you risk raising some twisted pervert like wretched Androgen, who gets his vicarious kicks lusting after others’ arugula or, heaven forbid, their zesty rainbow chard.
Yes, be realistically afraid, people. Because, really, rainbow chard.
STORK – BLIMY – IMPEL – AXIOM – MUSIC – CUMIN
As the old saying goes, a strange bird obsessed with delivering whiny English babies is a song not even the new parents truly want to hear.
Also, cumin
GLOAT – SLANT – PLAIT
Chinchilla had spent months growing her hair out and brushing it, and once it was finally braided, it was long enough to hang to the bottom of her back.
My hair is just the prettiest, she thought, strutting down the school hallway as if it were a catwalk, tilting her head just so, to catch the right light.
Frindl held a differing view.
“Your hair,” he declared, “looks like an old horse’s tail, except woven out of moldy straw.”
Chinchilla whipped her head around, slapping him hard in the face with the formidable braid.
They agreed to disagree.
RIGOR – TEARY – BREWS – BREED
Ogle tried to be good; he put himself in situations where he would be unable to drink. But then, sometimes the call of the hop was too strong, and he’d pop into a new drinking establishment on the way home, “Y’know, for one quick one.”
But one beer always led to many, and without fail, he would get weepy and then beg unsuspecting women to bear his children, only to be summarily evicted from the premises.
He finally took up gardening and got himself a dog, but the damage around town was done.
CLASH – SEDER – SOUPY – SWOON
Everyone held later that they knew it was a bad idea. Bubby Filtenstein was getting batty as the worst belfry, but it was her year to host the Passover meal, and she wasn’t giving it up without a fight.
Still, everything was fine right until the big tureen of matzoh was served, and it became clear after the first slurps that something was horribly awry. That wasn’t matzoh meal, it was sawdust!
The fight that broke out across the table was quickly to become the stuff of family lore, especially since no one knew the old biddy packed a .22 pistol in her sleeve. Portly Aunt Yonah, always a bit prone to the drama and the tsuris, collapsed unconscious into the chicken broth, which was neither chicken nor particularly brothy, while Cousin Flemish eventually gave in to the family’s quiet requests for reconstructive surgery, as his left ear did indeed look like someone had run it rather indelicately through an old-fashioned meat grinder.
FINCH – SATYR – REGAL – REALM
Naive Prince Ogilvy, a nebbishy sort or royal, was startled during his bird-watching on palace grounds, later maintaining he was fondled by a mythological woodland creature name of Earl. In truth, the groundskeeper, Clugman, half-naked as was his wont, and smelling suspiciously of unwashed goat, was simply blind drunk and feeling frisky.
GRIPE – CORAL – ACORN
Ardis should never have listened to Plebar’s advice when Plebar suggested, upon learning of his associate’s vacation plans in the Caribbean, that Ardis try snorkeling while fucked up on ayahuasca. It should be noted that Plebar was Ardis’ dealer.
It is just wrong for there to be bonsai oak trees growing out of a shallow-water reef, with fat squirrels perched precariously atop the branches gorging on the strangely bountiful nuts to the point of falling down among the schools of circling, squirrel devouring angel fish. Which, by the way, had wings.
Never again, Ardis fumed to himself afterward, as he went — traumatized, you might say, to the gills — to meet with Plebar, who, as bad luck would have it, was also his therapist. Never again.
CHASM – AVERT – PANDA – PAPAL
It was 2087, a tough year for everybody.
Antarctica, the part still above water, was increasingly thick with tropical greenery and beach palms. Barton “Piggy” Trump, great-grandson of one Donald J. Trump, and likewise with the IQ of a turnip, was U.S. president for life, as had been his grandfather and that classless fucknut’s own father before him. The international Powerball lottery now accounted for the entirety of most every still-solvent country’s GDP. Mountain Dew had 372 flavors.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, having merged a few decades prior with the McDonald’s Corporation, and in a bid to recapture some of the floundering pair’s vastly declining membership/repurposed-meat burger sales, was being belittled publicly by a consortium of its own hired focus groups over the newly branded Catholic McChurch’s™ vaguely muttonesque McShepherd sandwich.
“So bad it warrants not just a barf-bag, but an excommunication,” noted Religious Eats magazine.
In a growing sense of panic, the College of Cardinals hastily convened in New Rome, which was actually a walled-in section of Detroit’s burned-down Van Steuben neighborhood, as the bulk of the now-former Italy had been sold off to Moldavia to pay down the spiraling Italian national debt brought on by wave after wave of lawsuits, on the heels of the stunning revelation that the Mob-run Ente Italiano del Turismo’s national campaign to promote “authentic Italian pizza” had, for the last dozen years, been “strongly encouraging” the AI-staffed ristorantes to sell overstocked Totino’s frozen pies bought in bulk from Costco via the culinary black market.
The Church badly needed its own new savior, as the old guard had withdrawn its longstanding offers of assistance. In fact, Jesus Himself, from His plush Antarctic bungalow, had recently texted His intentions of now never coming back, citing budgetary considerations, plus a general global lack of interest. Meanwhile, the last few popes, headhunted from private industry, had failed outright to reverse the downward spiral in refashioning the church as a pay-for-penance enterprise, with the once-sacred confessional becoming the primary vehicle for Mob-directed extortion.
In a bold move, Cardinal Fredo, new of the Newark Diocese and just returned from his Cosa Nostra cross-training, proposed a big shift in both Church look and direction, including a dramatic public change for a badly besmirched Papacy that had tried adopting the unpopular McShepherd sandwich as a Church-sanctioned substitution for the traditional body-of-Christ communion wafer. Immediate public outcry forced the Church’s hand, and Crunchy Cheetohs were brought back instead.
“We gotta get us a new modern look, and even more, a new fuckin’ Pope,” Cardinal F. declared to his fellow red-robed companions’ startled oohs! and ohs! “Optics, brothers! It’s all about them fuckin’ optics! We need some streamlined getups, and a fresh SOB in the hotseat, someone we can finally control. Someone the public might actually give a holy shit about, amIright?”
It was agreed. Fuhgeddaboudit.
Just days later, the white smoke heralding a new head of the Mother McChurch was released into the smoggy Michigan sky, and entirely missed by bored onlookers, such that until some skinny priest name of Phil soon sauntered out and shouted, “His will been done!”
It was not clear who’s will exactly, but then the devil’s always in the details, right?
And so it was, and so it came to be. Thanks to the rampant success of the unregulated market for genetically engineered animals to replace the most delicious/cutest of the world’s now entirely extinct natural fauna, the distant genetic progeny of the perpetually unfornicating, Chinese-born, bamboo-munching 20th Century star of Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, then languishing in a laboratory cage in Tulsa, Okla., suddenly found himself whisked away to a distant balcony crammed with high-fiving humans in new white-trimmed robes of Mob-black, where he was quickly outfitted in a strapped-on black-and-white mitre matching his own distinctive coloring, and faced to look out at his own much surprised New Holy See …
“Welcome, Pope Francis Xavier Ling-Ling the First!” Cardinal Fredo shouted to the dozen or so moderately faithful assembled in the street below.
The newly appointed Pope then proceeded to do a handstand and pee all over everyone.
FETCH – SLACK – SMOCK
It was clearly the wrong night to dress for style over function, yet jet-setting, never-svelte Fishlong opted for a splashy form-fitting tropical shirt with no give in it as he set out with friends on a wide-raging dining tour of the Tokyo area’s top Ramen eateries.
By night’s end, he was like a human sausage stuffed into a fabric skin nearly bursting at its buttons.
In a surreptitious call to his personal assistant back at the hotel, Fishlong instructed, “Barnsley, bring me my muumuu, toot sweet!”
With Fishlong breathing easier, it was on to Yokohama’s steam-punk-fabulous Men Yard Fight, where heavy metal music blared, and the extra-wide noodles flowed thick with pizza sauce.
FROWN – SCORN – STERN
It starts out mildly enough.
You have the occasional bout of mild consternation over this or that thing, a secret, perhaps, that unsettles you, a thing you’ve done that, tut-tut, you know you really should not have.
But avoidance isn’t just a river in Egypt. And as you do not deal with the issue directly, the consternation revisits you, again, and again, becoming like some Mormon missionary to whom you should never have uttered the word “agnostic.” It ultimately settles into you, like a plate of greasy food, soon enough oozing out your pores in an oily sheen, a spreading dermal field of inflammation; it momicks your troubled digestion.
Before too long, you find yourself saddled with Resting Consternation Face, which invariably droops further, into Settled-in Somber Face. At this advanced point, if you don’t address the situation, yes, face forward, by quite literally grinning into your personal abyss, then in the wink of a disgruntled eye, you’ve developed Persistent Angsty Look, giving way, invariably, to Alarming Angry Outlook and, finally, to Furious Fuming Facade.
Now, when you walk into a room, everyone around you quietly retreats, like a tide going out, or an army of roaches at a sudden footfall or a burst of light. You can hear their whispering, out just past the periphery of understanding, though you can never ease close enough to make out what anyone is saying.
But let me just tell you what they’re saying:
“I hear,” they venture in their hushed tones, “that he eats children.”
“I understand,” they murmur, like a drone of doomed cicadas, “that he was married once, long ago, but she left him for a circus clown.”
“I have it on excellent authority,” they assert, en sotto voce, “that he had inappropriate relations with a jar of jumbo Spanish olives.”
And all the while, inwardly, you smile, as outwardly, you no longer can. Because you’re certain they cannot possibly know your secrets, the disquieting tut-tuts of your twisted self-disgust – about your cannibalistic tendencies as regards the young, about your ex-wife and that yellow-shod bastard Bozo, and most of all, about those olives, with their tempting little tongues. You tell yourself that pimientos never talk, but your face says you maybe don’t believe it …
STING – FOLLY – OPERA – ORDER
I’m not saying stay in your lane, but it was just pure hubristic foolishness, that former singer from The Police attempting the role of sad Canio in “Pagliacci” in front of an Italian audience, which summarily turned on the blond soft-rocker midway through the tragic “Vesti la giubba,” running amok and beating him to death with Pagliaccio’s left clown shoe.
VERSE – PARCH – PROUD
Spiegel refused to admit he was going through a particularly dry period until an influential reviewer compared his newest slim volume of love poetry to a candlelit dinner of dry white toast.
BURST – SHOAT – SPELT – SWEET – SCENT
Not to say young Piggy, the popular porcine prince of rural Lyon County, had food issues, but the Doritos, cotton candy and chunks of fried Oreos that the kids tossed into his pen at different stops on the Iowa fair circuit had led to one mighty hefty porker. So to speak.
Farmer Dan was duly ashamed. He read up on possible nutritional solutions, and once fair season had come to its crisp pre-winter close, he implemented a strict new regimen at mealtime, a trendy wheat alternative high in healthy vitamins and minerals. He’d knock that weight right off his blue-ribbon winner, yes, sir!
Trouble is, Piggy was a pig, in every sense of the word, devouring the grain in his heat-regulated barn sty as if it were one more emptied bag of crunchy Cool Ranch on a lovely Indian summer night by the flickering lights of a spinning Ferris wheel.
And oh, the horror.
Young Piggy had always been mildly gluten intolerant; the small fan placed on him in his pens at different fair locales was not so much for his own comfort as to whisk away the foul methane evidence of his tricky digestion.
But then, in the new face of sheer grain abundance, alas.
Overnight on his new diet, which he undertook with a wholesale lack of discretion, being a pig and all, he bloated up to a formidable degree, and as Farmer Dan on his morning rounds watched in wretched disbelief, prodigious Piggy exploded like a flesh piñata.
In the sad aftermath, the farm hands who were tasked to clean up the awful mess noted that things smelled like a bountiful field at harvest time. And bacon. Also, bacon.
Comments
One is led to believe you have, perhaps, mixed a few too many disparate ideas, and have, if I might suggest, crossed, perhaps, too many red lines, even to my obviously biased sensibilities.
But who am I, wonk to the Oxford comma that I am, to judge?
Kudos are, no doubt, due …
So ….
Kudos …