Esther Peabladt did not know what the world was coming to, but she knew she didn't like it one bit! Why just yesterday she'd been walking her fat little asthmatic dachsund Pixie down the sidewalk along Pine Avenue, when she encountered a horrible word sprayed onto the whitewashed plywood fence that surrounded a construction site. The word was:

At first glance the wild chaotic lettering made her shudder in revulsion, but in a short while she became angry! It was an intrusion into her sequestered, civilized world by a hostile outside one; a culture---a whole planet seemingly---where rudeness and barbarism had long since come to reign, and which she knew would never return to any sort of decency; a world where each new level of beastliness gave way a week later to something even more unthinkable! She expected to see people running around stark nak- unclothed any day now, gibbering and dancing lewdly, their bodies pincushioned by drooping syringes full of DOPE, or something, she didn't know what all!

She had tried to insulate herself from the awfulness of modern "morality" when she had moved into the eighth floor suite of the Colonial Towers Retirement Village, which she only left briefly anymore to let Pixie do her .......... you know. But the world out there, which had gone so crazy, was like poison gas or something that you could never keep out. Not entirely...

She no longer watched TV much, those game shows that she had once enjoyed were full of lewd insinuations on the part of their greasy, leering hosts ......... But this morning she had viewed an old movie that she remembered enjoying quite a bit back in her girlhood. And they had colorfied it---which was nice---but they had also monkeyed around with the sound somehow, in what she imagined was an attempt to make it more "up to date", so that people who were only interested in filth anymore would watch it, because there were words in it that she just knew weren't in it originally. Lines like, "This is a fairly DAMN-ing bit of evidence..."

Which made her insides go all into knots and she just wanted to lie down and take a nap. Or first take a Tums for her stomach. A nice little Tums...

But just then Mrs. Wertz came over and wanted to chat. And the thing was, as the poison gas seeped in everywhere it changed people. Even the previously nice ones became corrupted by the constant exposure. Mrs. Wertz spoke a steady stream of intimate paramedical lewdness, at one point even saying:

...which upset Esther terribly, though you couldn't say anything to them. They were all crazy and might even hurt you if they sensed your fear, it was from the dope. Mrs. Wertz might hurt you when she was on that dope!

And so she was glad when her neighbor left, and she could try to settle herself down, to calm her nerves by playing a few ditties on her beautiful antique piano; those wonderful Best Loved Songs like "Roll Out the Barrel"...

Which was when she noticed for the first time that the curves of her piano's legs, seen in profile, were obscenely full and voluptuous, and that one of them kept trying to rub up against her leg!

It was a girl piano, for gosh sakes! Like that time in 1943 when Mary Greenlee had tried to- OH IT WAS TOO AWFUL TO THINK ABOUT!!!

Esther's upset stomach went into overdrive now. She lurched toward the bathroom, almost stepping on Pixie, who was bent in half on the oval hallway rug, huffing noisily as she licked the flesh between her hind legs in an onanistic frenzy!

"Stop it Pixie! You stop that right now!" cried Esther hysterically. The whole world had gone filth-crazed! All of this in a single morning, and it wasn't even ten a.m. yet! She knew that if she saw or heard one more obscene thing that reminded her of the filth in the world it would be too much for her. She just knew it!

She swung open the medicine cabinet to take a TUMS; a nice little, friendly little tummy-tum-tums...

But when she pushed the mirrored door shut she saw in the reflection, spelled out in bold block letters on the tube tablets in her hand, the word:

Esther screamed and jumped back, falling---KEEERASHO!!!---out through the window and eight stories to the street below, where she landed right in the path of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, which had come to town for the Auto And Truck Expo at the Tri-Cities Convention Center. Unable to break in time, the giant fiberglass weenie ran over poor Esther.

Then the angels came and tooke her off to heaven...

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Where that horrible man Jesus keeps coming up and trying to sit next to her, putting his hand on her knee and calling her "my child"; sadly shaking his head as she jumps up and storms off, quaking with disgust and indignation.
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