Ordained With An Umbrella Scooter: Short Stories (And A Few Failed Experiments)

The Miracle Men

****AUTHOR'S NOTE**** This is the first story I wrote for a creative writing class in college.  It dates back to 1996 or 1997 and I was probably about 19 when I wrote it.  It still definitely displays many of the hallmarks of my writing style today.  What's more, my brain must really think along similar tracks because I noticed familiar names in here that popped up in later works I did.  I hadn't read this in a really long time and I thought it had been completely lost, but then just for fun in October of 2021, I was looking at some of my really old emails and I discovered I had sent a copy of this to a friend sixteen years ago.  I was able to recover the story from that email, along with another story that I also thought had been lost, so that was a pretty exciting discovery to make and it was fun to re-read this after so many years.  I remembered some of it, but there was a lot that I had forgotten.  Incidentally, the story "Cinema's Newest Auteurs!", which appears earlier in this collection is a loose sequel to this story, in that it also features Milo and Floyd.  Perhaps now that I've found this one, I'll see fit to continue their adventures at some point.  

"Get out of here!" shouted the decidedly large owner of the restaurant as he tossed Milo headfirst out into the street. Floyd, who was dressed in a rented chicken suit, followed soon after and landed with an audible thud.

"I told you they'd never believe I was a giant chicken," Floyd mumbled as he picked himself up from the ground.

"We had them fooled until you sneezed," Milo sneered. He rose slowly to his feet and brushed the dirt off of his cheap three-piece suit. "After all, everybody knows that chickens never sneeze."

"It was a stupid idea, Milo," Floyd persisted.

"It was not stupid. It's common knowledge that the giant Albanian chicken is a valued delicacy. Restaurants will pay top dollar if they can get a hold of one. Besides, I wouldn't have left you there. After they took you into the kitchen I would have broken in through the back door and we could have escaped in time to get the chicken suit back to the rental shop by five o'clock." Just then he noticed that the price tag was still dangling from under Floyd's left wing. "Hey, what the-? Didn't you remove that?"

"Hey, look at that," Floyd mused. "I didn't even see that there."

"For God's sake, Floyd," Milo flung his arms up in exasperation. "I come up with these stunningly brilliant plans and you keep screwing them up with your incompetence."

Floyd looked sheepish. "I'm sorry, Milo. What are we going to do?"

"Well, we both know I'm the brains of this operation. Give me a few minutes and I'll think of a plan."

Floyd shut up and let Milo think. Sometimes he suspected that Milo wasn't as smart as he claimed to be. Nonetheless, Floyd tended to let him come up with the plans because he was pretty sure that he himself wasn't terribly smart at all. Floyd watched Milo intently as he pondered. Milo's brow was furrowed viciously and he appeared to be deep in thought about many complex things far beyond Floyd's comprehension.

In actuality, Milo was thinking about the fact that his back itched in that annoying spot that he never seemed to be able to reach.

Floyd continued to watch him with great interest. Milo was not really an attractive man. He was fairly small in stature. Considerably smaller than Floyd, at any rate. He had thick oily brown hair that always looked like it had just been slept on. His eyes appeared to be set pretty far back in his head, but this may have been an illusion caused by the fact that he had a rather large nose. His ears were also oversized and he was slightly bucktoothed. He always wore loud suits that had gone out of style about a decade previously. He had three fake gold chains that he displayed proudly and his skin had a somewhat artificial color to it that looked like someone who had spent a large amount of time in salons trying to look like he had a great tan. When most people saw him, the word "slimy" was the first thing that came to mind. It struck Floyd how rat-like Milo appeared at that particular moment and he had to suppress a chuckle at the thought.