The
Don Cosquillas
Tales
(Freshly Spun on the Tickle Wheel)
Rhys Hughes
His nose is very long, so long that when he faces north it turns purple with cold, because the tip is significantly closer to the Arctic Circle. When he faces south his nose crosses the equator and jungle birds use it for a perch, including a toucan with a beak so long that when it faces west the sails of galleons returning from Mexico are ripped to shreds. Not all galleons, just some. When that toucan faces east nothing happens, not the usual kind of nothing, but a nothing packed with incident.
If this man decided to duel with that toucan, unsheathed noses at dawn, someone would surely snuff it, probably a bystander, but not an innocent bystander. All his bystanders are guilty. His eyes are like green cherries with protruding stalks, stalks also tipped with eyes, so his gaze resembles that of a crab or quadruple cyclops. His head opens on a hinge and the top half is a giant eyelid with strong prehensile lashes that can grasp objects of value, including mugs of coffee and ducks.
His name is Don Cosquillas. Do you know him?
He knows you, without question. He passed you on the stairs last week and tickled you with a rather small schooner. His hat was fully grown at the time and the ships anchor caught on the brim by mistake. How it squealed, that hat! How you sniggered with your talking belly button! Disappointing. Your belly button should be more disciplined. It went to navel college. His didn't. Then you trod on his foot and the top of his head swung open. Why did you flick your cigar ash into his brain?
He was so upset by your behaviour he vowed to emigrate immediately. To the airport he went and bought a ticket to Snogg, capital of Lipsaria. On a moving platform he stood, because the departure lounge was on the far side of the airport. Hours passed, days, months. Eventually he reached the departure lounge, only to discover he was now in Snogg. He had forgotten that he lived in an age decades before the invention of powered flight and that people travelled between airports on foot.
Don Cosquillas owns a cloak of invisibility.
Did you ever see one of those?
He keeps it locked up in a highly obvious wardrobe because such attire causes more problems than it solves. It makes him perfectly invisible when he tries it on, but cant perform the same service for itself. He has to wear a second cloak of invisibility on top of the first, a third on top of that, and so on. It soon grows stuffy under all those cloaks, itchy too, and the resultant bulkiness is visible from any distance. A team of mountaineers mistook his grossly muffled form for a hill and climbed him.
A flag is still embedded in his eyelid-capped skull.
The separate halves of that skull are often at loggerheads and argue with such force that many lumberjacks frequently faint.
Not just lumberjacks. Golems too. And rotters.
But his soul lives comfortably within his body and sleeps on a hammock suspended from two ribs. He has wallpapered his skin from the inside. The kitchen can be found in the region of his pelvis. All the furnishings are very tasteful, but he never invites guests for supper. Likes his privacy too much, I guess. Inside his soul is another skeleton but its bones are made of pasta. It likes dancing salsa, or so it tells me. Saucy! Oddly enough the inventor of radio was also a pasta skeleton. Macaroni.
If you tune a radio carefully, to a frequency a little less than the square root of minus one KHz, you can pick up the pirate station that forced Don Cosquillas to walk the electromagnetic plank.
He fell into the ether and had to cling to his shadow to stop drowning. His shadow is a horse riding a bicycle. Whats yours like? If he drapes his cloak of invisibility over his shadow, the shadow of the cloak has nowhere to go. It hangs around in cafes drinking beer. And rebels against whatever youve got. His inner balcony is under his shoulders. His applause is very faint, almost silent, because his claps sleep in a hammock suspended from two palms. He drinks clouds through a straw.
Why didn't you laugh when he tickled you with that schooner? Have a problem with small fast boats, do you? Tell it to the judge. The judge is a psychologist, part time. Judge Tapas. Hell send you down. To the cellar to fetch a black beer. Who else is going down? Well answer that question a little later. In the meantime, who will curl the eyelashes of our hero with a big pair of tongs? Maybe the pirates on the airwaves will do it. Judge Tapas has the wisdom of a dish of olives, incidentally.
The mountaineers are coming down now. It was them all along! Coming down can be more risky than going up, everyone knows that, even people who don't know it. Don Cosquillas blinks as some fall and his blink throws the others off. Thats what happens when you have a giant eyelid on top of your head. What is the toucan doing? Drinking black beer. What happens when a cloak of invisibility gets wet? Why am I asking so many questions at this useless point in this tale? Its your turn.
What kind of tale is this, you ask? This tale is not a description of a liar. Don Cosquillas always tells the truth.
I am the liar. This tale is a description of a liar.