The
Don Cosquillas
Tales
(Freshly Spun on the Tickle Wheel)
Rhys Hughes
This is the story that Dr Jos de los Rios likes to tell best in the canteen of the university of Chaud-Mell. That strange city in the mountains near Liechtenstein is home to many people from Spain and Portugal and other warmish lands, I don't know why, perhaps just to make this tale possible, though it seems a lot of effort for them to go through for so small a return. Ah well! De los Rios will only start to speak if someone buys him a coffee, preferably a cappuccino with cinammon sprinkled on top, because he likes to have a quirk. Just for your sake Ill order a mug for him right now and youll be able to listen to the following yarn as a consequence:
I spent a lot of time in Madrid during my long career, and in plenty of other places too, before accepting a job here, and I witnessed many different kinds of research programs, but probably the most remarkable one was when it was decided to determine what the most powerful kind of tickle was. As an all-round specialist, I was consulted on the matter before investigations began and I was an important collaborator on everything that happened after funding for the project had been secured. Yes, I was a dedicated member of the tickle team!
A random individual was chosen from Madrids teeming millions to be the secret guinea pig of our research. By pure chance Don Cosquillas was selected, but he wasnt known by that name back then, he was plain Arturo Risas, a face in the crowd, a nobody, a plain simple human being, or so we unfortunately thought. He never realised he was a victim of academia and the furtherance of human knowledge until the very end. He had no idea why things kept trying to tickle him, some successfully, in different sectors of his lean but not insensitive body.
Everybody knows that some things are more ticklesome than others, its no secret, but what thing delivers the ultimate tickle? We discounted self tickling from the outset, didn't even bother to run any tests on that, because its a truth universally acknowledged that to tickle oneself is an impossibility. Weve all tried at some point. No, we began with feather dusters. The most fleet of foot among our team was given the task of accidentally bumping into Don Cosquillas on a busy street and letting him have it with the duster.
The encounter came off as planned and the target laughed, but his laugh wasnt really very hard, rated very low on our Giggle Counters, and in fact he laughed much harder when he caught our researcher after a long chase and ran him through with his sword, because although our researcher was fleet of foot he didn't know Madrid very well and ended up running down a street that was a dead end. As for the sword: Don Cosquillas had bizarre romantic inclinations and nearly always carried one, making our job rather more dangerous.
Our second tickle raid involved those little known objects of unwanted hilarity, strands of seaweed. Late one night we climbed onto the roof of his house and carefully cut a hole in the ceiling of his bedroom. Then we lowered the rubbery strips on lengths of cord and lightly tickled his forehead, nose and ears. He chuckled in his sleep and then reached under a pillow for the primed duelling pistol he kept there, aiming at the ceiling and pulling the trigger. A flash, a roar, a whistle, and another of our researchers ended his postgraduate studies prematurely!
Our third experiment utilised the legs of a centipede trained to crawl up the leg of his trousers while he sat in the Parque del Retiro, writing bad poetry in a little book. He could hardly respond with blade or shot against such a creature, especially one hidden somewhere in his clothing, so he was forced to use his hand. But the centipede reached the top of his trousers and ran up the back of his shirt to a place he couldnt reach. He had to improvise an artificial hand that could reach, namely one of his gloves on the end of a long stick that he found under his bench.
In the following months we experimented with many small creatures and studied the readings on our Giggle Counters. Of all the creepy crawlies in existence, the spider was the most ticklesome. But we found other things that tickle even harder: very fine drizzle, light breezes, certain scents, an agitated cats tail, the tongues of warmth that rise from newly baked loaves broken open, unravelling cotton threads from the sleeve of a shirt on the underside of the wrist.
We even conducted some crude tests with streams of neutrinos and similar massless particles, though our understanding of subatomic physics was very naive back then, and this was many years before the appearance of the Tickleless Man of Madrid, who belongs in another story. And we even hired the horrid Spiderpus to tickle Don Cosquillas. The Spiderpus is a giant octopus mounted on a giant spider: with eight arms and eight legs its very versatile and can do almost anything, including picking the most secure locks ever designed. A formidable tickler!
Always the readings on our instruments went up. When would they reach the maximum? Don Cosquillas continued to defend himself against us. Remembering the centipede incident, he devoted himself to constructing a mechanical hand to parry all oncoming tickles, dismantling bicycles in his workroom for spare parts. The single arm attached to this hand grew longer and longer as he learned to anticipate and thwart tickle assaults more efficiently and closer to their point of origin. We were compelled to launch our tickle raids further and further from our target. Soon we were on the outskirts of Madrid, then on the very edge of Spain itself!
This process continued but eventually we ran out of tickling methods and deemed the experiment to be over. The data indicated that the most ticklesome thing in creation is a single hair from the head of an auburn girlfriend who has recently participated in a snowball fight. This item gave an incredible reading of 998 tickle degrees. As we were about to turn off the Giggle Counters the needles suddenly jumped off the scale. But how? We rushed to investigate. Don Cosquillas was tickling himself! All our former beliefs about self tickling were overturned in a few comical moments!
His mechanical hand had grown so long that it now went all the way around the world and back again, its fingers tickling their owner on the ribs. So this was the answer! It is possible for a person to tickle himself but only if his arm circumnavigates the globe. We had the decency to disarm him and help him to a chair, then we explained everything. Because he was the only man in history to have successfully tickled himself, and on the ribs too, he awarded himself the title of Duque de Costillas y Cosquillas. As for myself, Ive finished my coffee now and so its time to button my lip. A little more cinnamon next time, please.