Buried Letter Press March April 2014

The children built him a little house down by the lake and he was sent to live there and contemplate his failing prettiness. So he spent his days pining and thinking what life was about and after several months he took some baby steps to changing his thinking. He began to clean up the lake and to take care of the landscaping and to make where he lived prettier. He started off slowly then speeded up and worked for fifteen hours a day on his little hut and his surroundings. And he began caring for the wild animals that lived around the lake. He bathed and groomed coyotes and raccoons and pollywogs and the occasional opossum. He brushed their teeth with peppermint toothpaste so they even smelled good close up.

And the family noticed. Julia was pleased. The children were nonplussed. But they saw that because of Drew’s unprettiness he had become a different, yet admired person.

And soon pretty Julia (whose own toning up was slowly toning down) and the pretty children (who would be pretty until they hit 60 or so) joined him in his efforts to make the world pretty. They started with their town, painting the houses bright colors and mowing the lawns and building attractive fences and playgrounds and cutting the hairs out of the townspeople’s noses and plucking their eyebrows and washing their cars and building new walking paths and planting spring bulbs.

Then they (the plain and pretty Bellenderbilts) moved on to other towns and other counties and other states and what they left behind were clean buildings and neat landscaping and colorful (pink, yellow, purple, green, blue, magenta, and white) wildflowers everywhere and, of course, smiling, toothy wild animals with peppermint breath.