The Unthinkable Val Thevictorian

For all of you worried about Ebola wiping humanity off the face of the earth, or about zombies shambling into your neighborhood to feast on your brains...let me take you away from all that. What better way to forget your problems than to take a glimpse at one of Val's?

Val is lolling about the homestead this weekend, doing what she darn well pleases. Hick and The Pony have gone upstate to a Factory Safety Meeting and a Future Mensa Reunion. You can judge for yourself which of my guys attended what.

Since they were away, I had only myself to feed on Friday night. I stayed late after school, not that such a behavior is uncommon to Val, with her usually staying at least an hour-and-a-half three days per week. So it was shortly after 4:15 when I left. I have to be careful these days. Darkness falls quickly in the hinterlands, what with all those pesky hills blocking out the setting sun before its time. And darkness is very dark in the country. So I wanted to get home before dark so I wouldn't be listening for Mothman flittering about in the woods when I stopped at the mailbox row to pick EmBee's gullet clean.

Nobody wants to cook only for oneself. At least not this nobody. So I thought up something quick that would not require a lick of input on my part. I called Pizza Hut for a personal pan pizza and some breadsticks. Yum. I haven't had a personal pan pizza for years. Mmm...it was going to be SO tasty! I chose beef, mushrooms, and onions as my toppings. It's hard to have a pizza how you like it around here. Hick demands only meat, including that horrid pepperoni, and The Pony will only eat cheese.

So with great anticipation, I piloted T-Hoe to Pizza Hut, which is on the way home, and just the right distance for that personal pan pizza to be ready when I got there. Let the record show that my commute is around 40 minutes, not due to great distance, but due to two-lane blacktop. I picked up my personal pan about 15-20 minutes into the journey.

The window woman brought my eagerly-awaited personal pan to the window in its small cardboard box. The breadsticks were in their own cardboard box, longer, and a bit narrower. The window woman foisted this purchase on me like she was part of the pit crew for Dale Earnhardt Jr. Could she not see that I was without my little helper who rides behind me? I had to reach over my purse onto the shotgun seat and try to balance these unequal sized boxes. As I was finagling them into position, Window Woman growled, "Here!" I turned to see her shoving a red booklet of some sort at me, and a flapping receipt. I quickly took them and tossed them onto the passenger seat.

I pulled away from the window a bit so as not to impede the next pit stop, and grabbed the breadstick box which was trying to jump over the edge of the seat and land on the business end of the umbrella that has rested its point on the floor since Tuesday. I grabbed that awkward red book, and saw that it was a Pizza Hut calendar. I put the breadstick box on the seat, the calendar flat on top of that, and then my much-anticipated personal pan box on top of that. The receipt had fallen to the floor already. Not that I cared.

The tantalizing aroma from my personal pan beef, mushroom, and onion wafted across my nostrils like a silken white thread of eau de PePe Le Pew in cartoonland. Only much more pleasant, I would imagine, though I never had smell-a-vision as a kid. I motored along, obeying all the traffic rules, despite people behind me taking umbrage at my law-abidingness. I was going to arrive alive. None of that speeding for Val Thevictorian. She had precious cargo perched upon her passenger seat. Mmm...that precious cargo was going to taste like the best personal pan pizza that ever personally panned.

It was at the roundabout that the bottom fell out of my fantasy. Roundabouts, I am certain, are the main traffic interchange in not-heaven. Folks around here are not accustomed to roundabouts, even though my route has had two of them for nigh on four years now. You never know whether you will have to slam on brakes because young drivers speed up like they're Dale Earnhardt Jr. rather than let you merge, or, as in my case Friday evening, shoot in front of you when there's no chance in not-heaven that an opening is possible.

I heard a sickening scrabbling of cardboard, and glanced right to see that my personal pan box had taken a dive over the side of the black leather seat, and was now partially visible between the seat and the door, as a$$-over-teakettle as a square flat cardboard box can be. Though I must say, the aroma grew even stronger. I still had ten minutes of my drive left. I surreptitiously glanced at my fallen feast as I had the chance. Plotting. A method to retrieve my treat before it fell to the cat-haired, bat-guanoed garage floor when I opened the door. There was no leaning over to grasp the box from the driver's seat. T-Hoe has a large console. Val has a large...um...everything. Except long arms.

As soon as I pulled into the garage and lowered the door so no neighborhood weirdo could come up and startle me, I grabbed that red, green, and black striped umbrella which I had never properly velcroed back around the handle. I went around to the passenger side of T-Hoe, and laid that umbrella down on the dusty garage floor like a sterilized sheet ready to catch a just-birthed baby. I yanked open the door and reached my hand inside. The Pizza Hut calendar fell onto the umbrella. The personal pan pizza box was wedged in the slot molded into the bottom of T-Hoe's door for placing, perhaps, maps. And books. And magazines. The personal pan pizza itself was not in the box.

MY PERSONAL PAN BEEF, MUSHROOM, AND ONION WAS PERCHED AT A DIAGONAL ON THE FLOOR BESIDE THE PASSENGER SEAT!

Having been fresh and hot and soft when placed in the box and foisted upon Val at the window by the Pizza Hut pit crew, that tender pizza had flattened on one side like a half moon. Did that stop Val from trying to salvage her fantasy? What do you think? Val is the woman who fed her toddler half a chocolate chip granola bar off the garage floor. Don't act shocked. How dare you assume Val never gave her kids anything healthy like a granola bar!

Sorry. I'm feeling shaky from reliving that nightmare. I must wrap up this horror story and let you go back to your own worries.

But let the record show that my personal pan beef, mushroom, and onion pizza, though misshapen, was real, and it was spectacular.