Seamort was not, in fact, Slub Glub’s mother. Not only was Seamort a male giant squid, which at best would have made him Slub Glub’s father, but Slub Glub had not been conceived by the usual method. Slub Glub was the product of man’s nefarious ingenuity and nature’s shiftless flexibility. He was born in a bathtub.
To be more specific, the chemical agents that acted as the catalyst for his unnatural life were mixed in a bathtub-like vessel within the Research and Development Laboratory of General National, a corporation of conglomerated concern of consolidated commercial enterprise. They were a big business, run by big business men, who did sinister things and made great gobs of money doing so. Their scientists were trying to discover a chemical ingredient that they could put in potato chips to make them taste like soda pop. The boss of General National, who always wore a four-piece suit, was convinced that if they could sell a bag of chips that tastes like soda, it would sell as well as chips and soda combined, which would generate enough revenue for him to have his bones replaced with solid gold.
In pursuit of this noble goal, the dutiful white-coated scientists of the General National labs combined different ingredients in their bathtub to see if any would make potato chips taste like soda pop. On one fateful day, the ingredients in question were lemon juice and frog’s fingers. It was then that the useless discovery was made that when lemon juice touches the fingers of a frog, it becomes a darkly-colored, sticky goo that smells like moldy fish lungs and stains all that it crosses with a permanent purplish-blackish tattoo. Repulsed, the scientists did what scientists who work at big corporations usually do, which is they flushed the horrible mess out a long tube and into the waters of the nearest stream.
To be continued.
Table of Contents: “Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows”
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Illustration & text copyright (c) Andrew Goldfarb