“Wow, time sure does fly,” Crumpet-Hands Man said, lost deep in the reflective pondering of that dear old classroom of his adolescence. (His dear old teacher's head had been stuffed and hung above the mantelpiece.) Our hero did also reflective ponder: But if time really did fly, then why didn't clocks have wings? And whenever he hurled a sundial or a grandfather clock or someone's actual grandfather out of a top floor hospital window, why did the police arrive and start shooting? “Ah... C'est la vie,” our hero shrugged, did ponder the more. His teacher's head slipped from its hook and landed on him.

  From under it our hero did reverie, “It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in this very classroom, swatting up on my ABCs, my 123s.”

  “And flies, by the looks of it,” Muffin Mind grimaced, himself swatting away a horde of the aforementioned bugs, they attracted in droves by the scent of his sickly quiff. The villain morphed said quiff into a wave of sticky marmalade; much to his satisfaction, all the flies became stuck and thereby drowned. Hah!

  “Ahh,” our hero (who had dragged himself out from under the head, BTW) sighed wistfully in respect to his doughy doppelg?nger, the young Crumpet-Hands Boy seated at his desk, taking notes. (The mayor blah-blah-blah etc.) “I can't believe how much I've changed.”

  The villain was not convinced such a maturation had transpired.

  “But you look just as old then as you do now? Wait a minute!” the villain snapped around, noticing the date on a nearby calendar. He ripped it from the wall, “February, 2026? This was last week?” he said, throwing the calendar back at the wall. “What's the game here, Crumpet-Hands Man? This is not the past, your past! Are you attempting to play tricks on me?”

  Crumpet-Hands Man shook his head; a dozen sultanas fell from the villain's face, ran away, hid, along with a swarm of escaping and eternally grateful flies.

  “Please, do not do that again,” Muffin Mind threatened, reapplying his quiff with an icing bag. “But really,” he asked bitterly, “what subterfuge is afoot here, Crumpets? Why are you disordering these illusions of yours?”

  With a palpable display of shame and an unwarranted West Country accent, our hero contended that he be doing no disordering. “These no illusions, squire. I did go to school last week. You see... I never be brightest arf students.” he admitted with another palpable display of shame, albeit one greatly more pronounced this time. (He dropped to his knees and began screaming). “Due to my lack of academic shortcomings I've been held back a year or two.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “A decade or two, more like,” Muffin Mind took great pleasure in chuckling at our hero's expense. Said hero sniffed away a tear; the resulting coughing fit indicated, much like his schooling, that he hadn't learned his lesson. (Hah!)

  “I'll have you know, Mr. Muffin,” said Mr. Hero, “that when I was growing up, school was terribly difficult for me.”

  “Still is, by the looks of it!” the villain heckled, streams of tears (and poppy seeds) pouring down his cheeks. Our hero became belligerent. “You can't know my suffrage. You try holding a pencil when you've got crumpets for hands. You try not to get all upset when the teacher asks any pupil in class who knows the answer to 'Raise a crumpet.' What do you know of being outcast, being singled out, to be bullied due to the grotesqueness of your hands. What's a young boy–”

  “Or a grown adult!”

  “–supposed to do when his body odour causes his classmates to salivate, or when his school photo gets mistaken for the centrefold of Baking Monthly?”

  The villain laughed so hard he ruptured a raisin, much to our hero's visible chagrin. (Knees, screaming, etc.) Yet, as his surroundings magically transformed from classroom to gymnasium, Crumpet-Hands Man became calmer. He sniffed (and coughed), “But if my time in the classroom was unhappy, I did find acceptance here on the school netball team. The powerful suction of my crumpet-palms made catching the ball a cinch, see?” As verification our hero performed a fine exhibition of dribbling around the court.

  “Why didn't you tryout for basketball, like the rest of the boys?” the villain asked, taking up a mop and some Febreze due to all the 'fine' hero-dribble around his ankles.

  “Surely, given your age,” he sniggered, “you'd have maintained a superior height advantage over the opposition?”

  “Netball had better shorts.”

  “Those are skirts,” the villain sighed, for repetition is a wearisome labour. “And I should stress, unlike yourself, that none of your fellow players are wearing them across their shoulders.”

  “More roomy,” our hero explained, wiping his crotch on the mop. “Fair point,” dunked the sewage worker with the paunch.

  While the villain got busy rinsing the dribble-drenched mop in a dribble-drenched bucket, a stray netball from a nearby practice session struck Crumpet-Hands Man across the back of the head. “Watch out!” called one of the players on the girl's team, immediately distinguishable from her team-mates due to her hairy legs and moustache and spinning fedora. “Pay attention next time – And wake up,” the hairy girl pleaded over her moustache. “Wake up, Crumpet-Hands Man! Wake up!”

  With a palpable expression of unease (he dropped to his knees and began screaming) Muffin Mind suggested that he and our hero should take leave of this place at once.