The Chocolate Covered Ant Candy Container

It all started when our blog-happy hero, Merry, woke up in an ant-infested bed after being up all night blogging on her "Idiots Online" blog. It was the fourth time it had happened that week and she was really feeling revolted since they bit and she was once again itchy. It was such a pain to handpick the little critters off the sheets and return them to her chocolate covered ant candy container. Once the can was full, she would pour chocolate over top of the insects and then feed the now candied ants to unsuspecting ... friends.

Feeling rather creepy crawly now, Merry attacked her room thinking it would make her feel better to clean it (but as usual, it did not), but she needed to get the critters back where they belonged. Suddenly, as Merry went to reach for her beloved chocolate covered ant candy container (and with ants still escaping from between her fingers), she realized that it was missing!

Without more ado, she immediately called her friend, Maddy. Merry had known Maddy for (plus or minus) 2000 years, the majority of which were interesting ones. That happens when you are both vampires thanks to the ministrations of a Tom Cruise look-alike one night while they were watching a vampire hand shadow presentation on the Grand Pyramid east wall in Egypt, but that is another story.

Even so, Maddy was unique and outgoing though sometimes a little... well... funny looking. All that big red hair had a way of becoming the only thing you could see when Maddy was in the room since it so much resembled a railroad boxcar that had slipped off the rails sideways.

Merry called her anyway, for the situation was urgent and it was imperative that she find out where her beloved chocolate covered ant candy container had disappeared.

Maddy picked up the telephone to a very upset Merry. After listening to her friend, wailing about the missing chocolate covered ant candy container and about how many thousands of ants were racing up and down her arms, Maddy calmly assured her that most longhaired AOL women screamed before killing their mates, yet South Texas armadillos usually sneakily gummed you to death after you had one for a snack. She had no idea what that meant, but she was only anxious and concerned with distracting Merry about the ant escapees.

Why was Maddy trying to sidetrack Merry? Because she had snuck out from Merry's house with the chocolate covered ant candy container hidden under her left armpit only the day before. It was a flamboyant little chocolate covered candy ant container... how could she resist? It was so CUTE all covered up in gold brocade with rhinestones around the center and she had suddenly decided she had to have it, in spite of the ants inside. In fact, she had set them free at the time, but now was feeling just a tad guilty over that because of what Merry was saying on the telephone.

Anyway, it did not take long before Merry got back to the subject at hand - her missing chocolate covered ant candy container. Maddy sneezed in response to her nose hairs standing on end out of the pure fear of discovery, but she couldn't own up to taking the thing, at least not yet. Reluctantly, Maddy invited her friend over and assured Merry they would find the chocolate covered ant candy container. Merry grabbed her recently tanned hippopotamus leather pocketbook and headed toward Maddy's house immediately.

After hanging up the phone, Maddy realized that she was in trouble. She had to find a place to hide the chocolate covered ant candy container and she had to do it quickly. She figured that if Merry took the nappy, rusted, cranked up, busted-out Pinto hatchback, she had at least nine minutes before Merry would arrive; however, if the woman took the refurbished Batmobile she had bought last week, well....then Maddy would be exceptionally screwed.

Before she could come up with any practical ideas, five feral and abrasive AOLer's that were lured to her home by her online blogging (yes, Maddy was also a happy blogger), interrupted Maddy. Maddy yawned and yawned again as she frantically slapped at the AOLers, who had swarmed in through the doggie door.

"Not again," she thought. Feeling astounded that they continued to find her since she moved every month, she reached for her electric cattle prod and aggressively and promptly zapped every last one of them. Apparently, this was an adequate deterrent--the discouraged AOLers began to scurry back toward the cyber swamp, squealing with pain and not a little displeasure. She exhaled with relief. That's when she heard the refurbished Batmobile rolling up her driveway. It was Merry.

As Merry pulled up, she felt a sense of urgency. She had to make an unscheduled stop at the local Burger King to pick up a 12-pack container of milkshakes. Although she was in a hurry, she drank all of them while sitting at the end of the drive-thru, so she knew she was running late but she did not want to share with Maddy. However, the truth of the matter was that once you had sworn off drinking blood, you had to get your nutrition somewhere! With a hasty leap, Merry was out of the refurbished Batmobile and went immediately toward Maddy's front door, thinking now was a good time to try out Maddy's new bidet.

Meanwhile inside the house, Maddy was panicking. Not thinking, she tossed the chocolate covered ant candy container into a box of still usable fruitcakes she had been saving for the past 20 years and then slid the box behind her white sofa. Maddy was temporarily baffled at it being white since moments before it was blue, but at least the chocolate covered ant candy container was temporarily concealed, and she had little time to ponder what had happened. The doorbell rang.

"Come in", Maddy called out. With an awkward shove, Merry opened the door. "Sorry for being delayed, but I was being chased by some maddening communal pariah in a smog polluting and illegal Bulgaria import," she lied.

"That's ok", Maddy assured her as Merry made a beeline to the bathroom where she spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to flush the bidet, but finally gave up and flipped a towel over top the mess she had left on the floor. Maybe Maddy would think her dogs did it.

Returning to the living room, Merry took a seat about two feet from where Maddy had hidden the chocolate covered ant candy container. Maddy almost yelped in fear, but yawned instead, trying unsuccessfully to hide her nervousness.

"Uhh, can I get you anything?" she blurted out, as she tried to make eye contact with Merry, but her hair kept falling down in front of her face and thus had her eyes shielded from the sudden influx of ants into the room.

Merry did not answer and, instead, had been distracted by a line of ants making a beeline into the house, going everywhere from behind the sofa to the kitchen where Maddy had left her White Christmas Chili sitting on the counter (she had taken that the same day she took the chocolate covered ant candy container, but Merry hadn't realized it was missing yet). Maddy noticed a look of surprise on Merry's face.

Merry slowly opened her mouth to speak.

"...What's that smell? Why are there ants here?" She got down on the floor and started sniffing in all corners of the room.

Maddy always felt a stabbing pain in her right toe when Merry asked this. In a moment of disbelief, she realized that she had hidden the chocolate covered ant candy container right by her oscillating fan and she caught a whiff of chocolate tinged with pineapple, thinking it must have spilled open on top of the fruitcakes. She, too, noticed the line of ants and they were increasing by the seconds. Shortly, you would not be able to see the floor.

'Wh-what? I don't smell anything..!' A blatant lie, but what was one to do?

A terrible look started to form on Merry's face. In turn, Maddy's face was just looking terrible.

Merry sniffed and sniffed, checking under the potted lime tree and then on top of the baby grand, then turned to notice a box that seemed clearly out of place behind the white sofa she had been sitting on and where most of the ants had now congregated.

"Th-th-those are just my grandma's cricket legs from when she used to have a pet South Texas armadillo. She, uh...dropped 'em by here earlier," groaned Maddy, as she started brushing ants off her legs.

Merry nodded with a look, she knew that was a typical Maddy lie...then, before Maddy could react, Merry lunged toward the box and opened it. The chocolate covered ant candy container was plainly in view among all the brick hard fruitcakes, ants, and bits of rotten pineapples.

Merry stared at Maddy for what must've been three milliseconds.

Her heart now filled with earnest sorrow for taking the chocolate covered ant candy container, Maddy groped helplessly in Merry's direction, clearly desperate to make Merry understand. Merry grabbed the chocolate covered candy ant container and bolted for the door. It was locked and bolted shut.

Maddy let out a conspicuous chortle. "If only you hadn't been so protective of that thing, none of this would have happened, Merry", she rebuked her friend, flipping her big hair out of her eyes again.

Maddy always had been a little crazy, so Merry knew that reconciliation was not an immediate option; she needed to escape before Maddy did something extreme, like... start chucking onion soup made with Indian leeks at her or something.

As if it really mattered, Merry gripped her chocolate covered ant candy container tightly to her chest and made a dash toward the window, diving headlong through the glass panels, which made a beautiful tinkling sound as the pieces fell to the floor.

Maddy looked on, blankly. "What the hell, Merry? That seemed excessive. The other door was open, you know?"

Silence from Merry.

"And to think, I replaced that window nine days ago when I threw Rose out after she tried escaping through the doggie door...it never ends!"

Belatedly, she started to feel a tinge of apprehension for Merry and hoped she had made it out the window safely.

"Oh, dear. You ..okay, Merry?"

Tranquil silence filled the room.

Maddy walked over to the window and looked down. Merry was gone.

Just yonder, Merry was struggling to make her way through the imaginary desert behind Maddy's place that was really a holographic film, but Maddy had planted cactus and poured 20 truckloads of sand into a large sand dune to make it more realistic. Merry had severely hurt her tailbone during the window incident, and was starting to lose strength in her legs.

Another pack of feral AOLer's unexpectedly appeared again, having caught wind of the chocolate covered ant candy container. One by one, they latched on to Merry. Already weakened from her injury, Merry yielded to the merciless onslaught and collapsed. The last thing she saw before losing consciousness as she began to sink into the sand dune was a screaming horde of AOLer's running off with her chocolate covered ant candy container.

Then Merry began to dream that Dr. House had arrived and lovingly restored Merry's tailbone. Feeling a trifle concerned, Dr. House also smote the AOLer's with his cane for their injustice to Merry and retrieved her chocolate covered ant candy container. Merry jumped with joy when she saw this. Her chocolate covered candy ant container was safe and Dr. House was going to stay for dinner.

It was a good thing, too, because in three minutes her favorite vampire friend Maddy, was going to come over and they were going to watch the new show about unusual food groups, including broiled armadillos and rice (followed immediately by "New car designs inspired when spotted wolf scorpions meet Japanese auto manufacturers"). Merry was excited, more so than when she read a detective story.

Therefore, everyone except the feral AOLers (whom they both continued to blog nightly) and a few not so fuzzy armadillos lived blissfully happy ever after.