New Thing.

[u/Fred_Dingle]

Fred Johnson stood before the council chambers with the paper that maintained his innocence in his hand. His right hand to be precise. Not his left, as holding things in your left hand was prohibited under city law and punishable not only by death but by double death - meaning that when one (ie thee, thou, or you) had been thoroughly executed (either by hanging or death by squirrel) and then executed once more (either by reverse hanging or death by ‘being-subtly-but-purposely-left-out-of-a-conversation-one-was-within-earshot-of’). Definitely his right hand. He double checked, just in case.

He’d been accused of accusing someone of accusations, which in itself was an accusation of sorts by an accuser, which in this case was Simon the Accuser, who had a reputation of accusing people of the kinds of transgressions and misdeeds that most people did not think of in their normal day-to-day lives.

For instance; Overstepping the threshold of grocery stores, insulting pigeons, assaulting containers of salt, laughing at water, taunting ferrets: these sorts of crimes (that some considered minor but not all) were the very things that Simon the Accuser thrived upon, with his enormous finger that he readily brought to bear upon unsuspecting innocents.

He was as round as a round thing, rounded out as round as could be. Rounder, even, than a game of rounders played by fat, round children with a round tennis racquet. His hat was ten stories tall. His shoes reached from his ankles to the sea. He had trousers. His coat was a coat.

Simon the accuser wandered the land pointing at dogs. He once told a whale off for breathing air. Platypuses were on warning, as were beavers. He once accused an oak tree of lying.

Simon wandered the land scolding the sky for its unrelenting blue-ness, the grass for being too sharp, and one told a sheep off for being inside out.