A Story of Hope

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You awaken to find yourself stranded on a deserted island with nothing but a pocket knife, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and Britney Spears. How did you get there, and what do you do now?
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After I open the whiskey bottle, and throw away the stopper, I share it with a bald girl who has accompanied me on the beach. After some time, I mistakenly think the emptied J. Daniels bottle is a glass slipper, and try all the rest of the day to squeeze the bald girl's foot into it. But since the Cinderella metaphor will not prove sustainable throughout this story, I swing into action and look for water.

Wow! There is a whole ocean of it. So, I drink some sea water, until I fall asleep on some driftwood. I awake occasionally but the bald girl is missing, as my last thoughts are of serious sickness; and as the night falls thick and moonless, the only sound I hear is the death groans of my spastic colon.

I dream strange things, like petting a horse as we lounge on a divan. At some time in the night, I awake shivering. Through thick fog of half-waking, I barely make out shapes, but the bald girl comes over to me. She is holding a small knife, a pocketknife, favoring her foot.

She says, "Hi, I'm Brit'ney... Britney Spears." In her other hand is a gutted raccoon, half-skinned, dripping blood on the sand. "We're stranded here," said the bald girl, "for at least a day. Are you my GBM?"

"Hello, again. Huh? Oh, sorry earlier about the glass slipper game," I say back. "Are we stranded here, you say?"

She is still standing over me, "Is the party over?" I ask. She says the party is long over, and something about a bridge. Then I begin again throwing up, heaving and roiling my own huge ocean of liquids, all over the sand.

Brit'ney stands by the whole hour I am sick. She crouches close by and watches me intently. After spasms subside, "I must have passed out," I said. I didn't want to mention I didn't know her from Adam, "Errr, Brit'ney, is it?"

"Yeah, that's right, and you had too much, and I wasn't much help, I was keeping up with you, though" she was condescending, then distracted. "You want some raccoon to eat?" she asked.

I begin dry heaving, "Excuse me a moment." I get up and stumble to a large palm tree to pee behind. I kept looking over my shoulder. My molars begin to float in my jaw, and my eyes rolled up to the sky, as I lean against the big trunk. "Where the hell am I?" ask I myself.

I return to the cozy fire Brit'ney had built. She has removed her wet evening clothes, and has wrapped herself with raccoon skins. She is nude from waist up. "Wow, she still has a semi-pubescent body," think I to myself.

However, I divert my eyes, so as to not be rude, and see off to the side is a pile of dead animals gutted and in various stages of rendering. "Wow, this young woman is a hell-uv-a hunter, and butcher!" I notice there are green alligators and long-necked geese; some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees; some cats and rats and elephants, there is even a unicorn.

I sit by the campfire, and ask half-clad Brit'ney, "When did you, errr, kill all those creatures?" keeping my eyes above shoulders, so as not to seem overly interested in her nudity. Her bald pate was bleeding a little, but she continues silently pealing back skin off a lifeless a brown bear carcass.

"Do you know you are covered in those animals's blood, ...and are you bleeding as well?" I asked. She stood up and held the small pocket knife downward in her right hand. I tried my best to stay focused on her clavicles up. Her appearance is very strange: blood of the animals is dripping from the hand and knife.

"This is my blood," here she says, and points to her scalp. "Do you want some unicorn meat?" and she pointed to a skewer in the fire with a large animal leg is speared. "I am after all Brit'ney Spears, remember? I'm feeling better now. Have you ever been married? I have been, and have children. You have been in my mind for awhile, even when I was married. I sure wish I knew then what I know now! Did you know next Thursday is Valentines Day..."

She wasn't making much sense. "You have thought about me?"

"I can't say I thought, but I never forget a familiar..." she doesn't finish her sentence.

She stands there staring, maybe daydreaming. I direct my attention elsewhere, and I spy the tripe of the animals, guts strewn about close to where the water meets the sand, they begin to drift with the tide. "Miss, did you chase down all these animals yourself, with just that pocket knife?"

She still doesn't answer. I feel a very sharp pain in my limbs, arms and legs all at once. Then I swoon as before. Again I fall to the sand, I begin to shiver uncontrollably. I feel very cold, and my ability to move is hampered. Then I feel a tugging at my back side jacket and pants, pulling me away from the warmth of the fire.

I ask weakly "Are we going to get off this island?" as I lose conciousness once again. This time I dream of two empty houses, and children running about in neighboring yards. I am caught in spernatural spider webs, and can't move to free myself.

Later in the evening I awake to Brit'ney singing: "More kinds of animals than you've ever seen. They'd run around free while the Earth was being born, And the loveliest of all was the unicorn..."

"You've been knocked out for over three hours," she said. "I had some help from MR. I, and my PET. We had decided to segregate the fibers..." I listen but I don't understand a single word.

"And they are building a bridge of survival beyond the jungle." says Brit'ney. Then she sprints off, in the direction of the heavy jungle underbrush, and is out of sight as quickly as an impala.

"Who they?" too slow ask I, on the other hand, lying helpless, being tugged ever closer to the tripe at the water's edge. As I slide across the sand my clothes are sucked right off my body.

My finger tips are bleeding, and my shoulders ache. I gasp, then I notice tips of my toes also are bleeding. I have burns and pock marks all over my body, front and back. I am being attacked but I cannot move any of my limbs to see what it is. If I try it feels like I am in twice regular gravity, in slow motion, makes me helpless to defend myself.
Then in a great suction as if from a whirlwind, I am pulled from the beach, into a whirlstorm, and down the neck of a beaker that I thought was a Jack Daniels bottle, after I thought it was a glass slipper! I scream, but no sound comes from my mouth... "Brit'ney! Help!"

There is a voice somewhere afar echoing from behind the dawning horizon, "Do you think you have it all?" It must be the companions Brit'ney spoke about, who are building a bridge.... Then there is nothing at all --

sssssllluuuurrrrrrpppp; thwummmpp! flabadee flabadee bloink plink...blip^..............blip~~~~~~~~...............______________fffffft

"Nurse, get this down to the lab, please, stat!"

The nurse detachs the glass bottle marked [GBM / Dr. J. Daniels / Spears] and holds up the GBM tissue remains to the light, for all to see. "There's the bad guy!" exclaims the surgeon, Dr. Daniels.

"Good-bye old man," the nurse bids farewell to the gelatinous substance in the bottle. Then she passes it through the revolving door to the outside in a hermetic sealed vaccuum bag. "Patient is 120 over 90."

"Yes, I think it is all gone. I think we got it all. Show me the fMRI, please," says the surgeon. "Suction, please."

He puts down the blood-stained scalpel, and peers again into the photonic viewer of the Da Vinci S Surgical Robot comparing benchmarks deep in the brain of Britney.

"That was an abnormally large mass of tissue to be benign," said the student surgeon. "It looks like it multiplied in an uncontrolled manner."

"Yes, her immune system recognized these mutant cells and destroyed them, for a long time," said the surgeon. "I would say it might have been only weeks before the breakdown of her immune system. After it craters, lack of defenses would've allowed spreading and more likely malignancy."

"So you think her pregnancies delayed these abnormal cells; and we couldn't see them? We ceased scanning, but afterward they multiplied rapidly?" asked another attending understudy.

"Yes, exactly," answered the surgeon, "it got past the PET and we found it in the fMRI."
"As you know, tumors attempt to grow in all persons, but it is the failure of one's immune system which allows mutant cells to grow, and allows a tumor to form," adds Dr. Daniels.

"Someday we will be able to, but today there is no way to prevent tumors, because we surgeons and researchers really don't know what causes them to arise," replies the senior attending surgeon.

"Did you know Liz Taylor at 65 years old survived removal of a benign meningioma?" said Dr. Daniels. "Yep, eleven years ago this same month, 1997. Uncanny, isn't it?"

"Happy Valentines' Day, Brit'ney," whispered Dr. Jack Daniels.