*                            McPherson’s Folly*



Had we decided to pen this narrative so as to relate Dewey McPherson’s
sidewalk tirade verbatim, this story would have begun with a 2-page long
gushing torrent of sputtering “G-d(censored)s.”  The enormously
proportioned and crimson faced man made quite a spectacle of himself that
warm July afternoon as he spouted off 100-decibel curses while repeatedly
jumping up and down on a sidewalk in front of his Victorian-era mansion.
The ferocity of his exhibition so shocked on-lookers that they  half
expected the sidewalk to form undulating ripples radiating rapidly away
from the impact point.   The transfixed citizens had never beheld such a
sight and, with the exception of a few children who thought it delightfully
amusing, hoped to never witness such a performance again.  As Lionel
Goldwag, the town barber, would later describe the scene of the bouncing
bulk of implacable fury to his horrified wife later, “Imagine what a water
buffalo would look like if a hypnotist had just convinced it that it could
fly.”
                Although one would have thought that his family members
would have remained concealed within the house’s interior while daring to
do no more than cast frightened glances through the muslin curtains, his
petite wife Molly walked nonchalantly out the front door just as her
husband expelled his 27th consecutive “god(censored).”   (The following
morning, concerned neighbors left two Bibles and one Thesaurus at his front
door.)
                “How was work today, dear?” she asked, wiping her hands
casually on her gingham apron.
                Having exhausted his reservoir of soul-imperiling
expletives, Dewey raised his arm toward the roof and uttered a series of
guttural yawps that seemed to propagate through Molly’s salt-and pepper
tresses like storm gusts through a cornfield.
                Molly’s eyes followed her husband’s arm until they set upon
the upper eaves.  “Oh, yes, we thought you might have noticed that your
thingamajig has gone missing.”
                Dewey responded with a whimper of restrained fury that
caused two nearby Dachshunds to flee in a panic, which almost lifted their
dog walker Nicole Cotterell off her feet.
                Looking nonplussed, Molly replied, “Well, dear, Herbert,
the Code Enforcement officer happened by today and saw it on the roof.  He
knocked on the door and explained that you needed a permit for its
installation.   Now, because everyone in the house hates the damn thing,
none of us argued. In fact, Liam and Brian actually helped him remove it.”
                Dewey then bristled with rage: his feet scuffling back and
forth while his fists gyrated in synchronous rhythm with them.
                Molly continued. “If it makes you feel better, as soon as
it was on the ground, the children and I all danced around it.”
                A moment later Dewey regained a measure of his English
proficiency.  “Molly, me love, what have ye done with it?!”   Though
Dewey’s brogue had become adulterated by an American accent he developed
during the nearly three decades he had spent stateside, it always returned
full force under the strain of the intense agitation.
                Molly’s brogue, which sounded like the undercurrent harmony
of a well-tuned woodwinds, neither intensified nor diminished under any
emotion. “We put it in the shed, which is the second best place for it. We
would have put it in the best place had the devil been more cooperative.”
                “I’m going to fetch it and stick it back,” he said while
his eyes reddened with wrath and his right brow quickly ascended into his
mid forehead to form a nearly perfect inverted parabola.
                “Ah, yes, I thought ya might,” Molly said resignedly as she
watched her husband’s expansive frame hurry toward the back yard.  During
the moments preceding her husband’s return, Molly had time to both flash a
pleasant smile to the stunned on-lookers before they moved on and to check
the mail.  Only a bothersome flier about a hardware store sale.    She
started ripping the flier into strips when she caught sight of Dewey
bounding excitedly back with his prized possession  firmly in his arms.

“I have it.”

“So I see,” Molly sighed.

His manner was more serene due, perhaps, to the feel of his prized
possession against his chest.  Or, perhaps it was merely the tranquility
resulting from exertion-induced exhaustion.

“And I’m puttin’ it back.”

“Are ya, indeed.”

Dewey eyed his wife sternly while casting a furtive glance at the street.
“What are the chances that code officer will see it again?”

Molly shrugged. “Well, considering he lives three houses down the street,
the chances are slim.”

Dewey scoffed. “Curse and damn all code officers.  This thing here,” –and,
unless she was mistaken, Molly thought she saw her husband actually caress
it- “is the most beautiful thing on Earth.”

Molly then sniffed audibly and with an exaggerated motion, touched her
apron to her eye.  “Ye once said that about me.”

Dewey, who had just stepped on the ladder’s first rung, stopped.  “Eh?”

“That Saturday afternoon on Camden Street during our courtin’ days,” Molly
said, dabbing her perfectly dry eyes.  “Ya took my hand and said, ‘Molly,
you’re the most beautiful thing on Earth.’”

Looking a bit shame-faced, Dewey paused and then said, “I hadn’t seen much
of Earth back then,” before scaling up the ladder.     Tossing up her
hands, Molly moved toward the front door only to stop at the sound of her
husband’s shout.   “Hey! Come back!   I need your help.”

“I’m not going up there!”

“No,” he said, as we kept one hand on the object while summoning his wife
with the other.  “I need you to stand by the street and tell me how it
looks.”

“I can do that from here.”

“Just do it!”

“Is it straight?” Dewey asked once Molly reached the street

“I can’t tell.  The thing’s a contorted mes..”

“Does it look like it did before?” Dewey asked with a bite of impatience in
his voice.

“Unfortunately,” she murmured.

“What?!”

“Yes!” she said. “It looks exactly the same as it did before.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“Good reason for that.”

“You’ll grow to love it,” Dewey said happily as he fiddled with some
screws.

“My mother said the same thing just before our wedding.”

“Eh?!”

“Nothing. Are you almost done?”

“Just a minute.   I am securing it fast this time so it won’t be so easy
for any busy bodies to fetch it down.” After two more minutes and a few
more screw twists, Dewey smiled broadly for the first time since he last
put it up.

“Now,” he declared, placing one hand on the thing while raising the other
triumphantly.  “it’s in place and forever shall it remain!”

“Indeed,” she said morosely.

“Sorry you’re so off about it, but there it is,” he answered proudly. And
just before he took a step back to admire his handiwork, Dewey exclaimed.
“The price you pay for having married a geni….”

He landed 1.03 seconds later





“And to cheer you up, I’ll take out our four thickest photo albums to thumb
through this afternoon,” Molly said as Dewey, laid up in bed with his left
arm in a cast, stared straight ahead, his face contorted with anguish.
“Can I get you anything?”

Dewey seethed.  “What have you done with it?”

“Done with what, dearie?” she asked innocently.

“IT!”  he demanded.

“Oh, well, I think it is still on the ground in the same place where it
fell after you brought it down the ladder with you.    You had a hand on it
when you fell, you might remem…”

“Is it broken?”

“No way to tell.”

“I want it.”

“Later….”

“Now!”

“Perhaps you should nap fir…”

“Now!”

“Or, maybe we could cuddle and reminisce about our one good tim…”

“Now!!”

“It might be too heavy for me to bring up.”

“Have one of those reprobates help you!”

“Brian’s gone off to work and Liam is napping, I believe.”

“Wake him.”

“He’ll be grumpy.”

“Wake him!”

“I don’t know if I can handle being in the presence of a grumpy person, my
life having otherwise been so idyllic.”

“Molly….wake him now!”

“Honestly..”

“Now!”

Dewey did little more than seethe between the time when the exasperated
Molly strode hurriedly out of the room and the moment she returned in the
company of her bleary-eyed son.    ‘You needed me, Dad?”

‘Help your mother bring it up.”

‘Bring what up?”

“It!”

After exchanging fleeting glances with his mother, Liam nodded.  “Oh,
yeah…all right.  Um, where do  you want it?”

“Right there!” Dewey snapped, pointing at the floor next to his bed.

Seven minutes later, Dewey cocked his ear toward the door, beyond which he
heard the dulcet sounds of grunting, moaning and footfalls landed heavily
on the stairs.      After three more minutes, his son, and wife, faces
lustrous with perspiration, entered the room and with difficulty deposited
the coveted item on the very spot where Dewey had demanded it be placed.

‘Let me look at it,’ he said, pushing himself up into a recumbent
position.   ‘Ah, it looks undamaged, doesn’t it?” he said gleefully after a
few moments of close study.

“Liam’s vertebrae should realign themselves in a couple of months,” Molly
remarked. “Thank you for asking.”

‘Please don’t touch it,” Dewey cautioned, gesturing for them to step back.
“I’ll need it intact when I put it back.”

“Honestly,” Molly said despairingly, “ya surely can’t be thinking of
putting it back now, what with your arm in that condition.”

“You just let me worry about that, me dear.”

And, it must be now said that Molly did leave all the worrying to her
husband. She, for her part, silently hastened down to the kitchen and
grabbed a large aluminum bowl that had been hanging on the wall above the
stove: step one in making her famous Irish Whiskey Cake.    Its preparation
served as a meditative exercise, one in which she was always in need
following an agitating morning with her impossible husband.   Although she
didn’t know how many she had made recently –it was her 300th since the New
Year- she did know that the stirring, measuring, scooping, tasting and
baking served as a cooling balm to her tortured soul.    Apart from its
power to mitigate the asperities, that delectable confection also held the
family in good stead in the neighborhood.  In fact, it is not too much to
say Molly McPherson’s Irish Whisky cake –one part love, three parts
damnation- was the toast of the town.  Friends and neighbors would often
receive a few slabs wrapped in cellophane on Christmas Eve and Easter as
well as St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Independence Day,
Flag Day, Lammas, Hannukkah, Yom Kippur and a heaping surfeit on September
15th, the day after Molly’s wedding anniversary.

Meanwhile Dewey brooded upstairs.  He regarded the object both covetously
and anxiously.   Despite the opinions of his family and 99.67% of all
conscious people, he considered it exquisitely beautiful.   It was even
more beautiful than it had appeared when he had first noticed it on the
beach a couple of days earlier.  He had been standing at the shore enjoying
a quiet pipe when he felt something rub against his toes.  He looked down
and saw it there.  For all its loveliness, it might well have been a
scantily clad mermaid in desperate need of affection and conveniently
bereft of aesthetic sense.   With great difficulty, he lugged it back to
the car and swiftly spirited it back home where he placed it on display for
the entire world to admire.

At the present moment, it was poised on this bedroom floor and regarding
him plaintively, like a pouting mermaid denied the comfort of
intimacy.      He knew he had to act but, as his infernal wife reminded
him, he was not in the best condition for moving such weighty objects.

So, as we said, he brooded…and brooded…and strained his mind more than it
had ever been strained before.  Three minutes later, he hastily pushed his
feet to the floor and said, “I’ve  got it!’  Five minutes later, Dewey
became a contortionist:  his unbroken arm held up the bedroom window while
the beloved object rested on his knee and -unbeknownst to his doctor- the
cast of his broken arm.  The discomfort, though comparable to the most
exquisite posthumous torments generally reserved for the most wicked and
impenitent, were nevertheless tolerable because he was preparing to display
his prize to a world that be truly believed yearned to behold it.    He
even smiled in defiance of his pain as he prepared to perform a double loop
twist that would push the object out on the ledge.   The smile faded a bit
when the bedroom door opened.

             ‘Oh, ah, are, ah, you supposed to be doing that, Dad?’

The shock of this unexpected entrance, which happened to occur about a
microsecond before the double twist loop, caused the knee to drop, the
object to teeter precariously to the left, the window to slam down and
Dewey to spout off an exclamation which my Methodist upbringing prevents me
from recording.

‘You sound mad,’ Brian answered, nonplussed.

Admittedly, Dewey wasn’t particularly pleased when the object then crashed
onto his foot, causing him to yelp banshee-like while hopping frantically
away from the bed, only to fall head-first and heavily onto the hardwood
floor.



With his head swaddled in a thick bandage and his throbbing foot set in a
cast as burdensome as the one which enclosed his arm, Dewey cut a
particularly pathetic figure as he sat up in bed.   Despite the Emergency
Room physician’s explicit orders, Dewey refused to sleep.    Still he
brooded. At least the object remained in the spot where it had fallen and
his beloved wife had remained so curiously busy in the kitchen that she
wasn’t at his bedside being annoyingly solicitous.

After a couple agonizing hours, Dewey drifted off just long enough for his
unconscious mind, widely regarded as the secret genius in us all, to
provide a solution. His eyes opened and he almost felt the urge to jump up
gleefully, but considering the circumstances he refrained.  Despite the
late hour – the room was dark except for the three flashlights Dewey had
trained on the object- he picked up his cell phone and dialed.    After
three rings a tired voice answered, “Hello?”

“Father Malone?”

“It is,” the voice answered bewildered.

“Remember that confession?”

After a pregnant pause, Malone replied, “Dewey, if this is you, you’re
going to have to be a lot more specific.”

“I am referring to that confession you made to me that night at the Tipsy
Witch Tavern.”

After hearing an audible gulp, Dewey replied,  “Yeah, that’s the one.
Please see me at my place at the first crack of dawn.”



Father Malone, a sandy-haired fifty-something widely regarded as a
congenial soul whose face was almost always nearly luminous with
benevolence, glowered at Molly the next morning when she opened the
door.

“Oh, hello, Father,” Molly said happily while wiping an excess of flour off
her apron. “What brings you about?”

“Here to see Dewey.”

Molly’s tone brightened. “Oh, Last Rites, is it?  Right. I’ll bake another
cake.   He’s upstairs in his bedroom.”

Ordinarily, the sight of a battered man swaddled in bandages and confined
to bed would have drawn out the finest aspects of Father Malone’s
nature.     He would have promptly made inquiries about the fellow’s health
as well as ensuring that he was comfortable before offering to bring him
anything he needed to help facilitate his convalescence.       On that
morning, he merely stood transfixed on the threshold and seethed, “Dewey…”

Dewey, who had been gazing longingly at the object on his bedroom floor,
looked up at the turbulent priest and said, ‘Hello, Father.  I’m glad
you’ve come.  Here’s what I want you to do.”



As Father Malone struggled to bring the ladder from the shed to the side of
the house, he reflected on his time in the Seminary.  The long, laborious
process leading up to ordination seemed interminable to him at the time.
The copious reading, incessant writing, and Herculean efforts he made to
attain a command of the highly complex theology was, he knew, all going to
be worth it once he became an ordained priest.   Then, much to the secret
gratification of his ego, he would attain a position of both respect and
authority in his community.   Delivering inspiring sermons, listening with
compassion to confessions, and engaged in what he regarded as the most
sublime of all professions.   Moreover –and this was the true benefit-
there would be no heavy lifting.

“Right,” Dewey shouted down from the window as Father Malone placed the top
of the ladder beneath it. “Now, come up and help me put it in place.”

Because Dewey cautioned Malone to be discreet so as not to attract Molly’s
attention, the priest returned to the house, slammed the door, and bounded
upstairs, sounding very much like a pack of terrified bison.       He
wasn’t sure whether to be amused or incensed when he saw Dewey precariously
poised on one foot while leaning on the wall with his injured arm while
trying to lift the object with his other hand.    “I think I’ll need ya to
hoist it up by yourself, Father. Just squat down and lift with your knees.
It’s a heavy one and I would hate to have ya drop and crack it.”

After what he would always thereafter regard as the longest fifteen minute
span he ever experienced, Father Malone managed to place the object exactly
where Dewey had wanted it situated. The strain in his arm muscles as he
lifted and then maneuvered it out the window was almost as intolerable as
the strain of listening to Dewey saying, ‘a little to the left’ ‘no, not
there up…too high, a bit down.’  ‘wait, shift it a bit here,’  ‘it needs to
be a bit over th..no, too far!’  ‘Ye shoulders are shaking, ba gaw don’t
drop it.”

“Now,” Dewey finally said much to the priest’s relief, “let it go.”
                Once he was satisfied that it was in place, Dewey told
Malone to run down onto the lawn to make sure it looked straight.
While nursing his throbbing arms, Malone hastened down the stairs and out
the front door.    In what he assumed must have been a sign of divine
encouragement, he stumbled over two bibles and thesaurus en route to the
front lawn.     It was at the moment he stopped and looked up that he
realized he was not alone.    Adorned in sweat clothes and in the company
of a yapping little poodle, a diminutive, spectacled man of about sixty
approached.    His was a stern expression which did not soften one iota in
response to Father Malone’s ingratiating smile.

“What’s this, then?” the little man demanded looking up at the house.

“Oh, hell, it’s that code enforcement jerk Herbert,” Dewey muttered while
leaning out the window.

“Is there a problem?” Malone asked softly.

“You bet your pants there’s a problem,” Herbert answered in a funny little
voice. “He can’t have that thing up there.  It’s a violation.”

“My thoughts precisely,” Father Malone murmured.

“YOU,” the code officer shouted, pointing a quivering finger up at Dewey,
“remove that monstrous eyesore at once and be quick about it!”

“NO!” Dewey snapped, leaning out the window as much as his infirmities
allowed. “Unlike you, it’s beautiful and everybody wants to see it!”

“Hold Cerberus,” Herbert said to Father Malone as he passed the poodle’s
leash to the flummoxed priest.  In one swift move, the officer whipped out
a pad from his back pocket while striding swiftly toward the house.  He
stopped under the ladder.  “Dewey,” he said, shaking the pad up in his
direction, “I gave a warning the last time because of your wife, but now,
by God, I could write as many zeroes on this pad as I want.”  Herbert
pulled a pen from the top of the pad and yielded it menacingly above him so
as to convince Dewey of his earnestness.

Dewey swatted at him. “BEAT IT!”

“Three zeroes is it?!”

“It’s me house, Herbert and I’ll do what I want!”

“Four zeroes!”

“You see that priest, there,” Dewey said. “You’re interferrin’ with the
Lord’s work. Now, scram!”

“Ten zeroes!”

At this point, Father Malone, remembering that peace facilitation was an
aspect of his profession, moved forward and, despite Cerberus’ reluctance
to join the fray, walked up next to Herbert.     “Dewey,” Malone said as
gently as he could while still being audible to the many at the top of the
ladder. “maybe you should take it down.  It’s not worth the trouble.”

Face reddened, Dewey pushed himself out of the window even farther and
proclaimed. “This thing is never coming down.  You can damn me to hell,
Herbert can write zeroes until his wrist snaps, and the world can rail
against me like an assailing tempest, but this exquisite work of Godcraft
will stay here until the world implodes and showers of embers rain down
from the decaying heavens.  Furthermore,” he said, jutting himself out even
farther, “if anyone dares to lay one blessed finger on this I shall…”

It was fortunate for Dewey that he then tumbled out the window and as he
descended scrapped against every rung of the ladder because he hadn’t been
quite sure how to end that sentence.  Such was the speed of his descent
that neither Father Malone nor Herbert was able to jump out of the way
before he landed.

Apart from agonizing moans, nobody in that collapsed pile of three said
much as they all laid there in a heap for an entire minute.   Had they
managed to only lay there for half a minute they might have avoided being
pummeled by the object which had at first teetered on its perch before
plummeting inexorably down to the ground.





A FEW CENTURIES EARLIER….



And there he was, in precisely the spot where Macowell had expected to see
him.  An apparition-like figure whose lanky form was cast in an interplay
of shadow and candlelight, he sat alone in the tavern’s most tenebrous
corner.     His appearance was in stark contrast to the rest of the
flame-lamp interior, which bustled with all manner of cloaked figures, both
human and otherwise.   As Macowell maneuvered his way carefully through the
crowds, he caught the eye of his favorite serving girl Ottilie.  He nodded
his head toward the corner and she winked and smiled in response.

“My pardon,” Macowell then said apologetically after bumping into a burly
blacksmith who snorted disdainfully but made nothing else of it.     Within
a few hasty moments, Macowell reached his destination and bowed.   The
venerable, white-haired centenarian, who had been quietly nursing a pipe,
arched an eyebrow in response to Macowell’s approach.    After exhaling a
dissipating cloud of smoke, the elderly man said, “I presume you wish to be
seated.”

“If I may…”

He waved his hand toward the other end of his small table. “By all means.”

“Busy night,” Macowell said as he moved toward the seat.

“Naturally, what with it being solstice eve.”

“Of course.  Well, then, my old friend, how ar..ow!” Macowell looked down
at the object on which he had stubbed his toes.  “What is that?”

“My latest bane,” his companion answered tiredly.

“It looks, well, actually I can’t quite describe it.”

“Nobody can describe it, my friend,” he said through another smoky cloud
“as an ineffability spell has been placed on it.”

“Ah, your own, then Gwydion?”

The old man snorted. “I hope you would hardly expect me to devise something
so unwieldy and amateurish.”

Macowell hesitated.  “Pryderi?”

Gwydion sighed slowly, but said nothing.

“Your apprentice is, well, um, creative, is he not?”

The older wizard remained silent for at that moment Ottilie arrived.
Entranced by her plump, youthful and comely face, Macowell looked longingly
at her for a few moments before requesting his usual honey mead.   Even as
she left to fetch the drink, he found himself pleasantly distracted.

“My apprentice,” Gwydion said with a cough so as to draw Macowell back into
the conversation, “is an ass and, I rather suspect, will soon become the
laughingstock of the entire guild.”  Gwydion cast a furtive glance at a
distant table where Siwon and his infernally merry clan had just recently
been laughing uproariously while looking askance at the object next to
Gwydion.  That it could have commanded even a second of their attention was
telling for it is well known that elven folk were so overfilled with
self-affairs they hardly paid humans any notice, even during their
pleasantly infrequent gatherings at the tavern.      While Gwydion tried
not to notice the pointy-eared shadows of Siwon’s gleeful family rocking
back and forth against the ember-tinted wall, Macowell asked, “So, what
does this thing do?”

After a brief pause, Gwydion replied, “It possesses the first person to
come into contact with it.   Under its influence, the one it possesses
loses sovereignty over his own soul while his body sustains a rapid series
of humiliating and ultimately fatal injuries.”

“Oh, damn,” Macowell said, backing instinctively away from it.  “I knocked
against it just now.”

Gwydion waved his hand dismissively toward his friend. “Not to worry.
Pryderi fixed it so that it affects only the Irish, not us Welsh.”

“The Irish?” Macowell said darkly.  “Hmm…so I gather things didn’t work out
with Pryderi and Aoibheen?”

“Hardly surprising.  A Donegal witch of her caliber and a frivolous young
wizard apprentice eager to impress.  Doomed to failure.  Oh, my pardon,”
Gwydion said while moving his arms off the table so that Ottilee, who had
returned at that moment, could set down the mead.    “Yes, well, and love
is a troublesome matter in the best of circumstances.”

“No plague blacker,” Macowell affirmed with a smile, as he swiftly kissed
the blushing girl’s hand before she hurried away into the crowd.  He looked
back at Gwydion.  “Perhaps he should have tried a small possessive object,
say a cup, dish or ring.”

Gwydion pulled the pipe from his smirking lips. “Cursed ring.  That will be
the day.”

“Can’t you just cast a negating counterspell?”

“No,” the wizard said miserably.  “Pryderi has been under my employ for
more than 30 moon cycles and by dictate cannot be counteracted without his
permission.”

Macowell drew gratefully from the mead before saying  “Counter spell it,
anyway.”

“And contend with a summons before the Synod?  More than my life’s worth.”

“Well, the Synod demands that every such object must have its own
negation.    If Pryderi neglected that, you may destroy it.”

“He’s not quite that green.   The spell can be broken.”

“How?”

Gwydion laughed lightly but mirthlessly.  “The object must fall on the one
it possesses, a government official and a clergyman at the same time.   Him
and his inane ideas.”

Macowell spit out the mead.  “Heavens, so essentially it’s permanent.”

“Afraid so,” the old wizard lamented drawing in a deep breath.  “and all I
was able to do was confiscate it.”

The two wizards sat in silence for a few moments while surveying the tavern
around them. The merriment seemed to increase with every passing moment, as
one would expect it to with the approach of mid-eve.     It was when a
boisterous troop of sailors crashed through the front door that Macowell
spoke again.

“Hey, look,” he said, while one conveniently ghastly mariner blew a kiss at
the unimpressed Ottilee, “we’re not far from the sea.   Let’s take it now,
you and I.   We’ll toss it into the briny deep.”

“It’s magical.  It will float.”

Macowell finished his mead and hurriedly wiped his mouth. “Yes, I realize
that.   However, we can cast some meandering spells on it so that it
remains at sea for quite a long time.”

“Spells that will slowly diminish in potency after our deaths.”

“Perhaps.  But, by that time it will be far out in the ocean and what with
the westward currents, it will eventually wind up in Asia where, I suspect,
there are precious few Irish people.”

Though initially skeptical, Gwydion’s face suddenly brightened.    He drew
the pipe again from his mouth and for the first time looked down at the
object without dread.    “Perhaps that might work.”

“Oh, I know it will.  Come,” Macowell said while drawing a wand from his
cloak, “let’s dispose of this matter at once and enjoy the rest of the
solstice in peace.”

Gwydion required just a moment to rise from his table and withdraw his own
wand.   Together, they levitated it above the tavern floor and floated it
toward the entrance, much to the obnoxiously loud delight of the elves and
other on-lookers.    Both wizards maintained a stoic calm as they moved
through the amused, but wary sailors before escaping the tavern’s interior.

The brisk salt air redolent of wildflowers served both to calm and enliven
them.   It would be child’s play, indeed, to cast this cumbersome piece of
silly black magic to the waves where it would never trouble, let alone
possess, a single soul.  And, it must be said, that despite its myriad
troubles, the world is much the safer and sweeter due to the machinations
of benevolent wizards.