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  We were cacking ourselves massively. No wonder she’s so totally loopy, but those hairs in her mouth . . . EEWWW!

  Jared had NIGHTMARES about it for ages. He kept seeing the long grey strands of hair coming to life and growing out of control. They’d twist and stretch and then suddenly come s h o o t i n g o u t from her wrinkled, yellowing face at the SPEED OF LIGHT. They’d begin to wrap themselves around his throat, tighter and tighter until all of his zits popped like a thousand tiny volcanoes erupting and spewing their yellowy lava puss into the air, EXPLODING like fireworks and squirting all about the room.

  Every day as we passed by her shack a shiver ran up my spine and we both just about hurled veggie chunks as she spat her dribble through the air, all the while sucking on those ‘OLD GREY STRAWS’ like she was having a drink and sucking up her own phlegm.

  Yep . . . living in Agnath is like living in the Dust Bowl University of Useless Information, Blowflies and Old Goats. And I’m not talking about my Aunty and Uncle’s goat farm.

  One time, me and Jared were camping out in the back paddock at his place for the weekend. So we decided to jump onto our bikes in the middle of the night and head out to the town limit to do a little ‘art work’. We thought the Agnath town sign needed a little ‘make-over’. It took over a month before anyone even realised that instead of . . .

  ‘Agnath – GOLD DIGGING IN THE MUD’ it said;

  ‘Agnath – GOATS DRINKING IN A PUB’.

  Yep, ever since we’d moved to our ‘CRAP SHACK’ in the country, I had to make my own entertainment to try and stay SANE. And ever since Dad went out to the old shed and just disappeared off the face of the planet I had to be “the man of the house” and “far more responsible”.

  Yeah righto mum, WHATEVER!

  For me and Jared it was worse than for the other kids though. In the city there were always a zillion and one things to do, all the other kids around here are ‘YOKEL’ locals. They get excited when they see a cow with more than two spots.

  The most exciting thing to happen around here is the annual ‘Day Of Rural Kindness & Support’ held every Easter. D.O.R.K.S. for short.

  This is the biggest social event of the year in Agnath and talk about thrilling! BULL!

  All the farmers come into town with their families and the townspeople all frock up in their best tracky-daks and t-shirts. Everyone heads down to the creek where a paddock has been mowed just for the big event. Then the adults all sit around on hay bales at the bar, also made of hay bales, drinking and discussing the exciting world of animal parasites and drenching.

  The way some of the kids around here are scratching all the time, mum reckons that most of them could do with a damn good drenching as well.

  About the only difference to any other day is that the guys have all got clean singlets on. So it takes just a little bit longer for the blowflies to gather around their heads, but not too much longer.

  The kids are either sitting around chewing on grass and trying to count their fingers, or they’re trying to take off around the back of the dunnies to sneak a half can of beer that they’ve just nicked from a table when no-one was looking.

  And just like all the great big fantastic fairs that I’ve been to in the city, there’s WICKED spinning rides that make you want to throw-up, heaps of AWESOME GAMES to play and win HUGE prizes and loads and loads of extra special lollies and disgusting, sugary food to pig out on . . . NOT!

  This is Agnath. So the only ‘fun spinning ride’ that there is, is to climb onto the back of the old faded red fire tanker that’s just about rusted through and hold on for DEAR LIFE while one of the ‘older’ kids takes everyone for a spin around ‘SUICIDE PADDOCK’.

  It’s called SUICIDE PADDOCK because it’s actually the old town garbage tip that’s been covered over by a couple of handfuls of dirt. So every now and then a HUGE gaping HOLE just opens up and swallows WHOEVER, or WHATEVER, happens to be on top of it at the time.

  Booga Boris reckons his cousin was driving a ride-on mower, getting the paddock ready one year, when a humongous hole just suddenly opened up, sucked him down and closed over again in an INSTANT. He was swallowed, mower and all. No-one ever found even a sign of where it happened, he was just gone, but Jared reckons he overheard his mum talking to Booga’s mum and they said something about “Eight years in prison orta sort him out.”

  WHEEZY REESE told us that his parents reckon that’s where all the kids are ‘DROPPED OFF’. If they’re ‘good’ then they’re safe, if they’re ‘naughty’ they get swallowed, never to be seen or heard from ever again. ooohhhh SPOOKY. WHEEZY'S such an idiot!

  Anyhow . . . the only games that happen at the D.O.R.K.S. fair are ‘WHO'S DOG CAN JUMP THE HIGHEST’, ‘BEST DRESSED COW POOP’ and ‘TOSS THE PET’. Actually it’s ‘BEST DRESSED PET’ and ‘TOSS THE COW POOP’, but I reckon my way would definitely be WAAYYY more fun! I tried to suggest it but no-one thinks I’m serious.

  I reckon I could toss Fluff Butt, at least a hundred metres or so. All that hair would act as a sail.

  Fluff Butt DID win her section in the ‘DOG HIGH JUMP’ though. I WAS SO PEEVED OFF!

  TOFFEE THOMAS had been going on and on at school for weeks about the incredibly amazing mega awesome prizes. He reckoned the dog’s owner of each section was gonna get a huge bag of really yummy stuff that we couldn’t get anywhere around here, so I begged Mum to let me enter Fluff Butt, then I spent every spare second trying to teach the STUPID MUTT to jump. Every day, morning, afternoon and night, I pleaded with her, yelled, PULLED, pushed and then just two days before the festival I finally found something to make her jump . . . my secret stash of biccies. Yep, the only decent biccies in our house that aren’t made of ‘bird-seed’ or ‘good for you’. The only ones that I actually like. So of course from then on Fluff Butt would sit on her hairy backside until I gave her one of my biccies, then she’d jump once and sit back down again. . . it was SOOO painful. I even tried to save a few biccies for myself by breaking hers in half, but then she wouldn’t budge an inch until I gave her the other half. . . STUPID DOG.

  I figured it would all be worth it though. I could just imagine rolling about in first prize . . . delicious choccies, sugar-coated lollies, chocolate-coated sugar, sugar-coated chocolate and heaps of other disgustingly delicious stuff that I was not going to share with anyone else, not ANYONE!

  After all I did have to train Fluff Butt all by MYSELF!

  On the big day, when it came to her turn to jump, she just sat there like a BIG, WHITE, HAIRY beanbag, so I took out the last three of my favourite biscuits and got her to jump. . . three times. It was actually pretty cool.

  She won so easily . . . and they gave me a huge bag of really yummy stuff that you couldn’t buy anywhere around Agnath . . . a really huge bag of really yummy DOGGY TREATS!

  Oh CRUD! I was NOT amused.

  Anyway I figured that the whole ‘DORKS’ fair is so totally crappy that surely they’d at least have some good stuff like fairy floss, toffee apples, Pluto Pups and heaps of other teeth-rotting, gut-melting, diarrhoea-dumping, sugary, sweet stuff and other yummy foods, because everyone knows that’s what fairs are all about. . . right?

  Wrong again!

  This town’s version of ‘special food’ is the latest great recipe invention concocted by the locals. You know, brilliant stuff like ‘CHOCOLATE DIPPED GOATS BRAIN ON A STICK’ . . . ‘EYEBALLS ROLLED IN HONEY AND CRUSHED COCONUT’ . . . ‘COW KIDNEY ICE CREAM’ served in fresh goat hooves . . . mm mm mmmm!

  Yeah, I reckon they’re just 'SIMPLY HORRIBLE ICKY TRASH' . . . or ‘S.H.I.#’ for short.

  And they actually eat this stuff!!

  Ruley truely!

  IT'S DISGUSTING!

  All the kids around here reckon it’s fantastic. Crabby reckons the ice cream is a bit ‘chewy’, but the kidneys give it a nice pink colour.

  These guys are SOOO weird.

  Of course this wonderfully exciting fair is held over Easter. So they find the local tha
t’s had far too much to drink and then dress him up in a pink bunny suit that’s three sizes too big . . . and by the smell of it, it’s never been washed. He then runs around the paddock and tosses little choccie eggs into the long grass for all the kids to find.

  WOW, how great is that . . . a big pink grubby bunny with really bad yellowing ‘BO’ stains under his furry armpits, stumbling about and tossing little chocolate eggs into a paddock full of cows. Cows with that same, long grass going in one end and leaving out the other, still sort of green but a whole lot mooshier and warm, so fresh that the steam is still rising from the new ‘parcels’ all over the ground. With the kids all running along behind the gross, stinky ‘bunny’ and diving face-first into the long grass to make certain that they get their share of the eggs. Then to make sure that no-one tries to nick their eggs, they shove them straight into their mouths with light-ning speed. Me and Jared have seen a couple of the little kids with STEAM coming out of their mouth and we know what that’s from. . . EEWWWWW!

  Yeah, so me and Jared decided to give that little game the flick too.

  But, the main attraction for the day, the one thing that all the locals have been talking about for months, the one thing that they look forward to more than anything else in this entire ‘waste-land’ . . . is the ‘COW POOPING COMPETITION’.

  Yes you heard it right!

  As if they didn’t have enough to do with cow poop already. I reckon they should change the name of the fair from ‘Day Of Rural Kindness & Support’, D.O.R.K.S. to ‘Cows’ Really Awesome Poop’, C.R.A.P.

  I reckon if one of the locals could find a way to dry it and wear it, they would.

  But anyway back to the competition. One poor cow is specially chosen, apparently it’s a very high honour to have your cow picked for the big event. Then it’s fed ‘extra special’ food the day before the fair to cause it to ‘block-up’ so that it poops big and solid on the ‘BIG DAY’. At the fair, an area about the size of a basketball court is fenced off and grid lines are painted across the grass to form squares about forty centimetres by forty centimetres. Then each square is numbered so that the locals can bet on where the cow’s very first steaming ‘dump’ of the day will land.

  On the morning of the fair the cow is led into the fenced-off area and right there with everyone watching it closely, the cow is expected to poop. This can take all day . . . but let’s face it, if you had that many people watching you try to go to the bathroom, you’d probably hold it in too. When the cow finally does drop its steamy load, everyone gets all excited as they wait to hear the final results . . . BUT . . . if the great dump of dung even touches a grid line, which it nearly always does, then the judge has to get down onto his hands and knees to scoop every little bit of it up out of the grass from each of the squares that it’s landed in.

  First the judge uses a silver spoon to collect all the poop inside each square, into a bucket labelled with the square’s number. The assistant judge then checks the grass patch closely to be certain that no poop has been left behind. He then stays right behind the official judge to make sure that the buckets aren’t ‘TAMPERED’ with. But before the weigh-in can happen the assistant judge has one more, very important job to do . . . the very close inspection of ‘the steamer’ in each bucket. Yep . . . to make sure there are no rocks, or other ‘STUFF’ in there, causing it to weigh more than it really should. With everyone watching closely the assistant judge breaks apart the dung and mooshes each little bit between his fingers before returning it to the bucket. And he’s not allowed to wear gloves either, that way he can’t hide stones or anything else in there to sneak extra weight into the dung.

  Booga told us how someone had been cheat-ing for years by sneaking into the paddock and sprinkling gravel in the grass of their square. That way if there was any dung dropped there it would stick to the gravel which then added more weight to their dung pile. It was finally figured out when one year it was a ‘liner’ and the judge weighed each amount. Even though there was obviously way less dung in one square than the other, it was heavier. TOFFEE'S dad reckoned it was a complete coincidence that there was not one tiny bit of gravel anywhere else on the field, only in his square. What a LOSER!

  Anyway, so since that year, they now rake the field before the cow goes in and the official assistant judge inspects every tiny bit of dung. The judge then carefully weighs the amount that he’s gathered from each of the squares to find the winner.

  WOW . . . talk about EXCITING, it just doesn’t get any more thrilling than that.

  Apparently a couple of years ago though, there was a HUGE scandal in Agnath. Someone actually snuck in another cow’s poop and dropped it onto their own square to win the prize money.

  What I can’t work out is how anyone could have figured out that it was another cows manure. Even worse, why would anyone want to look at it THAT closely!?

  Around here they reckon a good farmer knows which cow does which poop. It’s so they can inspect it for bugs, worms and every other type of disgusting parasite there is. RATTY HARRY reckons he’s nearly as good as his dad at identify-ing whose poop is whose . . . I’m pretty sure he means ‘the cows’.

  They go out and collect the manure while it’s still fresh and warm. Then the first thing they do is to roll it around between their hands checking it for texture and softness, then they start sniff-ing it for stomach gases and other gross stuff. Finally they take it apart, bit by bit, to closely inspect the whole lot and work out exactly what the cow has been eating and how digested it is, picking out any worms and bugs that they might find along the way.

  WOW! The dorks’ fair . . . I mean, the D.O.R.K.S fair, sure is exciting!

  At least Jared’s got five brothers, talk about lucky. They all look the same though, skinny, tall, 29 red hair and zillions of freckles. If you lined them all up they’d look a row of ‘Pluto Pups’ that happened to be standing around when a bottle of tomato sauce exploded.

  Most of Jared’s freckles are actually zits though.

  I reckon we could use his face as a DEADLY WEAPON. Like in those really, really OLD WAR movies that Granddad watches. Jared could be the machine gun and I could aim him. We could shoot his deadly puss bullets at the girls as they’re leaving the school dunnies . . . WICKED!

  But I’ve only got my snotty nosed little sister, Miss ‘I’m sooo perfect’ Yelly Melly.

  She’s SOOO PERFECT! Just ask my Mum, she’s always boasting to everyone; Melly’s hair . . . PERFECT, her eyes . . . PERFECT, skin . . . PERFECT manners . . . PERFECT really, really, really annoying snot bucket . . . PERFECT

  She’s perfect blah blah blah blah blah . . . aaahhhhh!!

  Actually she’s a perfect pain in the . . . well you know what I mean.

  Mum’s always ranting and raving and going on and on at me . . .

  “Set a good example for your sister Sam, you’re older than her.”

  “Show her how to wipe her bottom without her fingers going through the soggy paper, you’re older than her.”

  “Show her how to blow her nose without her fingers getting stuck up there, you’re older than her.”

  I’d really like to show her how to go and annoy someone else for a change!

  I don’t see why she can’t just use her sleeve to wipe her runny nose like everyone else?! Here I am trying to do the right thing for the environment, you know . . . REDUCE – REUSE – RECYCLE.

  REDUCE . . . the amount of trees being cut down and being made into tissues.

  REUSE . . . sleeves. Because there’s room for at least fifteen good snot blows on each one, and . . .

  RECYCLE . . . yeah, recycle the hundreds of soggy, snotty tissues by scrunching them up to use as ammunition for a game of ‘snot splatt’ at school.

  Jared and me made this wicked catapult that can fling a ‘soggy snotty’ for miles, but for some reason, mum just doesn’t want us to recycle the used tissues and be environmentally responsible.

  But it doesn’t seem to matter what I do, I end
up getting into a heap of trouble even when I do try to teach Smelly Melly the right thing. Like when I taught little Miss ‘annoyingly perfect’ Melly Poopy Pants NOT to draw on the walls with crayons, mum yelled at me! She reckoned that somehow it was my fault that Melly Dopey Daks went and used textas all over the walls instead. And like the time I taught her that whenever we go out you should always turn off the switches to save electricity. So how come I was the one that got into trouble when we had to throw out all of the food from the fridge and freezer because Jelly Belly Melly had turned all the switches off.

  What a major stink-o-rama that was!

  We’d been away at Gran’s for a week and when we got back, PEE-EWW!!! You could smell it all the way from the letterbox. At first Mum thought our new inside dunny had exploded and erupted all over the place like some great sewage volcano!

  But it was far WORSE.

  You should have seen it. Puddles of flavoured ice cream mixed in with the blood of thawed out meat to create swirling rainbows of creamy colour. Chicken and corn soup swam amongst soggy nuggets, and chips flowed all the way across the kitchen floor and headed down the hallway in a river of spaghetti and spicy casseroles. Warm jam, liquid butter, rotten eggs and soured milk were throwing a party all over the place and everything in the fridge was invited. And absolutely everything was covered in a carpet of greenish grey cobwebs of fungussy mould. It was totally disgusting. It looked as if a Tyrannosaurus Rex had come along, lifted up the roof, chucked-up massively throughout our entire house and then replaced the roof and left. It took all night and the next two days to clean up the gross mess and I was holding back from chundering the whole time. But of course, as usual it was somehow all my fault.

  I’m just glad Miss Prissy Perfect Melly isn’t going to school for a few years yet. I’ll never be able to get away from her then. Jared has to put up with two of his older brothers at school, the twins DUFAS and DORKY. They’re always acting like JERKS and try to make it look like they’re smarter than us.