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The Summer I Grofulated, or, Verbal Abuse

by William Kitcher and Marvin Freeman

I don’t like this new document-creating program that was included when I bought a new computer and software. It has this weird ‘verb check’ feature that keeps changing the verb I use if it’s particularly good.

For instance, I wanted to tell you about my summer with Annie when I grofulated. You see? Right there. That verb beginning with the letter ‘g’ was not the verb I actually wrote down. And I can’t even type out that word because the ‘verb check’ then changes it to something else.

I’ll show you. I will try to write that verb beginning with the letter ‘g’.

It was during the summer I twimmled. You see? Hopeless.

I looked both words up on the intertubes. Under ‘grofulate’, it’s defined as ‘twimmle’. Under ‘twimmle’, it says, ‘grofulate’. It was actually vice versa, as you can imagine from my current difficulties, but you get the point. No matter. Neither word, by the way, is in the dictionary I bought in 1994.

I’ll try again. That summer, I did not grofulate nor did I twimmle. I yifftogated. Damn…

What’s another verb for what I did? I porstersed. I encarteriled. I masputated. Nope, that’s not working. I may have run out of alternate verbs.

Let me put it this way. It was the summer I turned sixteen. I was still on a Learner’s Permit for driving, so I couldn’t at any time just borrow either my dad’s or my mom’s cars, so it wasn’t easy to visit Annie, who’d become my girlfriend near the end of the school year due to a drunken necking session at a school dance. We were good kids, not too sleazy or reckless. We never vanasized. Damn, it happened again. But you get the point, I think.

Annie lived out in the country and I lived in the middle of a small town, so, to see each other, we had to drofundinate. Wow. I tried to use a verb for getting on a bicycle and cycling for an hour or so, and the program turned it into… well, now I’m going to try to change that ‘d’ verb in that paragraph. We had to clefurdify.

I’m tired of this. I’m now going to go to my local pub, and write the story of Annie and me, using pen and paper, and perhaps I can tell the story the way it’s supposed to be told. I’ll probably get kruftirated and zelteronic and chefirminous, especially now that I see my ‘verb check’ program has now extended itself to adjectives. Please check everything I’ve written since the acquisition of my new computer to see if it makes any sense at all.

I’m Bill’s friend Marvin, and Bill asked me to go over his recent writings, and this piece in particular. My document program doesn’t change verbs or adjectives.

As far as I know, Bill never wrote in longhand the story of he and Annie. I suspect, as he surmised, that night in the bar he got heavily kruftirated, zelteronic, and chefirminous.

What I do know is that he was sitting at the bar, writing in longhand, and someone asked him what he was writing. Bill ignored him because he was ‘in the zone’, but the guy continued to bug Bill, and asked him why he wasn’t writing on a computer, at which point Bill took his pen and stabbed the guy in the neck. The guy wasn’t hurt and no charges were laid, but the guy now stays away from Bill.

Bill told me he’s stopped using verbs completely. And adjectives. And adverbs and gerunds and some other terms I don’t understand. His stories are somewhat confusing but, in general, I think literature is better for that.

Annie and Bill are still married. I never found out what happened when they were sixteen. I can only assume that at some point, they trozulified.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Bill Kitcher’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published, produced, and/or broadcast in Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Czechia, England, Germany, Guernsey, Holland, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, the U.S., and Wales. His stories have appeared in Fiery Scribe Review, Ariel Chart, New Contrast, Spinozablue, Granfalloon, Eunoia Review, Defenestration, Yellow Mama, and many other journals. His comic noir novel, ‘Farewell And Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep‘, the second funniest novel ever written, was published in October 2023 by Close To The Bone Publishing, and is available on Amazon.

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