Our Hero

OUR HERO
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They called Gard Fehfer mad when he tried to tile his bathroom with slices of American cheese. They called him mad when he sewed a parrot onto an iguana and built twenty-foot robot that ate puppies and ran on table linens. Well, okay. These things could be construed as eccentric, taken out of context like that. But if you knew the whole story, you'd see why his actions made sense.

It was all in preparation for the invasion. Not a military invasion, but an invasion of fashion. The Designers' Guild, never the most unified body in the first place had broken into multiple factions and a civil war now raged throughout the land. Jelly Jam, the youngest, hottest thing going, said everyone else was just marmalade and vowed that his new line would rock the planet to its very foundations.

Gard Fehfer had gotten wind of Jelly Jam's evil machinations through his network of double agents (they were actually triple agents but neither Gard nor Jelly knew this because the agents were just that good). Gard knew that he was the only thing standing between the world and high top loafers, cross your heart hats, and fountain skirts. The last piece of Gard's defense was to recite the biography of a non-existent Canadian chef in a dark room where no one could hear.

Those fools. They'd never understand that he was their savior. They all laughed at him. They called him mad for writing about himself in the third person, past tense.