The bathroom light flickered on and off as Grumpus Crop sat on the lid of the toilet, struggling to clip his toe nails for the sixth time today. “Stay still, you silly goose!” he lightheartedly commanded one of the nails. He was just a big goofball, that Grumpus.

Clipping his nails had become a very challenging thing for him ever since his dad had forced him as a child to soak his hands and feet in a homemade concoction of blended sweet potatoes and okra. “This is what you get for leaving water spots on the dishes!” his dad had screamed. At the time, it seemed that Grumpus’s dad was the only person in the history of humanity that knew that this kind of a punishment would do anything. Sweet potatoes were, and still are, the lowest quality makeup of atoms to exist on the planet. And okra is, if anything, insignificant and not even worth thinking about.

But the consequences, as Grumpus and the rest of the world soon learned, were dire and permanent. After his hands and feet had soaked for four straight days, he finally pulled them from the mix only to find that his nails had grown nearly four feet long. And though his father never revealed any of his knowledge about the soak, Grumpus was able to conclude after years of experience that the horrendous vegetables had caused the nails on his fingers and toes to grow up to an entire foot each day. He also realized that they began growing even longer as time went by, which is why he was presently sitting in his bathroom cutting his nails for the sixth time of the day. They were growing at such a quick pace that he could visibly watch them grow longer with each passing minute, and if he didn’t at least try to clip the silly geese, as he called them, then they’d easily reach ten feet long by the day’s end.

__________

Paul Plim sat behind an enormous solid mahogany desk mulling over possible ideas to resurrect his Museum of Infamous Swine. Once a strong pillar in the community, the museum had fallen on hard times in recent years due to the emerging generations showing no interest in history, museums, or even swine, for that matter. Paul leaned back in his burgundy leather chair and put his feet on the desk. He took a long drag on a cigar, his thick, black eyebrows so furrowed in thought that they covered parts of his eyes.

He glanced angrily at a gorilla sleeping in a cage in the corner of the room, relieved that it wasn’t thrashing around and releasing its ear-splitting screams like it usually did twenty hours a day. The attraction he’d once used to draw customers to his establishment had only recently become ineffective, but Paul had paid a pretty penny for the animal and wasn’t inclined to relinquish expensive commodities so easily.

Accepting that his slab-of-spoiled-meat brain wasn’t about to produce any new solutions to his predicament anytime soon, he decided to treat himself to an ice cold soda from the supermarket. He stood to leave, but flicked a paper clip at the gorilla before doing so, causing the beast to enter into a spiral-eyed, violent rage.

As Paul pulled up to the market, cutting off a car with a handicapped lanyard hanging from the mirror and parking in the only remaining handicapped stall, he observed a man limping to the market entrance. Looking the man up and down, Paul saw that the man was a hideous sight, and his open-toed shoes appeared to have thick strands of hay sticking out of them in all directions. He looked closer. No, not hay, he thought, those are nails. And they’re coming from his hands too! Those suckers must be two feet long! His eyes bulged with curiosity and he licked his lips, but wasn’t sure why.

Grumpus approached the market, thirsty for a soda just as Paul was. He winced as one of his toe nails began growing upward, piercing his skin and scraping his shinbone. He bent down, grabbed the nail with his entire hand, and tried to break the nail free, but was unsuccessful because it was too strong. Shaking his head, he continued into the store and tried his best to keep his fingernails from knocking over merchandise.

Paul entered the store as quickly as he could so he wouldn’t miss the spectacle. He remained in the background so as to not draw attention to himself. He watched the man fill a cup at the soda fountain four times, then fumble each one once it was full. By the time the man gave up, his toe nails were sticky and tinged with brown syrup.

Grumpus turned away from the soda fountain frustrated but still thirsty. He made for the glass-front refrigerator and noticed a man in one of the aisles duck in an attempt to not be seen. Grumpus hesitantly grabbed a bottle of soda from the fridge and turned for the cashier.

Paul, knowing he’d been spotted, jumped out of the aisle and into the man’s path. “Hiya, friend! Boy, that was quite a struggle there!” he indicated the soda fountain.

“It sure was. Glad it wasn’t all for nothing though, at least someone got some entertainment from it!” Grumpus replied goofily.

“Give me a moment,” Paul said and hurriedly prepared himself a large soda from the fountain. Upon returning, he said, “Let me get that for you, brighten your day a little.”

“Really? Aw, thanks, Mister!” Grumpus exclaimed.

Paul realized that he must have had something wrong with him since grown men don’t usually say such things. Nevertheless, he extended his hand and introduced himself. “Paul Plim.”

“Grumpus Crop,” Grumpus said, but upon returning the handshake gave Paul a deep laceration with his thick thumb nail. “Oh, yikes. I’m so sorry, Paul. You’re still going to buy my soda though, right?”

Paul looked over at Grumpus the same way he had looked at the gorilla in his office, then he smiled. “Of course, I’m a man of my word,” he stated as blood dripped onto the floor.

Grumpus grabbed his soda from the cashier’s counter and knocked a stack of gum packets from the countertop with his nails.

“Get out!” the cashier screamed at Grumpus, his patience worn too thin. “Just get out of here, you monster!”

Grumpus cowered from the cashier and headed for the exit like a dog that knows it’s done something bad.

“Hey, Grumpus,” Paul called out.

Grumpus looked back at Paul.

“We’ll see each other again. Remember,” he gave a long wink, “I’m a man of my word.”

Through the nails that now looked like corn-colored branches growing from his body, Grumpus smiled and winked back, though he had no idea what he was winking about.

Paul drove back to his office with a black-hearted smile on his face and fire in his eyes, in complete shock over his encounter with Grumpus. The gorilla in the room was more manic and deranged than ever. Paul unlocked the cage regardless, and all he had to do was furrow those brows and the gorilla stayed away from him. Instead, it jumped out of a window and landed on the walking path below. Once there, it pulled a parking meter from the ground and began smashing nearby cars with it, ruining the day for dozens of uninvolved and unsuspecting people. Paul pulled at the ends of his mustache as he watched.

Now that the room was quiet, he rang his on-call bounty hunter. “You’ll know him when you see him. I’m telling you, he’s better than a circus! He’s every act at once, and just what the museum needs!”

__________

Grumpus stumbled down the sidewalk with his soda, trying his best not to trip over his nails that were long overdue for their midday trim. Driving wasn’t an option for him, so he walked everywhere he went. Along the way he came upon a block full of vehicles that looked like they had been dropped from a mile up in the sky. He continued cautiously, but carried on as usual once he was past the wreckage.

Looking back to see the damage once more, Grumpus saw a man dressed in all white pointing a rifle at him. He choked on his mouthful of soda and dropped the bottle, then began to run the best he could. His nails were towering over him by this point, so it only took a few steps before he fell to the ground in defeat. The man in white approached and stood over Grumpus, then shot him with a dozen tranquilizing darts.

When Grumpus awoke, he was suspended in the air in what looked to be a public place just above a door. He was in a standing position and chained in such a way that he could only move his head. His hands and feet were facing downward and twenty different strands of nails were dangling from his fingers and toes. Judging by the fact that most of this nails were beginning to drag on the ground below, he determined that he was hanging fifteen to twenty feet in the air, which meant that his nails hadn’t been clipped in well over a day.

“Almost there. A little more to the left, annnnnnd…there,” Paul’s familiar voice shouted as Grumpus came to an abrupt halt like a piano being moved through the window of a high-rise apartment.

Paul stepped back and squared the scene with his hands. Grumpus hung directly above the entrance to his Museum of Infamous Swine, causing his nails to flow down over the entrance like a curtain of beads from the sixties. The new attraction was already turning heads, and a few people had entered the museum because of it. As customers passed through the nail streamers, the nails clacked together like hollow wooden chimes on a windy day.

Paul fished around and pulled a long cigar from his suit jacket pocket. “Paul, you son of a bitch,” he said through the corner of his mouth as the cigar began to catch, “you’ve really outdone yourself this time.” He walked toward the museum entrance and looked up at Grumpus. Drops of liquid landed on Paul’s cheek, tears streaming down from Grumpus’s eyes.

Paul blew a mouthful of smoke in Grumpus’s direction, then praised him as he continued to the door, “Adding to the customer experience, I love that kind of improvisation!”

Grumpus listened to his nails chime as hundreds of people began flooding into the museum. His eyes burned from Paul’s cigar smoke, but his heart burned even more.