Elle Lothlorien

“Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel when I’m around you: confused, but still satisfied.' I freeze, trying to figure out how to cancel it out and replace it with something that sounds a whole lot less like sex and a candy bar ad.”

“I think it should be obvious by now that I’m not necessarily interested in reality.”

“What if it’s a shy fish? Is that a 'coy koi?' What? Don’t hate me because I’m asking the important questions.”

“Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say that 'Alice Faye picked a peck of pepper for the poor, piping pig in the purple poke.' Wait—is that not what we’re talking about here?”

“Did you forget a dentist appointment or something, big guy? Where the hell did you hop off to?”

“This is from the queen? And you say it’s for a mouse? I’m sorry, sir, but the Pyramid Hotel doesn’t allow any pets except for service animals.”

“Okay then, I suppose you get a pass on poker intimidation for the glasses, little brother. But everyone else is wearing them at the tables too, and they’re all just sitting there, looking all serious, like they’re birthing the Grand Theory of Everything.”

“Speaking of your eyeballs, dear brother,I overheard some girls talking about you in the restroom at the tournament hotel. Apparently rumor now has it that you won’t allow anyone to see your eyes—ever. In fact, according to this knowledgeable source, you even sleep and shower with your glasses on in case someone unexpectedly walks in...one of them said she’d seen your eyes for herself two years ago and could only describe them as 'ferocious and roving,’ and ‘burning white-hot with a primal, raw wildness.”

“After one and a half cocktails, finding the appropriate response is a bit of a challenge. I finally say, 'Thank you for inviting me,' and leave the less desirable 'Want to play strip poker?' in the unscrupulous part of my brain where it belongs.”

“Don’t be such a dumbass, Gabe. Koalas don’t travel in herds. They move in heaps. Much like emus move in ripples, and kangaroos travel in photo-ops.”

“In any other fabric of space-time, my brother would have picked up Dee’s venereal disease-infested koala punt and run it straight down the line of vulgarity, all the way to the touchdown of tastelessness.”

“I hear they’re all infected with chlamydia, which just goes to show that you really can’t tell who’s got the clam. I mean, look at a picture of a koala…tell me you’re not shocked.”

“Fun fact: You may hug koalas in the Australian state of New South Wales, but not in Queensland. So…if you didn’t hug your koala nice and tight before you got here to Sydney, you’re going to be shit out of luck until we go back to Surfer’s Paradise.”

“You keep right on building that fence, Faye. See what good it does you.”

“Okay, so English settlers brought rabbits with them to Australia to breed for food and stuff, right? But they escaped and basically started destroying the country, eating the vegetation, that kind of thing. So by the early 1900s, the government was trying to figure out a way to get rid of all the rabbits. Want to hear what their genius plan was? The rabbit-proof fence. Worked out great for the rabbits. Once they learned how to play badminton and got the hang of tennis on grass, they couldn’t remember how they ever lived without it. Supposedly there was something like six hundred million rabbits by 1950. But you’re missing the point. The point is that even though it was pretty obvious from the beginning it wasn’t working, they kept right on building it—two thousand miles of it.”

“Must be the hair then. And the name change. And your new piss-poor attitude. Because every once in a while, I look at you and I don’t see a Baby Doll anymore. I just see Alice Faye Dahl, Poker Champion Badass. With obvious, heavy influences from Ronald McDonald, of course.”

“Who are you? Rabbit and Souris call you ‘Alice,’ me and Dee call you ‘Faye.’ I just didn’t know if ‘Alice’ was your poker-playing, Southern Hemisphere name or what. Hey, I’m just trying to fit in here. If I should be introducing myself as ‘Clark,’ I want to know about it sooner rather than later so I don’t embarrass myself.”

“Well then, I guess I’m man enough to admit that I’m trying to get in touch with my inner bitch.”

“I’m not sure a real man would smoke something that sounds like a mixed drink ice cream cone.”

“You’re in the country of the kangaroo and the duck-billed platypus, and you’re asking ‘why is it a mushroom? Because it just IS.”

“I am commanding you, as an older and wiser brother, to get over here, get on this caterpillar, and ride to the top of this mushroom with me.”

“Well, the gondola operator—whose name was ‘Happy,’ I might add—failed to inform me that about sixty seconds into the trip, the floor under the section of car I was standing on was going to slide away.Turns out it was a really useful way of finding out which of the passengers suffers from acute acrophobia.”

“Let’s put it this way: you know how we always told you that all those years of tormenting four sisters turned you into a closet sadist? Well, if you ever decide that being a lawyer isn’t bringing you the kind of gratification you were hoping for, then I think I found the perfect job for you.”

“I don’t think I heard the same ending you did. Maybe you should tell it again.”

“Did the Ancient Greeks ever write anything funny—like slapstick? I mean, I think I speak for everyone when I say that there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of well-written physical comedy.”

“He’s a guy. We’re easy and stupid. Just go bat your eyes at him and beg for forgiveness. It’ll take five minutes…three if you wear something low-cut.”

“Did you think your boyfriend was going to stick around and watch you do THAT? If we weren’t related, I would’ve left too. Actually…is it already too late for me to leave?”

“Now see, if it were me, I wouldn’t have led with that. I would’ve gone with something like ‘G’day’ or ‘Wow, aren’t you a little hottie?”

“How do you tactfully spin the term “man-whore” to someone’s sister?”

“I don’t think Australians ever use a couple of words when twenty will do just fine.”

“Oh, I have plenty of problems with Rabbit, it’s just that my comfort level with his name is standing in line behind about a hundred more important things.”

“I’m good at being vague and unpredictable. It’s sort of a hard habit to break.”

“Do you ever answer anything in a way that people expect you to?”

“So ‘fatal’ only kills you two out of three times these days? That’s good to know.”

“I like it because when people use a lot of poker lingo, it usually means they’ve been playing the game for a while. Which is why I immediately avoid those people.”

“Seriously, what is the purpose? Maybe I’d feel better about walking around speaking fluent jive if I knew there was a reason for it.”

“I don’t know what this is for anyway. I mean, let me tell you what I’m never going to say to any human being, ever: ‘I had hunting season off-suit in the pocket, but I've had kicker trouble with that hand often enough to fold it.”

“Congratulations, Mousey, you’ve managed to insult every marsupial in the country in just under three kilometers.”

“...once I realized that Australia’s top highway speed of 110 kilometers per hour was the same as going 65 in the U.S., all my hardened American enthusiasm for speed went limp until it felt like the car was hardly moving at all. Even worse, most stretches of the highway are restricted to 60 kilometers per hour, which is how fast Americans go when we’re, like, passing a stopped school bus disembarking small children, or driving through a herd of puppies in the road.”

“Yeah, well, when they say ‘You know it’s a long way, don’t you?’ what they really mean is: ‘You know it’d be faster if you just rode a kangaroo, don’t you?”

“I believe it went like this—and stop me if I’m wrong, Mousey: ‘Listen, we may not be our own continent and everything, but we have a big country over in America too.”

“If one more person tells me how big this country is, I’m going to go kick a koala.”

“When some smart ass asks you if you’re driving, you say, 'Nope, just kicking the tires.’ You have to make sure you actually kick them all on your way around to the passenger side. Otherwise it’s like lying.”

“The car doesn’t so much drive as float above the road, like we’re making our way to Sydney in a hovercraft.”

“Alice, it took big, dumb Talon Dodo thirty seconds to get you so pissed about a poker hand pun that you were about to beat him to death with your cane.”

“I’ll get you and your little dog too?’ You say your girl can’t pay me back? Believe me when I say that that little gift’s just gonna keep right on giving.”

“For the first time, there’s no barrier between us and we make eye contact. All of a sudden, I feel like the character in Raiders of the Lost Ark—the one who watches in horror as the wispy, beautiful angels floating from the Ark of the Covenant morph into howling, homicidal demons. You know, right before he melts like a cheap candle.”

“Suddenly, the giant, three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the Underworld appears next to her—sans two of its heads—and sits down. As a child, we had a neighbor with a Great Dane, and I know they’re about three feet tall at the shoulder. Allow another twelve inches for their T-Rex-sized heads, and you’ve got a dog that this woman could throw a saddle on and ride like a pony.”

“No thanks…Dodo, was it? I don’t know if I can watch you have performance problems twice in ten days.”

“Once the principals in their party are seated, with those lower on the totem pole left to grumble and move on to find another table, our once-cozy booth transforms into a damp fusion of vacuous wretchedness, with the three women all complaining alternately about their wet hair/clothes and their respective distance from Talon, while the man himself is trying to maneuver his Paul Bunyan frame way too close to me.”