Marla stapled a neon green tarp to her backyard fence, muttering, “This is art. This is genius.” Her masterpiece? A 10-foot-tall “sculpture” made of 378 yarn balls, glued together with craft-store glue that smelled like expired perfume. She’d spent three days winding the yarn, alternating between pink, chartreuse, and a suspiciously solid block of black that might’ve been a cat’s nest.
“Behold! The Emotion of Disarray!” she shouted, tripping over a garden gnome she’d painted to look like a disgruntled astronaut. The gnome wobbled, then toppled into a pile of used soup cans she’d repurposed as “foundational elements.” The cans clattered like a xylophone being played by a drunk toddler.
A neighbor’s dog, Buster, wandered in, sniffed the black yarn block, and howled. Marla froze. “No! Don’t eat the conceptual core!” she screamed, lunging to save it. The yarn block unraveled mid-air, launching a rainbow of threads into the sky like a disco ball’s revenge.
By sunset, the sculpture resembled a giant, fuzzy spider that had violently sneezed. Marla sat in the middle of it, surrounded by discarded glue sticks and a single balloon that had floated off during the chaos. “It’s… it’s postmodern,” she said, as the wind blew a yarn strand into her eye. She blinked, then laughed until her ribs ached. The dog, now wearing a yarn hat, licked her face. “Okay,” she said, “maybe next time I’ll try origami.”
