the story of Gnarlamange

            Try as he might, Gnarlamange never enjoys himself at water parks. There are always tons of kids everywhere, who scream when they see him in his bathing suit, as their parents look disapprovingly at his abundant hair, which always dries really weird when he gets out of the water, revealing senseless bald patches and remnants of the many incredible cow-licks he sustained as a youngling. His claws come out when he is scared going down the big slides, and sometimes he accidentally digs them so deep into the plastic slide-siding that he just halts midway down and children, many screaming children, pile up behind him as the water continues to gush beneath them.
          "MOVE!" they scream, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING" because the point of slides, I guess, is to move. So Gnarlamange has to calm himself down so he can get his claws to retract, but who can be calm when there are seventeen 10-14 year-olds screaming at you with their freckled, sun-burnt cheeks puffed and wheezing with gargantuan child-anger?! When he finally struggles down a slide and drags himself out of the water, he has terrible traction on the tiles and sometimes slips and falls, and the life guard yells at him in front of everyone.
          Once, even, Gnarlamange was mistaken for a beach towel, and a horrible woman rubbed him all over her body until she was dry. She was jiggling and squawking at her children while she did so. He protested at first, then resigned himself to just wishing, with all his mental capacity, that a cranky swarm of wasps would mistake her swollen head for an enemy hive, and they would dive into her ears, in sharp military lines, straight towards her tiny brain: the doomed, bumbling queen.