Flash is still dead, rot in hell, Flash!

"I may be dead, but I can still eat your brains."

Sorry, it's not pumpkin-stuffed crocodile, but it'll have to do.

Warning: choking hazard, small parts, not suitable for children under 3 years was what the Li'l Edgar Allan Poe Posable Figure box said, but Johnny didn't listen because he was almost thirteen so he ripped off the head and ate it.

The head of Edgar Allan Poe got lodged in his esophagus, as anyone knew it would, but that didn't stop Johnny, who nearly passed out in enlisting a third-party Heimlich from his neighbor, Crazy Uncle Gus, who, incidentally, wasn't his uncle, from subsequently managing to crack a molar in splitting the head in half. Hours passed before he felt the first of many strange sensations in his stomach, the cosmos conspiring against his afterschool snack be damned.

Was it lead poisoning? Once Johnny heard mom and dad complaining about cheap Chinese trinkets. He always got picked on for having filthy hippies for parents.

Was the plastic having an adverse reaction with his stomach acid, creating a new, dangerous substance that would slowly and painfully rot him from inside?

Was the head infused with magic?

That was the most plausible answer in light of Johnny's wholly unexpected, prodigious and macabre writing talents that began to bloom mere days after the waves of tingles in his gut vanished.

The rebellion disappeared, the waste of teenage land disappeared as did Johnny to the basement, not to fire up the PlayStation and down cases of carbonated beverages, but to write all through the night. Churning out such masterpieces as MS. Found on a Flash Drive, The Balloon-Boy Hoax, The Fall of the House of Bush, The Tell-Tale Kidney, The Masque of the Yellow Fever and The Black Dog: Hey Hey Mama, the next few years saw Johnny become somewhat of a local celebrity, with an endless stream of visits from college English professors who wanted to satisfy their curiosity, and their jealousy, if truth be told.

With his childish play on titles by the master himself, the curious branches of worshipful yet humble pastiche and modern, morbidly comic sensibilities soon bore the dark fruits of a fresh, grimly different prose. Something shadowy was growing in that damp suburban dungeon, and even the gothic flock of sultry admirers sneaking in beer, controlled substances and selfish pleas for illicit love while his parents were at work couldn't stem the tenebrous tide of terrifyingly beautiful text flowing from his pen.

What could, was madness.

Challenging the myriad laws of literary theory, deconstructing the postmodernists into their component parts, a dust easily carried away on the updrafts of his own, well- deserved hubris, Johnny's transformation was frightening. No longer a skilled author of the dark arts, he metamorphosed into the blackest wizard, wielding linguistic spells heretofore thought beyond the grasp of mortal men. With each step further down into the darkness, one less college English professor visited, one less Suicide Girl groupie groped, one less parent fussed, for even they feared venturing into that bleak, poorly lit pit, the playground of the mad.

Only the stench of Johnny's corpse was powerful enough to bring them beyond the forbidden portal into the barely legible legacy of the genius, the insane. The ghost of the extraordinary man of letters, obsessed to compose the one, last masterwork that had eluded him in life, had spent one more kindred, lost soul in fevered, merciless monomania and dispersed into the ether, ready to bide his time, waiting for another opportunity in the next Li'L Edgar Allan Poe Posable Figure.