Nas Solves A Mystery
Nas sat at his desk, surrounded by papers: magazines on the tables, notes in the chair, manila folders piled up in boxes on the bedroom floor. To his left, on an enormous flat-panel computer monitor, there glowed an ominous frozen image of the back of President Kennedy’s smiling head. To his right, a slightly smaller monitor, which Nas was currently looking at, showed some forty-five open tabs’ worth of Wikipedia. Right now he was reading about zinc.
Just then, there was a knock at the door. His friends were here for the cupcakes & Charlie Brown Christmas Special party! Zinc would have to wait until later.
At the door, Nas met KRS-One, Kool Keith, and an old woman named Phyllis, a family friend who lived in the apartment under Nas’s and had also not made a hot album in the last ten years. Nas welcomed them inside and led them to the living room.
While they waited for the program to begin, Nas lit a blunt and passed it around. KRS-One started talking a lot of shit about 2012 and the precession of the equinoxes. Kool Keith was writing his own name all over the cover of a notebook in a variety of fonts. Phyllis was using Nas’s phone to talk to her sister, which he guessed he was okay with because maybe hers wasn’t working, or something, although he wished she had asked first.
When the blunt was done, Nas went into the kitchen to get the cupcakes. They were from the best cupcake bakery in town. No, not that one; an even better one that just opened like two weeks ago. Nas knows this kind of shit.
But Nas was about to encounter some shit for which even he was unprepared for; some truly unfathomable shit. For lo and behold: where the fuck had all the cupcakes gone? Crumbs littered the floor, where the empty boxes lay scattered as if by dogs or adverse weather conditions. But all the windows were closed, and Nas’s building didn’t allow dogs. No, this was plainly the work of a human. Who among his fellows could have done such a thing?
It was a mystery.
Nas would have to investigate further. He managed to salvage a trio of more-or-less presentable cupcakes from the wreckage, and returned to the living room just as the familiar piano strains came wafting out of the television.
KRS-One and Kool Keith gratefully seized their cupcakes and devoured them. “Phyllis?” queried Nas. “Oh, no thank you,” Phyllis replied, barely diverting her attention from the telephone, “I couldn’t possibly eat another bite.”
“Another bite,” said Nas flatly. He repeated the word for good measure. “What the fuck, Phyllis?”
Nas was pissed now. He had begun to pace in front of the couch, and was about ready to hit Phyllis with an impromptu lecture on ethics and honesty and the code of the streets, when he heard a terrible commotion out in the hallway. More guests? He couldn’t think who it might be. He was on his way to check it out, but before he got to the door, it burst open, as if struck by a blast of magical door-opening lightning. A bunch of scary-looking kids in frosting-smeared ski masks rushed in, chanting something about golf. They seized Phyllis, dragged her out into the hallway, and beheaded her with a hastily-erected guillotine before disappearing into the shadows.
Nas stared at the headless corpse oozing blood in the old hallway. Great, he thought. Another mystery to solve.
