Pied is an imaginative retelling of the Pied Piper story following a number of perspectives.  

Pied (Play, 2010)

Wife: Disgusting!

I can see you, don’t think I can’t see you…

She sniffs

I can smell you. You smell.

She strains to see

Gram negative? Rod shaped? E.coli? Yes, E.Coli, Definitely. Thought I got rid of you yesterday. Do you want more bleach? Well I guess you don’t want it. You just want to breed and spread and feed yourselves to my children. Line their guts. Abdominal pain? Gastroenteritis? Death? Is that all you want? Stop that you! Stop it. I can see you multiplying.

I kill one, a thousand more.

I’ve read up and I know all about you all now. Don’t think that you can get away with it any more. Any of you, Staphylococcus with your thirty-two sub species and your clusters!  I know you grin at me thinking I’m ignorant to your little ways! I know you’re gram positive, with peptidoglycan and teichoic acid and you get under my skin!

She begins to scratch and starts trying to peel off her own skin

Dirty little bleeders! I know that you grow aerobically and anaerobically. I can smell you, I can hear you, I hear you stretching and growing and pulsing and being. You make me sick! You make my children sick.

If it kills me I will kill you, kill you all. There might be a nonillion of you in the world, but none of you are welcome in my house! My children are too good for you, do you hear me?

I kill fifty thousand, a hundred thousand more take its place.

Campylobacter don’t you mutter a word, you little twisted bastard, you animal abortionist. I’ll give you diarrhea and periodontitis, then we’ll watch your teeth fall out shall we? I can taste you in my food, on my lips, on my tongue. You taste like shit .

She begins spitting

Eww you’re spreading. You get in my mouth and you’ll breed in there, in the warm moistness. Incubating! Then you know I will spit you out, spew you out into the world where you will infest, ingest, digest your incestuous diseases will merge. Your master-plan, your disease manifesto, you and your armies, ranks of Staphylococci, platoons of Sporohalobacter armed and ready, regiments of Candidatus Carsonella Ruddi poised for the war. I know what you want, you want to make the super disease that will wipe us all out. The tiniest bacteria giving the death blow to our guts. Like a nuclear bomb going off in our intestines. I see the battle plans, the blue prints of your micro-war. I can hear you mutter your plans to each other. I can hear your captains and your sergeants barking their orders.

I kill a million, I wish others could hear your plans so they can join my cause.

Anyway, you won’t get away with it. From now on my children will wash in bleach twice a day, I can’t have you ruining their lives. You’re parasites. Do you hear me? All of you. Fifty-thousand-per-square-inch? I think not. I’ll scrub you off them, scrub you off me, my husband. You know he sells food? He makes and sells food here? How does it look if he has germs in the place he makes food? Would you want it? Now I think it’s time you left. Thank you.

 

Learn more about my scriptwriting services here.