Helios vs English

When Helios was at the cafe, he waved at his friends before leaving, “I’ll see you around!” he called, waving at Julian. The little guy waved back with a grin. “Go hit the road, Helios!”

For a second, Helios froze. His brain loading and working overtime.

“Fine,” he muttered. “I’ll take a hammer.”

And so, he actually started hitting the road with a hammer from his Turbo Tractor.

A police officer suddenly appeared. “Freeze, criminal! That sentence makes zero sense! You’re coming with me for assaulting the English language with a hammer!” The officer cocked his stun gun.

“Hands behind your back now! Was that supposed to be a metaphor? Because if so, YOU FAILED! I’ve seen kindergarteners structure better analogies!”

Helios stood frozen, completely bewildered, as his friends slowly slipped away. He faced the officer alone and raised his hands.

“I surrender.”

Julian watched as Helios got arrested for grammar mistakes. “Helios, remember! Don’t spill the beans!” he shouted. Another misunderstanding struck. “Does ‘spill the beans’ mean I should pour them out?” Helios asked, his face full of confusion. The officer’s handcuffs clicked tight with a loud snap.

“That’s it!!!... You’re under arrest for idiom abuse! Literally interpreting figures of speech. Requesting backup and… maybe an English textbook.”

Another officer approached. “Do you even realize the chaos you cause when idioms are taken at face value? The sheer anarchy?!”

Helios was dragged toward the cruiser, one-way ticket to Grammar Jail. No bail. Only sentence diagrams. The officer shoved him into the backseat. “You had your chance! You’ve committed the highest degree of grammatical crime known to humanity: taking idioms literally! You’ve ruined poetry!”

The door slammed shut.

Helios remained silent in the cruiser, staring out the window with sad puppy eyes. Julian and Hex watched helplessly from outside. As the vehicle drove away from the café, Helios just looked around like a lost puppy. The Grammar Officer smiled, satisfied with the silence. No more grammar mistakes. No more chaos.

The officer escorted Helios into the prison, passing under a sign that read: “Welcome to the Grammar Correctional Center.” It was a time-out, but also a time-in for reflection and growth. Helios clearly needed help understanding the difference between idioms, metaphors, and similes. They were determined to make sure Helios got that help even if it meant memorizing prepositions and verb tenses until his eyes bled

“You’re in my world now, buster,” the officer said darkly. “My world of proper grammar.”

Helios would face the ultimate grammar trial here. The officer guaranteed that Helios would leave this place as a changed man or at least, as a man who finally knew the difference between a pronoun and a preposition. One of them handed him a grammar textbook.

“This is your new best friend. Get comfortable. You’re gonna be with each other ALL. DAY. LONG.”

Helios slowly took the book and opened it. “Noun and… Pronounce?” he murmured. “A noun?... Hmm.”

Is Helios actually learning something? Who knows. If he somehow learned respect for the rules of grammar, it would all be worth it.

“Now read on,” the officer ordered, staring at him intently. “We have so much further to go.”

A few minutes passed. Then Helios snapped his fingers. “She, her, hers… Why the ‘s’? Is the girl more than one?”

The officer grabbed the book and snapped it shut. “That’s it!!... Straight to solitary for you!” He dragged Helios by the collar toward a cell labeled ‘Tense Confinement.’ Helios’s audacity was unbelievable, questioning third-person singular pronouns like some kind of grammatical conspiracy theorist.

“You’ll sit here until you can recite all the subjects-verb agreements backwards! And NO! The ‘s’ does not imply plurality!!... it implies respect for linguistic structure!”

SLAM!

The cell door shut, echoing through the Grammar Correctional Center.