The Decomposition of Delia Dethabridge is the fourteenth episode of the fourth series of Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids.
Characters
The Ambulance Men
The Doctor
The Body
Plot
Delia Dethabridge was told by her mum and dad that she was a genius, and so she believed that she needn't do any schoolwork. She told her teacher, Mr. Pugn, when asked why she hadnt done her homework that it is a well known fact that girls are smarter than boys, and that as she was the smartest of the girls there wasn’t any point in doing homework that she already knew. Delia was also horrible to people like Alvin who she thought weren’t as clever as she was, but Delia thought that everyone was stupider than she.
One day, when Mr. Pugn caught a case of greenfly and had to be taken off by a pair of ambulance men, the class got a scary replacement teacher, Miss Whetstone. Miss Whetstone believed in the punctual handing in of homework, and when Delia didn’t have hers told the rest of the class to read while Delia did her missing assignment. When the girl protested that she was a genius, Miss Whetstone responded that if that was the case, it wouldn’t take her long, and instructed her to write a five hundred word long essay titled "My Worst Nightmare."
The essay that Delia wrote was about being turned into a dumbo by a gremlin called Gormless who snatched her from her bed and took her away to the Land of the Really Thick and did something to her in a horrible way. However, before she had a chance to finish the story, the school bell rang, so Miss Whetstone ordered her to turn in the completed essay first thing in the morning or there would be trouble. However, when Delia went to pick up her exercise book, it felt much heavier than usual . . .
That night, Delia didn’t bother doing her homework, deciding instead to play computer games. When she turned in for the night, an overpowering smell of cheesy feet and a noise from beneath her bed disturbed her. As her exercise book slid out from under the bed, it popped open to reveal Gormless the gremlin who demanded that she finish the story in order to bring him to life. Delia pushed the gremlin back into the book, then stuffed it in her bag, where Gormless's pleading was muffled by her gym socks, and went to sleep.
The next day at school, Delia told Miss Whetstone that she couldn't finish the story because if she had, the gremlin would have been released from the story and come to life and eaten her. Obviously the teacher believed not a word of this, and instructed Delia to finish the story by the end of the lesson.
Frightened to write anything bad, Delia realised that as it's her story, she could write anything she pleased, so she changed the end so that the gremlin gave her a kiss and told her that he's actually a fairy gremlin with the power to grant her three wishes. The wishes she asked for were world fame, a million pounds, and the new Boyz R Us single. She justified this by adding in that her worst nightmare was that the friendly gremlin would one day go away.
When Delia handed the piece in, Miss Whetstone exclaimed that it didn’t work as a piece of creative writing, and rewrote the ending while laughing. Hearing the laugh, Delia turned as white as a corpse and fainted dead away.
Nobody knows what happened to Delia Dethabridge that night, but she went home from school clever and returned the next morning as dim as a five-watt bulb. She failed all of her exams and ended up smelling cheese cakes for a living, to see if they were bad.
Morals
- The morals of this story are "Don't look down on others," and "Do your homework."
Trivia
- Several of Delia's schoolmates share the same designs as characters from other episodes of Grizzly Tales, such as Peregrine (The Barber of Civil), and Sam, Col and Algy (The Chipper Chums Go Scrumping).
- At the beginning of the episode, a doctor at an operating table with a body on it explains that there are two lobes at the side of the brain that look like floppy saddlebags. He then proceeds to take them out of the body using a hacksaw and tells us that these are full of all of the knowledge that a human being acquires during a lifetime.
- At the end of the episode, Uncle Grizzly tells us that Miss Whetstone wrote that the gremlin takes Delia out of bed and pushes his fingernails into her earholes and bursts both saddlebags of knowledge, turning her from a know-all to a know-nothing.