Mountains o’ Debt

¡Oy, did the townsers have bacon on their faces!

They had heard from the bamboo vine that there was creamy platinum snug under the Geranium mountains, & so the machine the runs all the economies spun to produce for-profit colleges with cheap ads to enroll people in shoveling degrees to fill the hungry labor need till they had thousands o’ shovelers working for only 10 bottlecaps an hour digging.

‘Course this involved digging up all those Geraniums, which were crumpled & ripped apart in the process.

Now, the shame came when it turned out that there was nothing under the mountains but rock & dirt, all the way to the core full o’ molten cheese, which everyone knew was useless. Soon the demand plummeted & all those shovelers found themselves laid off & clogged with multi-thousand-cap debts that would devour them limb to limb in the next decade.

¿But who cares ’bout them? What embarrassed the townsers the most was that they later heard that they’d misheard the bamboo vine: ’twas the now destroyed & discarded Geraniums that were worth all the parentheses in the world. ¡What itches!

Prompt:

Geranium, Nepal, Platinum