Entrapped Visions in my Momentary Mind, Paroled

Past

She sat on the edge of the bathroom, dirty mildewey porcelain under her wet jeans, molding together in the fluidity of an LSD binge. We’d spent the night in disarray, having our minds turned upside down by the effects of the drug and our bones soaked through from overhead rains which, try as they did, were never able to force us inside until now. Her eyes were as large as 8 balls and similar in contrast, tears welling up and teetering on the precipice looming edge of her bottom eyelid.

We had spent the last year and a half together, lovers, her my first and I her best, and now the turbulent effects of time’s passing and our changing worlds was threatening to bring that to an end. There and then, we’d been standing in the bathroom for probably hours by now, having just before crawled out of the sticky sheets which had been wrapped around us as we tried to quell our exploding emotional state. I looked down at her, saw her breaking into pieces, saw everything going on inside of her as if the flesh and blood didn’t exist, just a massive confusion of knowing that it was time to move on and fearing what that meant leaving behind. She looked up me, past the smoky haze of her cigarette, and into my eyes for some sort of answer.

I unraveled a small length of toilet paper, wadded it up into a ball, looked at her once more, then turned to use it to wipe clean the sink.

“I thought you were going to wipe my eyes,” she said.

That was the exact moment that I knew that I’d lost her.

Present

“I’m so happy,” said the man in the Red Hat. He juggled a beer and a cigarette through the background sounds of good music and the basement hijinks of washing machines, dryers and furnaces all chiming in.

“Oh yeah?” I asked him, really more rhetorically. We were both enjoying the night with too much to drink and too much to make out of it.

“Yeah. Our lives are so good right now, think about it.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” I thought about his life. He was unemployed at the moment, neither of us had any money and even if we did, no women in our lives to spend it on. Our cupboards were nearly bare and I, for one, had gas pains.

“Think about it. We’re about to get the internet, we have beers and enough smokes to last all night. We get to keep the house and obviously we’re getting a dog.” He smiled big and sucked his cigarette a few millimeters shorter. “Plus, I have that donkey on the way up from Mexico.”

I laughed, and though it probably didn’t show on the outside and at the time, I’ll be smiling at that for the rest of my life.

Future

A big white house sits on the top of a monstrous grass laden hill. All around it are the signs of the world before this one; trees so old and distorted that they express entire novels worth of emotion and intrigue just by looking at them, let alone climbing them, blue skies that hold host to clouds which are more accurately described literally rather than figuratively as castles, and enough wildlife, still unafraid of man, roaming it all to make a picture encyclopedia out of. As the evening dims the light and sets the mood, the flashing crackle that any passer by would probably associate with a television’s light comes blinking through the big house’s windows.

Those inside, however, know that it’s merely the warm glow of the fire spreading its wings and tip tapping on the windowpane, a welcome for any stray straggling passers-by to feel free to come in.

“Just wipe your feet or take off your shoes, eh?” comes a call from inside of the house, just as a man goes knocking at the front door. He’s thin and a bit haggardly looking, but only from having dust kicked up on him after walking the last few miles up the mountain.

Inside the place is a veritable cobblepot of differentia. Giant iron skillets sit on the grates of stoves and a huge metal cauldron hangs above an unlit fireplace in the kitchen. Intertwined with these artifacts of old lay state of the art notebooks and wireless stereo systems. A cat licks the keyboard of one of them, and seems to have accessed some sort of internet porn site by doing so. Kinky cats.

The house was aflood with people, so many that it seemed the place might burst, but none of them actually physically too close to one another. In fact, only perhaps half a dozen actual souls sat in the room, but they were all seemingly so much bigger than their own lives, radiating spirit out and across the floor to every wall and possibly dripping a bit through the insulation into the outside.

“How are you?” one of the women inquire, her cheeks lifting up and warming the travelers old bones like a cup of grandma’s soup served to a boy just home from a long walk uphill through the snow from school. She doesn’t move from her spot, or say anything else, but he realizes that he has been invited to sit down beside her.

She removes his boots and then his socks. Then her own socks and gives them to him.

“Thank you,” he goes to take the socks from her, but she puts them on him herself. “Uh, well, I see there are a lot of you here? I’m looking for a place to crash, even maybe the barn or something would do.”

“Well, the chickens,” another one of them comments, a six foot man lounging across a four foot couch, “they don’t like strangers. We, on the other hand, love a good weirdo.”

The traveler pops a wide grin but only the sort of grin you give to crazy people in hopes that they’ll leave you be.

“You can stay here, certainly,” she finishes pulling the socks up on him and slipped his bag from his back.

“Thank you, I’ve got only a little cash, but I’ll get up early and leave straight away in the morning. I don’t need breakfast or anything, you know. Thanks, I really appreciate it.”

“Well, you can leave in the morning if you’d like, but I’d suggest staying longer.” She stretches for her glass of wine, and then for an empty one on the shelf behind her, splitting the contents of her own glass with his and handing it to him. “We really have quite a bit of fun here, you know?”

He looks at her, straight into and through her, actually. Then away and then back at her again. His smile becomes wide and throws the wine back in one gulp.

Years later he’s still there.

Up Next: Project: Giant Hamster Liberation