Microstory 1743: Water Snake

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I went hiking yesterday afternoon, in the jungle. It was only meant to last a few hours, but it ended up being an overnight affair when I ran into a sea serpent. I thought she might try to attack me, but instead, I led her back to the ocean, where she could swim and be happy. I might even call her my friend. I slept on the little beach that night, just out in the open, content that the experience turned into so much more than just getting a few extra steps for my fitness app. I’ve just woken up, and I’m hungry. I ate all of my snacks last night before my sandy slumber. I almost feel like I’m on a remote island, somewhere far from civilization, and have no choice but to figure out how to fish with my bare hands, or hunt rabbits with a flexible stick and some string. I can actually hear a truck driving on the mountain side above me, so I’m not too far from other people. My sea serpent and I just used the most direct route yesterday, so I take a few minutes to find the actual trail. I do not want to have to crawl through the vegetation again, even if it would possibly be quicker. It’s a struggle, walking down the path, the hunger growing worse by the second. Mother always says to pack twice as much as I think I’ll need. Father always said I’ll only ever need half, so don’t suffer the weight. I always split the difference, and go with my gut. Now my gut has turned against me, screaming across the abyss. I have to find something worth eating somewhere around here. I’m not liable to find a diner in the middle of nowhere. If I do see a diner, I’ll know the hunger overpowered me, and it’s nothing more than a manifestation of my desires, carried over to limbo from the living realm. Just when I think I can’t be too far from help, the trail ends. It just stops at the shore of a lake. Oh no, I am dead, but this isn’t limbo. I just went straight to hell. I could keep walking, or turn around, or learn to fly, but it wouldn’t matter. I’m never getting out of here, and I’m never getting food.

I stand there for a moment, ready to surrender to my fate, when a familiar sight appears before me. A snake slithers out of the water, and stops a meter away from my feet. He watches me carefully, but does not seem concerned. Like last time, I don’t move. The sea serpent never hurt me, but that doesn’t mean this one won’t. He looks a little more dangerous to me. Perhaps I should try to run this time. Before I can, he begins to slither off into the grass. I take that opportunity to walk in the other direction, but he quickly darts back, and gets in front of me. We regard each other a little more. When he’s satisfied with whatever he thinks he was accomplishing, he slithers away again. I try to leave once more, but he does not like that. He starts to circle me, and I know he’ll bite if I try to go in the wrong direction. Seeing no other choice then, I head in the direction he was going. This prompts him to stop circling, and slither beside me. After several more steps, I realize that he’s leading me somewhere. Is he that smart? Could he really know where the city is, and that I need to get there? Well, his saltwater cousin seemed to possess a shocking level of intelligence, so what do I know about what animals can really do? He keeps slithering next to me, but a little ahead, and I keep following him. If he ends up taking me to a giant Indiana Jones-style pit of hungry serpentine brethren, I guess I’ll just deal with it. Before too long, I see straight lines through the trees up ahead, suggesting some kind of man-made structure. The water snake leads me right into the clearing where I finally see where we are. My God, it is a diner.

Microstory 1047: Virginia

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My mother has only ever had one job her entire life, and it’s one of the hardest out there. She had me when she was nineteen years old, by a stranger passing through town whose name she never got, and has never seen again. She said the song Meet Virginia, by Train always really spoke to her, because the music video basically depicted a day in her own life, and she even doesn’t look unlike Rebecca Gayheart. Inspired by this, she named me Virginia, even though that muddies the analogy a bit. I’ve never worked a table, and I never plan to. She would take double and triple shifts just to provide for me, so I’ve spent a lot of time in that diner, watching her in her native habitat. Her job was absolutely dreadful, which is what really turned me off to it, but she kept doing it, because she didn’t think she was good enough to do anything better. The town of Blast City is full of really good and honest people, but the diner is like a world all its own. After all, it’s where she met my birthfather, and we all know he wasn’t a great person. Lots of truckers stop there, and other people who need to stretch their legs from a road trip. Somehow that place brings out the worst humanity has to offer, and I’m grateful that she’s finally done with that thankless job. Three years ago, I was approaching the age she was when she started working there. Even though I was clear that I would never follow her down that path, she couldn’t help but be reminded of her own childhood when she looked at me. It prompted her to really start thinking about whether she wanted to do this for the rest of her days, and of course, the answer was no. So she made a plan to go back to school, just like all those online degree commercials say adults like that are supposed to. We’ve all heard the stories about how Viola liked to go around, motivating people to take their education seriously, but she didn’t do that with my mom. She actually actively discouraged her from taking online courses. She said that this would end with her getting a better job, with better pay, but it wouldn’t make her any happier. Instead, Viola said my mom should try to become a singer. It was the craziest idea ever, because mom had no history of singing. It’s not like this thing she used to do and love, but had to give it up when she got pregnant. She never sang in choir, or even in the shower, but Viola was positive she would turn out to have a beautiful voice. Well, she was totally right about that. My mom has the most enchanting singing voice I have ever heard, and it upsets me to realize how many years we wasted not enjoying this characteristic of her. Viola and I weren’t the only people who thought this either. My mom has an agent, and has been performing all over the state for years. She’s primed to go national in the next few months. As soon as she finishes her first full album, she’s gonna blow up. The weirdest thing about it is that Viola also recommended I write her music, which is something I never knew I could do. Every single one of the original songs are mine, and my mother’s. And they’re also Viola’s. We’re dedicating the LP to her.

Microstory 241: Perspective Sixteen

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Perspective Fifteen

There he is; the guy I have a crush on. I feel like I’ve been staring at him through the diner window for hours. I can’t see very well through the glass, but people inside can see me clear as day. And they’re all talking about me. I need to make a decision to either go inside or move on. He’s approaching the son of one of our coworkers who he can relate to because he has a low level of maturity. And that’s what makes me feel so bad. He told me that he was diagnosed with borderline intellectual something. I can’t remember the full term, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bigoted, or anything. I just don’t know if I’m allowed to be attracted to someone like that. He’ll always have that learning disability, and I would always be explaining things to him, just like I already do. But is it fair to be in a relationship with someone who’s not smart enough to fully grasp what that relationship means? Or does he understand it, and I’m just being ignorant. Is it bigoted to not be in a relationship with him because of his condition? Oh man, I feel like such a bad person for these thoughts, but I can’t help it. It is my curse to overthink things. I actually have a medical condition of my own, which is probably what attracted me to him. Most people really focus on the compulsive part of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but those compulsions are not the underlying problem. People have stray thoughts all the time, but I have them all the time. In every situation I encounter, I think about every possible outcome, and every choice I could make. This sounds like science fiction, but it’s all about consolidation. I don’t literally think through each potential future. I just consider the possibilities and what kind of choices I would have to make for those to occur. The problem with that is most of the possibilities are extremely remote. The person I’m talking to is probably not going to turn into a vampire, and there probably won’t be a meteorite that will give me superpowers, but these kind of possibilities just consume me, and I have to work extremely hard to ignore them. I realized my condition when I was pretty young, and I developed coping mechanisms to help me function in the world. I’ve gotten pretty good at acting like a normal person, but I still stand out. That brings us back around to my crush. He doesn’t judge me or question me, and I could really use more of that in my life. But not right now. If I go in now, I’ll likely slip on the floor and break my back. I’ll talk to him tomorrow at work.

Perspective Seventeen

Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity: Part II

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Mr. Muxley sat impatiently in the passenger seat. “Why is this taking so long?”

“It’s a common land vehicle,” Monty explained. “It can’t even go a hundred miles an hour.”

“What’s a mile? What’s an hour?” Mr. Muxley asked.

“That bridge we passed a couple minutes ago is about a mile back that way,” Mervin said. “A minute is sixty times the length of time it takes for me to say...one mississippi. An hour is sixty times a minute.”

“I see,” Muxley huffed. “That is quite frustratingly slow.”

Mervin pressed the pedal to increase his speed by just a little. “We have things that go faster, like trains and planes. But this thing is cheap. We can’t all afford spaceships.”

“The spaceships we do have,” Monty furthered, “haven’t gone any farther than the moon, except for a few unmanned vessels. But it takes them a really long time either way.”

They were finally at their destination. They stepped out of the car and into the diner. There were a few other people in there. They took one look at the alien then went back to their meals. Despite having never seen an alien before, this was a ghost town, and people didn’t really care about anything. Monohon was small lake town that lived and died in the span of a century. In its place was a completely different city. A few decades ago, however, Monohon came back to life. If you drove on the streets, you would remain in Sammamish. If, however, you drove on East Lake Sammamish Trail while flickering your lights and keeping your radio on static, you would end up in Monohon. Half of the residents were dead; but half were alive, like Mervin. Why they chose to live there was kind of a mystery. Few people, Monty included, lived outside of the ghost town but were aware of its existence.

Miss Milly’s Mess Hall at the Mill was one of two major businesses in Monohon. The sawmill had burnt down and was rebuilt so many times, that people theorized that time itself eventually got used to the idea of the mill’s existence. Instead of waiting for someone to rebuild the town, it invoked the buildings on its own. The only people that worked at the mill were the ghosts. They never seemed to get tired. At the end of the day, they would eat dinner at the Miss Milly’s, and then eventually fade into oblivion. The next morning, they would reappear at the hotel and start all over again. On the weekends, they could be found fishing on Lake Sammamish. They would mouth words and pretend to talk to be polite, but were seemingly incapable of forming sounds. All the living residents worked at the diner, hotel, and post office. The train depot was completely out of use, but there were a few people, both living and dead, who wandered around and received payment to do nothing.

Mervin and Monty went over all this while they were waiting for their food, but Muxley was completely unimpressed by it. He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, it’s a pocket dimension. Whatever.”

“Is that what this place is called?” Mervin asked. “So, you’ve seen a ghost town before?”

“Yeah, of course. We have them all over the place. You were supposed to show me something interesting.”

Monty laughed. “Did we not tell you that we’re not really equipped to be tour guides of Earth?”

“No.”

“Oh, well. It should be pretty obvious. I thought we’d start with breakfast, and hopefully come up with something to try afterwards.”

“What does breakfast mean?”

The waitress set the plates down and smiled. “It’s when you eat food in the morning,” she said.

“Eat food?” Muxley asked.

“Yeah, you put it in your mouth and chew,” she said. “How else would you gather energy for the day?”

“We lather ourselves with the sap of the miulwebirkovel plant. Then we set our body on fire, and when all the sap has evaporated, we have enough energy for the rest of the week.”

The other three stared at him in silence. “We don’t have any...” Monty started to say.

“Miulwebirkovel,” the waitress assisted.

“...plants on this planet,” Monty finished.

“Well no, of course not,” Mr. Muxley laughed. “It only grows on Mekajs. But any sokugni class vegetation will do. I’m not picky.”

“We don’t have any plants that will help you if you set yourself on fire,” Monty revealed. “I hope you packed enough of your sap.”

“You’re telling me that you put objects in the same orifice out of which you speak every day?”

“That’s right.”

“Where does it go after that? How would it even evaporate?”

The two men looked away uncomfortably. The waitress went back to the counter and tried to forget the last five minutes.

“Answer me,” Muxley demanded. “What happens after you do this strange eating food thing?”

Two minutes later, Mr. Muxley burst out of the bathroom and ordered them to take him away from that wretched place. “I want to go somewhere I haven’t seen before and that doesn’t make me want to tear my ears off and erase my memories!”

Mervin sighed. “Let’s try the space needle,” he suggested. Click here for the next installment...