Sitting at the kitchen table, listening to old episodes of Monster Talk and posting images to Redbubble. Drinking a cold soda, and looking out the sliding-glass door...
I thought it was about nine o'clock, but NO! True, I'm getting old, but am I really SOOOO old that I can be tired and about ready for bed when it's not even six o'clock yet???
Yeah...
(He coughs, and lays his head in his hands. "Why?" he thinks. "Why would I bother to write this???" He shakes his head, and starts typing again.)
The table isn't levitating at all. No spirits haunting me, even though it's creeping close to Halloween. (I'm not sure who I can sue for this deficiency. I'll have to do some research.) Monsters? No. Not outside, anyway. (Except humans.) Need to buy some magic, somewhere....
My family is watching reality t.v. in the bedroom. I'm not that interested in reality.
Suddenly, the cereal boxes on the kitchen bar began to shake! They swiveled so that the icons on the front could stare at me, each of their eyes flashing red. I don't feel hypnotized (but if you're hypnotized correctly, you won't feel like it.) I suddenly have the urge to eat sugary snacks! I resist...
Strange, occult forces make the Kalama River run white, and Mount St. Helens rumbles. Squirrels discuss their options, rabid slobber dripping from their tiny teeth. Bats swoop and spiders flex their stabbing feet, sending ripples of movement across their graveyard-like webs. An ancient warrior, frozen in tundra but whose icy coffin is thinning, feels his heart begin to beat for the first time in two thousand years. My leg, propped up on a kitchen chair, tingles from a lack of blood-flow. And somewhere in Montana, a man shivers in his recliner and believes he's forgotten to return something vital to his refrigerator---but he is wrong!
A shadow crosses the moon, but that's nobody's fault, not even the Romans.
(The writer coughs and reaches for his soda. He wonders if Bigfoot has a reliable retirement plan, and if vampires could possibly be a form of intelligent vegetable. No smoking indoors, please...)
Devil Duck spreads his wings. The government is purchased for the third time that week, as a present for a new doctor of philosophy who would have failed most of his classes if he parents hadn't paid off the school. His doctoral thesis was based on his own, unpublished novel, and tried to suggest that THOUGHT is actually a form a currency, although his argument was easily dismissed by the fact that he didn't spell the word "thought" correctly. "Thot." Stupid dumb-shit. Stupid, rich dumb-shit. (Interestingly, instead of writing "thot," if he had only written "Thoth," the name of the ancient Egyptian god of writing, his entire dissertation would have made perfect sense.)
A glowing figure in a long white dress, his dark, stringy hair billowing behind him from his thick skull, weeps on the back deck. I would throw some corn chips to him to snack on, but they're way across the room, and I'm pretty lazy. Besides, I think the corn chips are stale.
Never look under the couch---you just might find your entire past living there!!!
---Richard F. Yates
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