Fresh Air From The Age

Letter Of Apology

"Letter of Apology"

So after this man drives off with his car with the bumper sticker on it I get to thinking: "Why the fuck do I have a face?"
And I woke up in a streetcar, still wondering about this man's face(or lack thereof). A small Asian woman glances over at me from her seat, the world outside zooming by. She does this several times and, finally, stands up and walks over to me. She's about a head shorter than me but this doesn't discourage her from standing inches away from my body. She digs into her purse, hears a plastic crinkle and takes out a fortune cookie. She smiles a toothless smile, her eyes become invisible and she hands the cookie to me. She then goes back to her seat. Perplexed, I open the cookie and inside it lies a white slip of paper, and on this paper there is text. It reads, "It starts here."
And I wake up in a hut of some sort. "It starts here?" I wonder about this fortune as I'm walking outside this hut. I seem to be on an island, more precisely, a beach. It is completely desolate and I start to wonder where I am. A few minutes pass and the sky turns gray, then dark gray, then a blue-ish dark gray. I walk to the hut, expecting rain. It begins to rain, only not water, but frogs. Well, toads to be precise. Toads are bigger, and these were huge. They land on the sand with dull thuds, many of them exploding to many pieces. Fearing a concussion via toad I head inside the hut. Only, I'm not protected there because the toads have already broken through the hut's straw roof. The last thing I remember was a swampy kind of smell. I suppose a toad made me it's bitch before dying.
And I awake looking at her. The smell of swamp is gone, replaced by nothing. A very bad feeling has gotten ahold of me, like someone standing on my chest. I find myself telling her that how sorry I am and how stupid I was. She looks at me like I killed her cat, so do her friends, surrounding her. I feel helpless and I can't breathe and I'm tired and there's no way to defend myself. I can't breathe, I can't breathe. I think I'm about to be lynched, maybe tarred and feathered. Where did I go? What have I done?

posted by Gary @ 10/30/2006 11:17:00 AM