The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
Expected Them To Be Blue
1-23-2000

I got a phone call from N. She told me that she did receive my e-mail afterall, and she was happy to hear from me. She mentioned how we were "so attracted to each other" back in the day. It was nighttime, and I was about to go to bed in my childhood home, in my first bedroom before it became my sister's room. There was a knock at the bedroom door, and it was N. She sat down at the window. She told me about how she lived in Arizona now, and how she flew out to see me as soon as she could. She said her mom came with her, and that her mom would stay at a hotel while she stayed at my place for several days. I found this all very overwhelming and flattering. I started to talk about how weird this was, us getting to know each other now when we never really knew much about each other before. I looked into her eyes, and they were brown. I expected them to be blue for some reason.

I was in a mental hospital. Some guy was chasing me with a bloody axe. I kept on trying to get away from him, but I could never properly lock or barricade a door when I made it to another room. He finally cornered me, but I pulled a fast one and somehow made it through to another hallway, up through a gap in the ceiling that led to a staircase on the next floor, and out around outside. But somehow he was still behind me. He complained that I'd replaced his hands with someone else's, but I think he just never noticed that they were that way all along. I finally hid in a classroom, standing between two windows, concealing myself. There were others in the classroom as well. Someone was knocking on the transparent door. It was some other quiet guy. The crazy guy who was chasing me went frantic, trying to warn us that this quiet guy was a bigtime killer. I didn't know who to trust anymore. He ran off.

I grabbed his axe and went toward some kind of cave. I was with a large team on a mission, and we were in a very fantastical land. I watched Dirk the Daring run a sword through some balrog-looking creature. I saw a witch standing on a cliff, the evil twin of a woman in our group, and I heard someone far off call her an "old hag". We went through the cave. There was a complex set of doors that closed in on us. The two women used all their strength to keep them open, teaming up for the first time ever to save their own lives. A portcullis came down, too thick for even the strongest man in our group to bend. The ceiling started crashing down, and we were all trapped. I wondered how we got on this backwater part of the world anyway, and how we had so far to go. I went around a corner somehow and saw an automatic sliding glass door. People were behind it, sitting at high-tech consoles. One of them was a woman. I tried to pry the door open, but it was jammed. Eventually I did, however, with the help of my axe, much to the surprise of everyone in there. I grabbed the woman, told her I wouldn't hurt her, and pinned her arms such that she was hugging herself, her hands in my hands, with me standing behind her. I told her how I was a member of the FBI. She started to panic. I told her it was okay, and we were on a series of eleven long missions. This was mission number eight, and we were only about 1/3 of the way through. I told her we had to hack into the mainframe. Finally she conceded. I went back to the tunnel where my team was sitting at terminals, desperately hacking away as time ran out. We lost a lot of men, so we weren't at our hacking maximum. I looked at the readouts at time zero and deduced we didn't hack enough money from the system. The main man, someone like Samuel Jackson, was not pleased. I reread the readouts and figured that I was mistaken, and we did make the quota.

I got into a bus and started driving down the road in downtown GB. I had to go to the bathroom, so I put it on autopilot while I tried to relieve myself at a drain in the floor. But I couldn't go, and the bus was making stupid decisions. It passed by a place that I thought was a gay hangout at first, but it turned out to be a new video arcade. I figured it was about time Houston got some. Some other guy in the bus decided to park it and take up a lot of parking spaces.


posted by Phlegm at 11/25/2003