On a Happy October Night
by Thea

“‘Try it,’ he said. ‘It’s happy.’ So I put it on my tongue and it wasn’t like acid or shrooms either or X or opium or anything I’d ever done - but I’ll tell you it made the world swim for the first six minutes, but not in the alcohol-induced way, in a different kind of way, like every single detail of everything I saw and felt and smelled was trying to reach me and make some fuller deeper meaning more apparent... then it faded away and I wasn’t there in the parking lot, I was on some vast gray windshield, and the windshield wipers, huge mother fuckers, kept passing by, kind of through me, like a trick of the light almost. A great big swoosh and roar they went by and then a moment later came back, rhythmically, back and forth - you know how windshield wipers do - only on such a scale that they were more like fog going in and out of the bay. There was someone else there too and I think it was God although it looked a lot like a chinchilla and smelled kind of like sex and melted strawberry ice cream on the sidewalk on a late-summer-early-fall day... and it didn’t really talk it just passed me a joint and said things in large deco-style floating newspaper print that floated by and was washed away by the roar of the wiper blades. The words were, ‘Don’t fear the new dawn. -SWISH- The Universe is only of the Communist flower - the one that smells like cheese. -SWISH- Remember death is temporarily forever. -SWISH- And how’s your mother doing? She was a good lay... back in the day- -SWISH-’ I almost socked ‘im in the furry muzzle for the last one but he put on an old vinyl album and the song was soft and hard and beautifully disturbing. I don’t remember any of the words, I wish I did, but slowly reality came back and the gray became raindrops and the windshield wipers were in front of me, normal sized again, and I got the feeling I was moving, and realized I was in a car... and then some sort of sleep came over me like a real black fog, and now I’m here. I’ve just been watching you kids walk by all night and laugh and steal each other’s candy, and you’re the first who’s stopped to say ‘hello’.”
The four-foot-two codfish on the bus stop bench sat next to a guy with a pierced nose who looked between eighteen and twenty-three, who had just finished talking. He looked up from his twiddling thumbs at the rubbery face of the codfish for a moment.
“...My mom told me not to talk to strangers...” it said, and picked up it’s bag.
“Ok... well, thanks for the candy corn...” The codfish started walking away, pace picking up to a run as it disappeared further into the dark.
“Have a good night!”