Whistling Past a GraveyardA Story by Gaston Villanueva The moments leading up to my story C'est La Vie 10:30 am August 9, 1945 Nagasaki
The lady with eyes as blue as azurite positions herself in the seat in front of me and she smiles. If I recall, I believe she says her name is Anna but my mind is elsewhere, chasing the cursive words of the menu like a lost puppy. My. Head. Hurts. Cursive writing is a dying art form, my thoughts desiccated by consumption of the 606 while she drinks some white wine. Call me Gaston. Clint Eastwood is sitting at the table next to me and I overhear him asking a waiter to bring out the chef. I look up and try to force a smile because I can’t tell if she’s hitting on me. I’m direct with her. “The doors are open if you can understand the me and I understand the you.” She laughs and shakes her head. She tells me that she’s not interested in getting to know me. That she only wants to ask me some questions. At first the questions are simple and I respond rather bluntly. I’m a sober alcoholic. I played intramural Frisbee in college. I’m a disaster of a human. But then she whistled a remark that stimulated my interest. For the right price of course, if you tell me your worst nightmare, I can help you experience it. And then, you’ll cease to remember it. Like a ripened peach, I step out of the airport having just returned from war. Call me Alvaro. I enter the local grocery store to pick up some ice cream, waffles, cheese, and steak. Clueless to my surroundings, I have no idea that I’m surrounded by corn. There’s corn in almost everything, in same way or another. I debate on what flavor of ice cream I want, something that famous individuals like Albert Einstein also did. I toss my opinion in the freezer and dethaw a box of mint ice cream. Harmonic sounds tease from inside it and I tear off the lid. Life’s a fad. Blind-folded and groggy, I can only assume I’m back in war. My heart is pounding and I shoot at air. As if asleep in a dream, I can’t take off the blind fold. I can hear sounds of war and smells of mint. I run, oblivious to its implications. My gun is melting. I can feel it. I can feel my gun melting and the liquid anguish bonds with my flesh. The smell is overwhelming and I’m disoriented. Am I even fighting against anyone? I move, zig-zag, and feel my way through the murky forests of Vietnam and I vomit. The vomit lassos onto my right leg and it drags me on the ground which now feels like plastic. I hear children laughing and finally manage to remove my blind fold. The jovial expressions on the children remain cemented on their faces and one eagerly asks me if I’m part of the war game. I look around. I’m in a McDonald’s Play Place but the smell of mint lingers. A clinking of wine glasses initiate the festivities of my 22nd birthday and I steer my yacht off the shore of the Great Barrier Reef. Call me Max. The database administrator of a highly successful company and surrounded by meaningful humans, life is good. Reality isn’t meant to be understood. I’m wide awake and won’t fall asleep at the wheel. Suppose Christopher Columbus had fallen asleep at the wheel. Looking out to the sea, I comfortably listen to the sound of ideas migrating between the intellectuals behind me. I finish my serving of wine. I set my wine glass down under my bed and uncork more euphemisms. White in color, the liquid reaches the top of my glass. If all the ice in the world melted today, sea level would rise by 270 feet. I take a sip, then another. It tastes like sea water and my friend tells me that it is, in fact, sea water. Oblivious to its implications, we all drink the sea water and continue to celebrate my birthday. An hour passes and as quickly as we reached the end of the bottle, my yacht begins to sink as well. Now underwater, it goes lower and lower and lower and lower and lower and lower and lower and lower until it gets lodged into a deep ocean trench. Alone now, a collection of logistical information intertwine me in sea weed and I want to hide from what’s happening under the bed of my mind but I can’t. Muffled by the water around me, my despair goes unheard when my knee caps are injected with bioluminescent white wine. The pain causes me to feint. I wake up to a jovial child laughing at me because she accidentally broke a glow stick on my shorts. Its glow-in-the-dark insides drip down my thighs and coagulate on my knees. Alone in my cabin, I advance by means of destruction, oblivious to its implications. Call me Alex. Influenced by Rocky Balboa, I’ve been in this cabin working out and preparing for my upcoming fight with Chet Sheinkner for the past month. How much of our actions are controlled by our subconscious? Being successful in the fight club has become my priority, my dream, my objective. I kneel down to tie my shoe and notice that my shoe lace has words on it. The sun has a fever. My cabin heats up and its composition runs amuck. Like yarn unraveling, the wooden beams twirl and graze as if possessed by egos. They contort to engineer a ring and send out a poorly knitted rendition of myself who fights in southpaw. A walking paradox. Never fathoming that a fight club would fraternize with a knitting club, I take the audacious risk of partaking in the main event. The aroma of Philly cheese steak imposes itself in the fight as well. Penned in the corner, the yarn doppelganger cuts me in half to see how many rings I have inside me. Using his superb and craveable skills in dendrochronology, he identifies me as being 22. The bell sounds and the fight is over. The sound of my alarm clock clamors and I lunge at it with an uppercut to hit the snooze button. I’d rather sleep more than go to class and give my presentation on colony collapse disorder. I see through Anna’s eyes. I tell her I don’t know if I’d want to pay for something like that. The chef appears in front of Clint Eastwood and he introduces himself as Charles Manson. Clint tells him that his dish of discomfort and fear is cooked to perfection. I pause for a moment and notice the time is 11:00 am. I tell Anna that I’ve changed my mind and she jovially tells me I won’t regret it. I look up at the sky and see an American plane, oblivious to its implications.
© 2015 Gaston VillanuevaAuthor's Note
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4 Reviews  Last Updated on September 8, 2015 Tags: schizophrenia, cabin fever, ptsd, psychology Author
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