Hunting Napkins in E-MinorA Story by Gaston Villanueva Glorifying the ordinary In Germany, they say that if you are bad at games then you are good at love. Who am I to judge, outloud. I’m bad at both. What’s great about turning twenty-one is that I can finally go back to the DMV and take a better driver license picture. It’s quite daft, however, to make me travel overseas and through six galaxies because, in their words, “Heaven isn’t open after midnight.” I walk into a Sieben-Elf and there’s an adult-sized purple behind the register. He’s towing away two customers: a beef jerky named Fabian and a ghost with a ponytail named Caspar. I tell him to stop and he says that if I take them to Kalifornien then I can have a free cherry Slurpee. The sheep are breeding. I agree. I introduce myself to them and Fabian informs me that he doesn’t like s’mores. Caspar is dressed very formally but only from the waist up. I walk to the frozen fruit section of the shop and wave down a taxi. A white suburban pulls up and the driver is eating pizza with her hands. Americans ate pizza with their hands as a way to rebel against the English. Her name is Rana. She tickles us with words and the three of us rotate with our responses. I wish Play-Doh tasted like it smelled. We tell our driver, Rana (our taxi driver), that we need to get to Kalifornien and that time isn’t our friend. Caspar says that they are late for the ninth annual Alphabet High School Reunion. Rana frowns. Rana smiles. Rana puts the pedal to the metal both figuratively and non-figuratively. Kalifornien is multiple cosmos’ away and we head into the first one. The view is fuzzy and green at first but the pseudo atmospheric redundancies quickly subside. Our taxi is now a bowling ball and we are second in line for lift off into the next cosmos. The bowling ball in front of us is hand-painted and mimics that of a human eye. There’s a hypocrisy in inanimate objects trying to be more like humans. Fabian the beef jerky watches the ball get a spare. Rana says that she feels uncomfortable doing this inside job and leaves. A flight attendant named Squidney takes command of our bowling ball and tells us a little about herself. She tries to be funny but her and I don’t get each other’s sense of humor. Here we go! The engines start to roar and Squidney is singing about the Little Rascals, I think. We bowl a strike which is a literal one up to the spare bowled by those who went before us. Caspar says he needs to go to the hospital because something is hurting him and that he’ll meet us in a couple of eons. The cosmos unzips and we float into the next mass of space while surrounded by games of Texas Hold ‘Em and PayDay candy bars. It’s dark outside. Fabian is relieved Caspar isn’t here because sometimes he becomes a belly. Ich bin ein Berliner. My circadian rhythm has gone rank and I receive a text message on my cracked phone. It says that I’ve been tying my shoes wrong my whole life. Squidney pulls to the side of the milky road and begins to snack on Nutella-dipped pretzels and a fruit smoothie containing numerous fruits, frozen peas, and granola. She offers some of it to me and I say no thanks. Et tu, Brute? Fabian* says yes please. Please is manipulative. She accidentally spills her smoothie and Fabian cleans the chair with a rag. There’s a dead fish by the bathroom. We’ve gone from second to second to last. I need to sleep at 11:00 pm because I have soccer try-outs in the morning. We’ve travelled through at least seven/eleven universes and Caspar is now back with us. We’ve also picked up a vegetarian female M who goes by Emma. She engages in conversation with us every so often but is committed to finishing a book she brought called “Uncommon Sense.” She finishes it. I tell everyone about the time I had spaghetti with a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Whoever designed that clothing style must’ve become rich because what wolf wouldn’t like a disguise as ingenious at that? Why didn’t sheep disguise themselves in wolf costumes? The humans are hibernating. Emma wonders who invented the deck of cards. The ace is above the king. We finally arrive to the Alphabet High School Reunion. None of us are letters except Emma but she’s so cool that the bouncer let’s us in with her. The first thing we do is take a picture. Squidney’s on the left and Emma’s on the right. What a surprise! Rana is here too! She tells me the punch is soft, like Egyptian cotton. All the letters are deep in discussions and they all seem to have weird Otterpop personalities. Z has self-incarcerated himself. G still doesn’t end his questions with question marks. U is all dressed up and has nowhere to go. E died from Seppuku, or was it too much Sudoku? There’s artificial blood in the attic. L and F are munching on the appetizers and exchange their recipes for disaster. Emma is dancing with T and P hands me the class yearbook. It’s just a bowl of alphabet soup. O and N are looking over my shoulder and whispering “James Bond Washington led the white coats across the cafeteria.” We’re all having a blast until Caspar asks me what I was doing in Germany in the first place. Then I realize that I never took my driver license photo.
© 2015 Gaston VillanuevaAuthor's Note
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