On a midsummer night.

I guess I’m allergic to nickel. I’ve decided to forgo my belt with the nickel buckle for the last few weeks.
The second day in these jeans.

They don’t fit without the belt.

Sun long since departed. It’s around ten.

I take the stairs down to the 7-11, holding my pants up. I smell restaurants.

Out front is the strangest car I’ve ever seen.

Station wagon. Ghostbuster chic. The rear wheel wells horizontally dissected as part of a deliberate look.

It is clean and white, adorned with copious chrome accessories. Horns, lights, mudflaps and an
impressive array of antennae. Elaborate roof rack.

The dash is festooned with snow globes and religious idolatry. I look through the windows at animal pelts.

It’s an impossible vehicle, I’ve never seen one like it. Decade indeterminate.

It spooks me a little. Goose bumps and hair on end even though it’s warm, no breeze.

So I’m more than curious now about who must be inside. I need to catch a glimpse.

I walk in, and there he is.

Cheap straw cowboy hat, bright red shirt, so new you can still see fold lines from the package it came
in. Late fifties early sixties.

Tongue protruding and folded over his front bottom lip.  Pot belly. Thick fingers. Rings. Massive belt buckle.

Smells like cologne from a bottle with a wooden top.

Breathes loud through a nose crowded by his tongue and lips.

He’s doing absolutely nothing. Waiting behind garish sunglasses makes him look vacant.

I go about my business, gathering all four food groups. Sweet, sour, salt……………..fat.

Brand new stiff jeans. I know his thighs are blue when he shucks them at the end of the night in
whatever fleabag he’s in this week.

There she is.

She’s ladling toppings onto hot dogs. Gnats swarm above the condiments. She is scabbed over and
otherwise beat to shit.

She scares me. She lifts here huge black glasses onto her forehead of greasy hair the better to see.
Bruised, puffy and lacerated.

I feel insects in my hair, they drop around my ears and she notices. Looks at me and says “I know,
huh?”.

Her teeth are fucking black and green.

Crustaceans race wherever I have hair, even in my nose. I pull my shirt over my face and sneeze. I shiver at the sensation in my crotch.  I fucking itch.

Behind her at the register, I clock the sores on her elbows and breathe her for the first time. Rotten seafood under menthol cigarettes and some horrible
detergent smelling feminine deodorizer.

Red shirt cowboy grunts, peels a twenty off a wad.
The hygienically challenged clerk wrinkles his nose in
her cloud, he’s confused by her stink and who gets the change.

He rings me up.

I see them dancing in the parking lot. They bob like they’re listening to some waltz or maybe a polka.
Even out of the corner of my eye it’s disturbing.

I come out, the car is still there but, they are not. The wind gusts, it smells like rain.

Trash and leaves blow through the lot like it’s fall.

I turn the corner and there they are.

She’s got one stiletto planted on the alley asphalt and a bare foot, well behind her, up on the stucco.

She’s hiked her skirt up and her pinky fingers arc and sway like she’s dancing.  His face is in her crotch.
He’s singing and I realize he’s chewing.

A beard of maggots cover his face and drop on his shirt. They plop like fat rain drops.

“Ring Around The Rosie ………pocket full o’ POSIES!!!”

His corpulent fingers lock at the small of her back as he cackles. The larvae waterfall down his torso
and he burps through a mouthfull of squirming bugmeat.

I get all this in a glance. Barely a turn of my head. I keep moving and realize my pants are sliding down my thighs. I jerk them up simultaneously pulling
out my keys. The drums in my ears are making me mad with panic.

I can’t make the motherfucking cocksucking whore of a fucking key work and there are insects on the back of my head.

They’re all in my hair again.

On the back of my fucking head and down my motherfucking collar and wiggling moist at my fucking spine.

Pooling at the small of my back. Glistening and writhing. Sounds like someone stirring tapioca.

I’m a little fucked up. A couple big ass Sapphire martinis and a few bowls of green.

Through the first door and the bugs turn to sweat.

Then there’s two locked doors behind me and what I’ve just witnessed.

I begin to forget what I just saw. Kinda. Not Really.
I want to.

Fucking creepy. Up the stairs I wonder at some details.

Once inside my apartment, I head to the balcony and suck up an ultralight. I hit play on the Tivo and the final frontier of space saturates the screen.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise……

I am motherfucking creeped out.

If I call 911, what the hell do I say?

My brain shows me a vivid picture of beetles erupting from my cell phone. They shine like they’re oily and they click and crackle.

I stare at the deadbolt.

Three fingers of $75 armagnac in a tumbler.  One cube.

I’ve lived here a year and a half and no one has ever knocked on that door.

I never even bothered to have a telephone number assigned to the security system to allow me to buzz in a visitor. In a year and a half, less than handful of
people have been inside my apartment.

In a year and a half, no one has knocked or rung the doorbell.

Twenty four hour security. Banks of monitors fed by cameras.

As the doorbell rings I realize I’ve never heard it before. I mute the television and three quick blows to
the door rattle it hard.

I’m paralyzed looking out the peep hole. Confused, stupefied by the parallax of a fish eye lense.

“Michaeeeeel, got any cereal? Got any Fruuuuuuity Pebblessssss?” Like a carnival barker, expressionless behind garish shades.

His bright red shirt is blotched with perspiration.  His countenance is stone.  Unmoving.  His fat pale tongue folded over his lower lip.

She stomps her feet, points her maw straight up as she howls and cackles. The throat apple in her skinny white neck bobs and dances.

Licking his thumb, he peels a card off an over sized deck and studies it.

A sinister grin spreads, revealing perfect white Chiclets.  Tombstones.

He pushes his index finger straight through my perfect white door like a drill through pastry.

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