My Bad Day

My Bad Day
by Tevia Wall
Today was a bad day. Not only was it bad, it was downright weird and freaky. I am generally a very early riser. I like to exercise in the morning, you know, get the lungs going and the blood pumping. Not today. I slept in till nine o’clock, really unheard of for me. So, I got out of bed, my head stuffed full of snot and my vision blurred from my eyes itching like crazy. It seems I got served with a cold and allergies simultaneously. I stumbled into the bathroom only to realize that my period decided to start five days early. What luck. The only upside to that was confirmation I wasn’t playing host to a parasitic embryo.

Like I said, I stumbled into the bathroom, and for some strange reason I had my mobile phone with me. It’s not uncommon that I take my phone into the loo with me, I like to play Words with Friends as I sit there doing my business. Everything was going fine until I turned to flush. My stupid phone somehow jumped out of my hand and into the toilet. Crap! I was so pissed I said a swear, another thing I don’t often do. I reached in quickly and grabbed it out of the swirling water, thinking that I should have just stayed in bed entrenched in the weird dream I had been having.

I took apart the phone, removed the battery and assessed the damage, or whatever, I really didn’t know what I was doing at all. I sat on the bench in front of the sink with my hands in my head. How was I to know what I was supposed to do today? My phone had my whole life on it. I had long since stopped writing things down on a calendar, relying only on my stupid device to direct me each day. I wanted to cry, but knew that if I did, my head would swell to the size of a watermelon and produce even more snot than it already was.

I heaved a very big, very moist sigh and stood up. I grabbed my mobile, battery in one hand, casing in the other and was startled to see a little spark of electricity jump from the battery to the phone casing. My hands were suddenly clenched tightly to each piece, as if they were clamped onto the bits of plastic and metal. Once again I saw a spark jump from the battery and felt a tingle start in my fingers and move up my arms. A thought ran through my head in a nanosecond, “I wish I had a bra on!” In the time it took to blink I went from my bathroom to the edge of a tall cliff overlooking a vast canyon in the middle of what seemed to be a dry summer storm.

The wind howled around me, whipping my nightshirt against my legs. Lightening flashed, illuminating the scene in an electric purple glow. In mere seconds a crash of thunder rang out, echoing eerily off the canyon walls. I dropped to my knees, and scuttled frantically away from the edge of the cliff. In that brief flash of lightening I had seen a terrifying sight, a mordicant! How was that even possible? How could I possibly be at or close to the seventh gate? There wasn’t even a river flowing nearby, so I couldn’t figure out how a mordicant could even be in the desert. If I only had remembered to grab my bells, or at the very least my pan pipes I could somehow protect my self against this horrific creature.

I looked down and saw my hands still clutched around my mobile phone and I was brought back to reality, or a semblance of reality. I wasn’t being chased by a mordicant at all, and I wasn’t actually a character in the book I had been reading before I went to bed that night. I was confused at how I could be hunkered down under a scrub bush in the desert.

A lizard sidled up to me, licked the air, then crawled onto my bare foot. It sat for a moment, then scurried up my leg and onto my knee, looking me right in the eye. We sat, staring at each other for what seemed like hours. My thoughts wandered randomly all over my brain, and when they finally began to become cohesive once more, the lizard jumped onto my other knee and started singing. For such a small creature it sang in such a deep, beautiful baritone. I didn’t understand the words, but peace and calm came over me as his voice floated through every empty part of my soul. I hadn’t realized there was so much emptiness inside of me. I wanted to weep, but remembered that I didn’t want to have more snot to deal with, so I kept it all inside. I closed my eyes, wanting to keep that full feeling as long as possible.

When I opened my eyes I was surprised as my surroundings had changed yet again. I was sitting on the edge of a grassy mound looking at a large circle of stones in the middle of a field. The sky was a strange greenish hue and the stones glittered in the light of two suns. If I didn’t know better I would swear I was at Stonehenge, but in some weird alternate universe. I heard a commotion to my right and looked over to see a young girl dressed in a white, flowing gown with a crown of absinthe on her head being dragged across the field towards the circular structure. She was fighting against the throng and I could smell so clearly her fear, mingled with the bitter herbs crushing against her sticky brow. The mob closed in tight around her, their filthy stench overpowering her fear.

I gasped in horror as a fat, round man broke away from the crowd and headed directly towards me on my grassy mound. In his eyes burned the passion of the devil, deep, dark and hungry for murder. He moved quicker than I imagined a man of his girth could move and was upon me in moments. He yelled to the crowd and four other men broke away to help him drag me next to the young girl.

I started screaming, but I didn’t cry. I screamed the same words over and over, but nobody seemed to understand what I was saying. Why couldn’t they understand I wasn’t a virgin! I would ruin their sacrificial offerings. I knew all the stories required the sacrifice of a virgin and I was definitely not a virgin! But they forced me to lay face down on slab of rock. The surface was sticky, like it had been used recently for a sacrifice. I screamed again, flailing my limbs, not wanting to feel the sting of the crude dagger pierce the flesh through my back to lodge within my heart.

A hush fell over the crowd and I knew my life was over. I waited for the blow, but it never came. I opened my eyes and saw my mobile was glowing in my hands. Small strings of electric energy jumped playfully from the battery to the casing. The crowd was mesmerized by the tiny blueish-purpley strings. I moved my left hand closer to my right hand, hoping that I could somehow connect the two parts and make something happen that would save me from this fate. The two pieces were within centimeters of each other and I skipped locations once again.

I looked down and saw that my nightshirt was speckled with  blood from the sacrificial stone I had narrowly escaped. When I pulled my eyes away from my shirt, I realized right away where I was. An enormous ape was batting a barrage of single prop planes away from him while holding onto me, dangling me over a thousand feet above the cold, hard concrete of New York City on the Empire State Building. Fantastic. I didn’t even like this movie and here I was, grasped in the stinky, sweaty palm of a giant ape. I didn’t scream. I didn’t flail around and try to wriggle out of his grasp. I merely hoped my stupid phone would take me somewhere else less cliche.

Instead, my day got worse. He dropped me. The big oaf dropped me and I plummeted down, down past every story of that building and I went right through the ground, as if it were nothing more than a pile of feathers. Down, down until I became so bored with falling through the darkness that I remembered I still had my phone parts in my hands. Instead of trying to put them together, I thought instead of where I might possibly want to end up after this interminably long fall. I thought about wanting to brush my teeth. I longed for a toothbrush. A fresh, new, out of the box toothbrush and a brand new tube of toothpaste. The fluorescent green toothpaste that was only on shelves for a few months, even though it was the best tasting toothpaste I had ever had in my life. I would brush my teeth for hours just to get the acidic taste  out of my mouth  after having been dropped off the Empire State Building.

My descent ended abruptly. My teeth rattled in my head and I looked down and saw that I had landed on a pile of skulls. Next to the pile of skulls was a glass case full of brand new toothbrushes and next to that was a glass case full of toothpaste. I waded through the skulls and breathed against the glass. I drew a smiley face, then a sad face, then a crazed looking face. I smiled and grabbed a skull and started bashing it against the glass. The skull shattered in my hand and I grabbed another, and another and another. I broke every skull in the room against that glass box and I never even scratched the glass. I turned my back to the glass box and slid down its side, surrounded on all sides by broken shards of skull.

I started to cry. I cried for my broken phone. I cried for the lizard by the edge of the canyon. I cried for the girl who died on the sacrificial stone. I cried for the big stupid ape that dropped me off the Empire state building. I cried for the darkness that enveloped me and dragged me down to the skulls. I cried because all I really wanted was that heavenly fresh taste of new toothpaste in my mouth.

My head swelled up. My nose dripped unreasonable amounts of snot onto my knees, which had drawn themselves up against my chest. My eyes burned like hot coals. My ears were plugged beyond belief. I didn’t try to wipe anything away. I just let them all flow out of me. When I finally heaved a big, gigantic sigh, I knew I was done. I could hear birds chirping off in the distance. They were getting louder and louder, and I felt something prodding me in the back. I turned over and realized my alarm was going off and my husband was trying to get me awake enough to turn the darn thing off!