Cosmic Vomit

-Excuse me, Colin -I wanted to get at my mom, but I still hadn’t had my bowl of coffee.

Click. Click. Click.

Not only had she been rude to me, she had also taken her already alto voice to a new high, descending on me like a used-car escalator.

-Give me a prize, Colin. ¡Give me a freaking prize!

I grabbed a mountain of paper towels and, as Cinque is my witness, I brought my fangs down on my own hand.

Chester had a multi-tiered laugh at that one.

-¿What did you say, little cat? -My mom knew how to piss Chester off fast also-. ¿Did you say you were going to be soy meat in about... oh... six years?

Mom’s baritone voice knew no tact as it rode the escalator up to some ancient Mayan ruins, and then back down through some Inca temples.

Apart from the Mayan ruins, the hell-raising, and the mountain of paper work that passed for a thinking brain, Colin was, deep down, really a pile of pig mess that had been lit on fire and then taped to a goat.

Or, at least that’s how he smelled.

With a pie in his eye and a whip on his hip, if it weren’t for the metering and the constant badgering from my mom, Colin would’ve been getting on board the Mothership.

-¿What did you just think? -Colin asked.

-Here, pass the rat’s ass -I responded, trying to make my voice sound a tad normal.

Mom looked at me with her receding eyelids.

-You know that I would win any three-legged sack race. But, ¿did you know that sleeping is Michelle’s greatest talent, Al?

-No, it’s not. It’s making toast. But that’s apples and oranges -I said-. The point is, she’s about as athletic as a sand box.

¡Uh-oh! I had been counting on my enormous goiter and my fangs to keep me out of trouble. And yet here I was, in a big mess not dissimilar to playing Nintendo in a tent. I’m so out of hand, that the last time I was calm and collected was the first.

-I don’t want to kick all of your asses in the sack race because, believe you me, you won’t know what the fuck hit you. You’ll think you’ve just hit the median at 33^rd and 3^rd. You’ll be digging your faces out of your cereal bowls -Now Mom was doing advertisements.

Great. And I didn’t put my fangs in this morning.

-It’s true, Mom -I told her-, except for that part after “I don’t want to kick all of your asses”.

I had sent away to Mexico for my fangs, and for my hands, actually. This time they came to me warm. Last time they came to me cold, salted and in a plastic bag with a bunch of fingers.

-I’ll tell you what’s true -Mom replied-. If the government comes here they’re gonna have to pry those cold, salty fingers of yours off of my Quesadilla Tortellini.

Her fangs retracted into her gums. She put my cold fingers into a bag and zipped it shut. I never realized what a cheeky monkey extraordinaire my pedagogical mom had become.

-Stupendous, Mrs. Sterner -Colin said-. Even if you’re a little late on the delivery of that tired joke about Al’s mail-order fingers.

Then her fangs began protracting like a mannequin’s arm. Then it was the silence before the mom. Then, it wasn’t.

-Shut the José Martí up -Mom said, and she said it from the kitchen.

I didn’t move until I heard the whites of her eyes, and even then I only moved closer to the door. Everyone was looking at my fingers. Maybe it was because I had my fangs in the palm of my hands. Or maybe it was because I had just wiped a good amount of mucous on them.

-If you were me, you’d quit arming the Ecuadorian Army -She told Colin.

-What in the Cosa Nostra tanning salon are you talking about -Colin’s questions never came with question marks. But his Pope-like face and Bilbo Baggins complexion came with him every time, limping along like some kind of strange substance you just hungered to sink your fangs into.

When I finally left, tomorrow had come and gone, which wasn’t my fault. I’m only responsible for how much sleep I don’t get.

It’s fricking freezing when you don’t have any corpuscles. Just damn cold. ¿And how cold would it be, when I left for college? I couldn’t decide, and that irked me. Finally, I agreed with my self that I was wearing cowboy pants and a lap dog shirt that I had put on because the metering system couldn’t detect it.

And now I had to wear socks and shoes. And Mom made me use soap when I washed. And recorded my showers on video “so I can check”. I say, ¿what the hell pesto kinda pesto is that?

It’s equality, she tells me. It’s because you’re always late. It’s because your socks smell like they’ve been worn every day since Anteaters Day. It’s because your shoes are my shoes and that’s why I’m always looking for them.

I told my self to be calm and I told my self to wash my socks. And later I told my self to get my self some new shoes.

I’m as tall as any man one moment, and 3 feet high and rising the next. ¿What will I be tomorrow? And, ¿why does it matter what latitude I’m at?

That kind of thinking will get you a pie in the shoe. It gives me a strange feeling. The feeling that everyone owes me a dollar. And that’s one strange feeling.

-Al, your date is here -My mom told me.

I pushed on one shoe and scraped pie from the other. I walked to the kitchen, grabbed my toupee out of the drying rack, and put it on.

To my despair, it wasn’t a date, it was Michelle, and she wasn’t working per diem. What she was working was giant shadow casting against a sea of giant ant eater people.

I looked right at her with eyes that swayed like a pair of trapeze artists, high on Novocain.

-Idiot -Michelle said right past my entrails, straight to my jugular, bypassing the grime in my eyes.

-Michelle, ¿why don’t you go fuck your self with a hand-made dildo?

And that was Mom, smoking the oregano once again.

-That’s right, Michelle -Dad was right there with her, toking madly away-. You might as well fuck your self, because you’re going to have to educate your self.

-But his shoes. ¡Look at his shoes!

-¿Are shoes really all that important? -I asked- ¿What about being a lesbian pissant?

Dad laughed at that one. I was counting on him no more than ever to help stem the time of the rising international waters.

¡-Oh, my Christ! -Mom exclaimed-. Michelle is right.

They all looked at my shoes and gasped like they were dying of suffocation.