Cosmic Vomit

Whenever I’m counting the number of phone rings, I always lose track and start cursing like a sailor running through a door on fire.

I knew that Miss Scott didn’t like it when Eric was always late for class. But I had no idea how mad she could get. I just wanted to be home with my bedroom door closed and Ice Cube on the stereo, rapping about rottweilers.

Whenever I stopped thinking out doors always seemed open, and escalators never seemed to be running.

And every segue seemed to lead nowhere.

Segue to the voice of Eric in my head. I’m gong to kill your punk ass, Sterner. And then I’m going to throw you in jail.

And that made the hairs on my saber saw stand up.

During math class, Eric passed me a note. The note didn’t mention killing me specifically, but it did mention body parts and human sacrifice and people’s heads falling off.

I thought that it was a note from a very depraved and corkscrewed mind. A brain that had three working synapses. Maybe four. Five tops.

I loved feeling my pulse, it meant that I wasn’t dead yet. But if anyone was going to send me to the grave, it was probably going to be that atrophied piece of shit Eric.

Maybe he had grown another synapse and maybe my toupee would protect me from Eric’s red death. I knew I was looking desperate. I knew I was feeling desperate. But the moon was shining and I still had a spring in my face and the color in my step.

But then all I could see was Eric.

He pushed the moon aside and ran sideways through the sky, screaming that I was a pussy. Then he disappeared.

And he had done all that in semaphore.

Wait a minute. I don’t know semaphore and I left my shirt at home.

I ran like hell. And I didn’t look back. I didn’t even genuflect.

This is impossible, I thought. I’ve lived in Shadyside all my life. And now I was running from ghosts in the sky.

I looked in my Rolodex® and found the number to call Fear Street.

I called that number. Everyone in the world answered and said that Shadyside was also known as Fear Street. But I don’t remember anyone calling it anything, except maybe Big Lump Of Crap.

I ran from one house to the next. It didn’t help that I was panicking. And it didn’t help that I was miserable. And it couldn’t’ve helped that I kept running into strange people’s homes.

I looked in every direction. Hey, żwhen did they stop posting street signs? If I kept running in every direction at once, I was bound to tear my self into pieces, and one of those pieces was sure to run into Eric.

I decided to sit and spin. No. I decided to abandon the hem of my dirigible.

And I thought that my segues weren’t making it anymore.

Four synapses. Five synapses. Six. Seven. Eight. I could hear Eric’s synapses synapsing like carbon copies of saliva - all water, but no salt.

I had run out of places to run - unless I ran into the Fear Street Arboretum. I don’t remember the arboretum being named that. I remember it as the Shadyside Arboretum and Clean Neck Shoppe.

I can question my self all I want, as long as I don’t run into Eric, I thought.

I was in Silence of the Snails mode, and that meant I couldn’t run into anyone nowhere.

I stopped short of the Arboretum. It was tall and there were a lot of junkies standing around. The light from the moon was being filtered by Tupac Shakur’s gravesite. When there’s more of me and less of the dentist, that signals a major era of obscurity.

And it also signals the beginning of the Stop Turtle Harvesting season. And Eric never goes to school during Stop Turtle Harvesting season.

I heard a whole bunch of ghosts in the trees, and they were all looking at me. ˇOh, no!, I thought. It’s Eric. He found me. I’m hamburger meat.

I ran to the Arboretum’s entrance, and my piece of mind ran to the exit, fucking up my equilibrium.

I started flying through the air until it became clear that I was flying through the air, and then - ˇCHOF! - I fell into a rototiller of water in Lake Fear Street.

My shoes started speaking in tongues to me. My pie had finally congealed.

I ran like I had a gorilla for a chaperone. I ran on the water, I was running so fast. I couldn’t stop running. I ran until I was so cold that my pies were going 2 for 1. ˇYikes-A-Roni! Because if Eric is atrophying, he’s atrophying like a March Hare Contra soldier.

I heard footsteps.

I couldn’t stop running, so I ran faster, but the footsteps were calling to me like a Ricky Martin song about avalanches. It forced me to put down my pies and contemplate puking. It sounded like Eric’s shoes, and they were mojo’ing on down the line.

But Eric was poodling on down the line even faster.

It took two people to get my heart started again, and then God vaulted down from the heavens.