A wolf ate the
moon, and all hell broke loose.
I, twenty minutes
prior the aforementioned event, lived at the University of Central Florida in
Orlando, where I planned to eventually major in film.
I lived in my car,
which I moved every few hours to avoid parking tickets. It seemed that the
school didn’t like you to park your car there until after you enrolled in your first class.
I showered in the
UCF gym (it offered a wonderful, cylinder-shaped climbing wall). I sort of
dated the girl who checked IDs at the gym, so I could sneak inside after five
pm, Monday through Friday.
A lot of school
clubs let me join up with them, despite the fact that I didn’t technically attend school yet.
I worked as a dog
groomer on the weekends. I often felt amazed my boss never fired me. I figured I
could learn how to wash and trim a dog as I went, but I seemed to only get worse at
it.
I would often
place a mirror in front of my four-legged customers, and they would regard
their reflections with sincere pity directed at (they assumed) some other dog.
My smartphone
awoke me from the backseats of my Volvo. Three pm. Time to meet with the
Multicultural Book Club (I served as its vice president).
I yawned so hard,
I though my jaw would dislocate. I heard what sounded like harp music. I
stretched, smelled my shirt, and decided I didn’t need to change it. I locked
my car/apartment and headed towards the school library.
I neared the
stairwell that would lead me to the bottom of Parking Lot B. I noticed,
as I did, a man who wore a rooster’s head.
Let me clarify. I
did not see a man who held the
decapitated head of a chicken. Nor do I mean that I saw a man who wore a mask. The
head of an actual rooster rested on this man’s shoulders where a proper head
ought to sit.
Let me clarify
further. The rooster head I witnessed did not exist in dimensions proper for a
human being. It looked the same size as that you would find on an average-sized
rooster, yet it sat on the shoulders of an average-sized man.
The man played a
harp. He wailed on it, actually. Van Halen. That song about Panama.
Rooster Head stood,
feet spread wide. He leaned forward and banged his head in a circular fashion
while his fingers attacked the strings of his harp.
I wanted to ask a
few questions, naturally, but the other members of my book club wouldn’t
appreciate it if I arrived late.
I tucked my copy
of My Pet Goat under my arm, snuck
around Rooster Head, and darted down the concrete steps towards the ground
floor.
I headed, from
there, past the giant fountain into which everyone jumped every year and ended
up sick the next day. The library stood behind it.
The water in the
fountain looked a bit rosier than usual. Its center looked thick with blood. A
large dog with matted fur and six eyes stood within the pool. He growled at no
one in particular. His eyes blinked out of synch with each other.
This struck me as
odd, but again, questions could wait. I made, last New Year, a resolution to disallow
myself to grow distracted by everything around me. I always suffered from a
short attention span.
I sprinted around
the large fountain and headed up the wide walkway that led to the library’s
front doors.
An amused crowd
gathered around some guy in a brown robe—probably another religious job who
wanted to remind the students that they stood hell bound.
I hurried past the
crowd while the robed guy said, “Odin will come for his eye. He will fly from
the heavens on His reindeer and destroy all who stand between Him and his
prize.”
Hmm. That seemed
different.
I reached the
library’s automatic, front doors, but they didn’t open. I tried to move them
manually (as if I lived in the middle ages), but they still didn’t budge.
A wave of concern
washed over me. I couldn’t miss the meeting. I served as the vice president!
I checked my
cellphone. A text message awaited me:
Joey-
The library’s
closed today because the water fountains squirt acid and the books fly around as giant bats. The book club will meet at the football
stadium, instead.
-Trisha
I really needed to
get off my butt and ask Trisha out on a date. Not a single Zelda game ever
touched a shelf that she did not conquer within a week of its release.
That seems pretty awesome no matter how lazy her left eye grew (and that eye floated all over the place).
I headed for the
football stadium where the UCF Knights recently won a game against the
Washington Lazy White Bitches (sounds kind of racist to me).
I took about ten
steps in that direction before my attention snapped towards the library’s
roof (where I sometimes went to smoke pot and quote Yoda).
Another
rooster-headed man stood on this roof. He wore only a golden codpiece that I
suspected didn’t require nearly as much girth as it offered.
This second rooster
head held a harp high into the air and screamed, “Are you people ready to rock all night?”
The students
gathered around the robed man frowned and responded with “All night? We have
finals in less than a week!” or sentences nearly the same.
The rooster head
adopted a heavy metal guitarist’s stance before he set his harp to a fast-pace
wail (AC/DC).
Several fiery
comets swooshed from the sky (which
brewed to a dark scarlet, almost black, color) towards the medical center. Crash. The Earth shook beneath my feet.
A crater smoked
where the medical center once stood. Something roared from inside the crater. I wanted to investigate the source
of that roar—but my meeting started in minutes.
I ran towards the
football stadium. The ground trembled a few more times. I overheard glass
break, people scream, and something screech.
Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed. I
distinctly heard a young woman say, “Kraken.”
I neared the
stadium. Dwarves surrounded it.
They knelt and
cried words too vulgar to repeat. A large, round, flat block of stone sat on
the grass before them. I never before saw that block.
I noticed, as I
raced past it, that strange symbols glowed across the block. It shook. It rose to partially expose a wide tunnel beneath it. Something angry echoed
from the bottom of that tunnel.
I found my book
club five minutes later, seated in the stadium.
Trisha and the
other three members glared at me.
“You’re late,”
Trisha said.
I wanted to
apologize, but I couldn’t get my breath under control—plus, how could she hear
me over the sound of the sky, which snapped
in half right then?
A powerful wind
blew from the tear in the sky. I watched—while day quickly evolved to night—a
massive, wolf’s muzzle drip from the tear. Its lips pulled back to reveal a
harvest of slimy tentacles.
My attention
spilled towards the football field, where several strange people now faced each other.
Thick, silver
horns thrust sideways from one man’s head. Another guy gripped a claw hammer
half the size of a bus. A donkey’s head decorated another man’s shoulders.
The largest of
these people stood with a bloody hole where you would expect to see an eye. The
eye she still possessed glowed with golden light.
A dirty, red
rooster with a football jersey strutted onto the field, opened its beak, and,
in a spray of maggots, vomited a massive harp onto the ground.
The rooster’s
clawed feet plucked at the harp, played the opening theme from the Mortal Kombat movie (the good one), and
the army attacked itself.
To be concluded . . .
I publish my blogs as follows:
Tuesdays: A look at the politics of
the entertainment world at EntertainmentMicroscope.blogspot.com.
Wednesdays: An inside look at my
novels (such as Daughters of Darkwana, which you can now find on Kindle) at
Darkwana.blogspot.com
