Have a Nice Day
by Kevin Monko
I crawled out to join Mac on the motel balcony just in time to
witness Chollie Mailbox, a remarkably agile fellow for someone
displaying so noteworthy a girth as to earn him his shapely surname,
temporarily eclipsing the dawn with the picture perfect execution
of a three-point, three-story butt-flop into an empty swimming
pool that left a sizable chunk of ol' Chollie's half-spent brain
impaled on a hunk of backbone protruding from a perforated section
of his shimmering scalp.
Several minutes or so must have passed before I came to understand that Mac had finally managed to stop laughing not because things ceased to strike him as funny, but rather due to the fact that a wad of breakfast gristle he had inadvertently inhaled during the course of his normally furious attack of uproarious hilarity had lodged quite perfectly behind his esophagus and would prove to be the primary motivating ingredient in the process that would lead to the creation of the hairy, swollen, and richly glowing magenta spheroid that was currently Mac's head.
Mac always was kind of a funny bird, sort of a loner, so when he didn't respond to my offer of a slug of beer, but instead casually released most of his bodily fluids and relaxed into a motionless pile of soiled long-johns. I took this as a signal that he wanted to be alone to enjoy one of the private moments that he always cherished so.
The girls were still asleep when I slipped back into the room,
so I gathered my gear and split, leaving them the motel bill as
a memento of my appreciation.
I left Ve and Dixie's Motel full of myself but hungry just the same. At Fat Ida's, Fat Ida hooked me up with my standard Barnyard Breakfast Combo, but when I'd finished my loaf of scrapple and a half dozen hard-boiled eggs, Miss Fortune threw me a wicked curve.
There, at the bottom of a large tumbler of orange juice I'd just polished off and then drank, was the most disgusting thing I can ever remember seeing. Lying there, as if defying me not to puke, was, as big as life, a good two two-and-a-half inches of human hair. I mean, Jesus Christ, I felt like somebody threw a hot hibachi in my face and opened my spine with an icicle.
I bolted for the door and whited out as I hit the street. When I came to, the surrounding sidewalk was all agleam and aglow, awash in barnyard bile, and all passers-by avoided me with gusto, detouring along the gutter and glaring at me as if my face was one huge festering chancre with a sizable portion of shit in the center.
Honest to God, some days it don't pay to get out from under the bed.