Shake Well

by Joshua Brown

Woman undressed sits comfortably on a high-backed wooden antique chair. Since the grandfather clock is at a standstill, she can do nothing but brush out all the knots in her ass-length hair and create a stunning self-portrait in the mirrorverse for those who exist out of time. The completed image on non-eternity lends itself to the asphalt flame which lights a man’s cigarette. Extinguishing this match erases the beauty that never was and gradually the world is set back into motion.The smoking man’s most distant memory is of a slice of bread. And how when his mother picked it up and ate it, it dawned on him that that slice of bread could never resurface. And how he cried. Today he felt like the Pinball Wizard. On a deserted sidewalk in mid-afternoon he had come across the twist-off top to a plastic bottle. Red lettering on bright yellow read “Shake Well.” He had greeted every individual this day by holding the bottle top face out in his palm, wordlessly pointing to its inscription. After leaning forward and squinting, each person who crossed his path had dutifully shaken their money-maker, just for him! He’d never known such ridiculous power over others. Right now he viewed a milky sunset through chintzy lace curtains from the diner booth where he sat by himself. Beneath the windows was a ’50s-style mini-jukebox that wasn’t really supposed to work. It was just there for decoration. Flustered, but not impatient, he pressed the brown-with-white-lettering service button, and out came an inflatable waitress with a roadkill-with-lipstick-and-blush face and a Lee Press-On body. The woman he decided to regard as Flo poured more ice water into the plastic glass that he’d only taken one mini-sip from. “You’re a saint,” said he. “A nun. A motherfucking monk with tits!” She looked at him like Benji, head tilted inquisitively to the side, and let him know that heroin-cakes were on special this evening. He thanked her for the information, but decided to opt instead for the corned-beef hash and scrambled grapes. He tapped the inch-long ash from his cigarette into the square glass ashtray. When Flo had jotted his order onto the green “Guest Check” pad and moved on to the next booth, the man made his way to the diner’s unisex bathroom. Locking the heavily smudged off-white door behind him, he began stroking his purplish member gently in front of the mirror over the sink, pondering the day’s conquests. He imagined his waitress finger-fucking herself with those fake nails and sensed a newfound respect for the woman growing. Not bothering to zip up, he took two final drags off his cigarette, turned on the hot water, and ran the butt underneath its stream. Then he tossed the wet filter into the shin-height trash receptacle in the corner overflowing with used brown paper towel strips. This motion inexplicably caused a pins-and-needles sensation to occur all through his body, making him faint and bang his head limply on the filthy, wet tile floor. When he gingerly stood back up, on the dimly shiny light green-painted wall appeared a line drawing of the picture-perfect woman who had been the flame that lighted his cigarette. In no uncertain terms she let him know that she loved him even though, in her opinion, he was hopelessly lost. More than a bit flipped out, he stuffed his limp protrusion back in his pants and stumbled out into the claustrophobic hallway. Not wanting to revisit that milky sunset scene and having grown a newfound aversion to corned beef hash, scrambled grapes, and a perpetually full glass of ice water, he walked up to the steel doors of the kitchen in hopes of finding a back way out of this place. He glanced in through oily plexi-glass windows outlined in black rubber. The coast looked clear enough. The kitchen staff was with him in his desire to waltz right out the back door, although they had all become irretrievably addicted to the sadness of the place. Making his awkward way among hanging pots and pans, time got stickier and the air turned into transparent molasses. The workers, clad in greasy white aprons, the skin beneath their glassy eyes permanently purple/black, turned to him in super slo-mo. The older Chinese man with thinning hair whose words did not match the movement of his lips blurted, “There goes another one.” He reached the back steps and looked around in dazed wonderment. This netherworld was exactly as he had pictured it when he sat on the bed in his basement room as a teenager, playing Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda while listening to out-dated heavy metal acts. The sky was uniformly medium-gray and the ground was filled with mysterious vegetation in all the colors of the rainbow. Only the diner remained as it was. He would later cross paths with a few earthly acquaintances of his, who were more confused about where they were and how they had gotten here than he was. He didn’t think as a matter of principle. They would be ambushed by denizens of this dreamworld, who are expert fencers. They had fenced before with Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson and would ask if any of them were up to the challenge. The smoking man would volunteer and find that plunging a sword into their bodies was very much like piercing Silly Putty. After the getting-to-know-you part, the natives would tell the intruders that they planned on killing them since they were obviously useless beings in this world and no one is allowed back into the world they had known. The smoking man would then give the most inspired speech of his life, that he hadn’t entered a parallel universe to die when there was so much to learn. This would distress his acquaintances visibly, and the smoking man would run and not look back. Nobody would move to stop him. He would climb over a series of ten-foot high cliffs, feeding his anxiety with the Halloween candy corn kernels that grew freely among the grass. Wondering all the while, “Did I really just kill those guys? Was it avoidable?”