Coffee, Donuts, and Tiny Warriors

Being a self-loathing individual, I’ve always been on the lookout for someone who is my opposite to hang out with, so as not to have too much me on the premises.  When I met my friend Stella, I thought she seemed to fit that criterion very well.  On the surface, she was a perfect candidate for my opposite:  A gay Panamanian journalist with a good vocabulary and an outgoing personality was quite a ways off from me: a straight white American man who speaks in grunts, grumbles, and curse words.  On closer examination, however, we found ourselves to be incredibly compatible and the perfect partners in crime.

We bonded over a mutual respect for one another’s work, a love of genre fiction, and mind-bending conversation.  It was not uncommon for us to whittle away an afternoon on her porch or mine while we did bong hits, drank brown-bagged malt liquor, and read Tolkien passages aloud (not the cool Goblin King shit he wrote about, mind you, but those entire chapters that were dedicated to describing meadows and trees).  We talked of personal issues and universe-altering scenarios, we blew each other’s minds, and we always, without exception, stumbled off the porch knowing we’d had a day well spent.

Sometimes we met at a gourmet coffee shop in the Historic District of Downtown Fort Myers where we discussed hipster ideals while denying that we were hipsters and analyzed science fiction to a degree that would make Joseph Campbell roll his eyes and say “I think you might be reading a little too much into that, guys”.  We constantly walked the razor’s edge between being elitist douchebags and intellectual giants, the balance kept intact by the fact that I was the former and she, the latter.

One such morning, we sat at a rustic wooden table in the corner of the deck of our coffee shop, leaning against the railing that enveloped the wooden patio.  Only a few feet away a single tree crawled toward the sky and leaned its weathered trunk back and forth, the result of a few too many tropical storms.  Stella and I sipped richly roasted coffee and nibbled pseudo-fancy European cookies, delaying our inevitable dive into baskets full of donuts topped with maple icing and bacon.  Our table was cluttered with coffee-stained notepads and sketchbooks that we furiously scribbled on as we discussed the virtues of not owning a television.

The vision of Stella and I sitting across the table from each other was an exercise in charisma.  Stella wore capris, a tank top and a scarf, topping off the look with mirrored aviator sunglasses and a faux-hawk of rich black curls that formed themselves into a futuristic pompadour that only she could make look respectable by all standards.  By comparison, I wore very similar clothes: Cargo shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt, topped off by a five-day beard and thinning gray stubble across my skull, but the sum of these parts amounted to people assuming I was homeless and forcing their pocket change upon me. One of us could pull off the casual, don’t-give-a-fuck look with style and the other could only manage to look like he’d slept under the Midpoint Bridge the previous night.

I picked up my mug and raised it to my face, needing to wash down a mouthful of concentrated unhealthy when I felt a sharp sting on my left forearm.  I dropped my coffee, shattering the mug on the deck and splashing scalding bean juice all over my bare feet.  I looked down, expecting to see a wasp, honeybee, scorpion, or a pygmy vampire bat sinking its stinger/fangs into my arm.  What I saw instead was an arrow.  It wasn’t a full size arrow like those used in Olympic archery events and Robin Hood movies starring actors who can’t manage British accents, it was miniature.  My first thought was that this was perhaps a runaway dart from some kind of traveling pub that just happened to be wandering past with a handful of British soccer hooligans and an old-timer with a red nose, sad eyes, and a voice so distorted by a mixture of regional accent and ale-induced slurring, that no one had any idea what he was saying.  Sadly, a quick survey of our surroundings revealed no such traveling pub.  I looked at Stella who was not looking for a pub.  She wasn’t looking for even a single renegade hooligan who might be lurking about with a pint glass and a handful of darts.  Stella was looking up the tree on the other side of the railing.  Her voice had cut off right in the middle of her sentence about how even when she did watch TV, it was only PBS.

“Hold still for a moment,” she said calmly.  It hadn’t even occurred to me to do otherwise.

“Why?” I asked.

“Dude,” she said, still looking up, “look at your arm.  There is an arrow in it!  A tiny fucking arrow!  Things are happening here!”

Time has always been difficult for me to judge, mostly because the speed of the outside world differs greatly with the speed at which my brain turns itself over and over.  Couple that with my inability to quantify a concept as abstract as a “moment”, and I had no idea exactly how long I was supposed to sit without making a movement.

“Slowly turn your head,” Stella said calmly, “and follow the trunk of the tree up until you see it.”

I did as I was told and ran my eyes slowly up trunk of the tree, taking time to linger spots where the bark was stripped away or woodpeckers had drilled into the lumber.  I ran my eyes up to the lowest branch, which was a good six feet above our heads.  There, standing on the branch, its back to the trunk, was a ragged looking squirrel holding a tiny bow and arrow.  The small projectile was set nocked on the string, waiting simply to be drawn back and fired at us.

I come from the Midwest, where squirrels grow fat enough that a properly prepared one could conceivably feed a family of four.  Florida squirrels, by comparison, always seemed scrawny, weak, and pathetic to me; scavenging, foraging nuisance animals who served no purpose in nature except as a beast to agitate and annoy dogs through sliding glass doors.  This squirrel, the one eying us and wearing a tiny quiver of arrows on its back, was just as scrawny as the playful tree rats I’ve become accustomed to seeing in Florida, but this one looked different.  Its fur was matted and wiry, frayed in some places, absent and replaced with scar tissue in others.  It had a look on its face as it stared us down, telling us that it meant business.  This squirrel looked menacing.  It looked dangerous.  It looked like nothing that could be bought off with peanuts or seed corn.

“What the absolute f–,” I started.

“Do you see it too?” Stella asked.

“You’re talking about the armed squirrel, right?” I responded.  Stella hated when I answered questions with questions.  She hated even more when I answered questions with stupid questions.

Chikachikachikachikachik…

It was still early enough in the morning that a light mist from the nearby Caloosahatchee River hung over the place and worked to slightly mute some of the sounds around us, but the sound of a rattle cut through the mist and straight into our ear canals.  We kept looking at the statuesque squirrel with the bow as it stared back at us.  The rattle hadn’t come from the rodent, but it had come from its direction.

The rattle cut through the air again, this time longer, more sustained, more insistent.  My eyes slowly continued up the tree to the next branch up.  There, perched on the limb, were half dozen squirrels, similarly decked out in warrior garb as the tiny archer who had shot me.  They held tiny spears, edged weapons, and bows, and they all stared at us.

The one whom I presumed to be the leader of these tiny tree warriors held a long stick, on which were tied crow and mockingbird feathers along with pebbles, small bones, and a long, mean-looking rattlesnake tail:  the source of the sound that had cut through the haze.  The warrior chief also wore the skull of a small mammal over its head, its beady eyes glaring out from the shadowy sockets.  The skull had, at one time, belonged to a raccoon or a small dog, I thought.  Another possibility was that it was a possum skull, and from there it was only a short wandering of the mind that led me to thinking that the coolest thing that could possibly happen at that moment was if it was a possum skull and the possum wasn’t actually dead, but just taking the concept of “playing possum” to a whole new level.  It might even wake up at that very moment and consume the squirrel that wore it.

“Phil,” Stella said, her eyes fixed on the tiny warmongers above us, “whatever cloud your head is in at this moment, I need you to pull it out and help me figure out what the hell is going on.”

“I spilled my coffee,” I replied.  “Also, I got shot and I didn’t get to finish my donut.  If you see the waitress, ask her to bring me another cup of coffee please.”

This is the moment when we simultaneously realized that the arrow I had been shot with was likely tipped with toxins, and not the fun kind.  On second thought, if I’m telling the truth right now, it was kind of fun.  I was very lightheaded and foggy and felt as if the only thing missing at that very moment was a long-winded description of a lake shore or some rocks.  I pulled the arrow out of my arm and turned my attention across the table.

“Stella,” I was starting to slur, “you gots to try this… ‘scool…”

I reached over and made stabbing motions at her arm, trying to get her high on tiny squirrel arrows with me, but not realizing that I was stabbing her with my empty hand.  She slapped me across the face and told me to stay with her and that we were in danger.

“I know we are in danger,” I said, “I forgot to bring that book with the dwarves and the forests.”

Chikachikachikachikachika…

The noise commanded our attention and snapped us back to looking up into the tree.

“Y’all gots anymore of those arrows?” I screamed toward the tree.

The possum-wearing squirrel in the middle of the branch held up its staff.  All the squirrels surrounding it brought their weapons to the ready and prepared to rain tiny hellfire down upon us in an effort that would possibly kill us, ruin our breakfast, and kill the buzz I had, until that moment, been enjoying.

Stella grabbed my arm and yanked me from my seat.  Despite the fact that I outweighed her by a good 50 pounds, she did it with seemingly zero effort as she simultaneously kicked our table over, scattering papers, dishes, and fragments of donut everywhere.  She threw me to the deck and we took cover behind the table just as another rattle rang out and by the sound of arrows whistling through the air could be heard.  Tiny spear and arrowheads could be heard impacting the opposite side of the table we cowered behind and an incessant chirping and squeaking echoed through the morning air as the squirrels unleashed their high-pitched battle cry.

“Ssssstellllllaaaa,” I said, immediately unsure whether it was my speech or my hearing that had slowed down, “I thiiiinnnnnnnk I’mmmm dyinnnng.”  The words poured from my mouth like molasses, but their morbid nature didn’t stop me from laughing.  I didn’t want to be killed by barbaric squirrels, but damn if they didn’t send you out partying.

“Shut up and eat this,” Stella said abruptly, picking a piece of donut up off the deck and shoving it in my mouth.  “Don’t forget to chew.”

I thanked her for the reminder and contemplated the idea that my last meal would be a cup of coffee that had scalded my foot and a piece of donut from the floor.  I don’t know what it says about me that I found it fitting and not at all degrading.

Stella told me to stay perfectly still.  I told her that wouldn’t be a problem since I could no longer feel anything below my neck, but I was still curious as to why stillness was necessary.  She told me that the natural enemy of the squirrel was dangerous and reacted harshly to quick movements.  I lied and told her I understood and continued lying still behind the table.

Stella ran her fingers through her faux-hawk and it started to quake and shake upon her head, as if it was a sentient creature, being awakened by her.  The hair began to puff itself up and seemed to change shape from a stripe of hair down the middle of her head into something larger and almost independent of her cranium.  Large quaffs of hair rose up out of either side and extended out like wings, the curly locks of hair forming into… feathers?
Near the roots of her hair, a large, four-toed foot with dangerous looking talons extended out and rested upon Stella’s head, followed by an identical one on the other side of her head.  These feet pushed down and lifted Stella’s entire hairdo off her head, revealing it to be a deadly-looking bird of prey.  There was nothing at all faux about her faux-hawk, it was an actual hawk and it was here to protect us.

The raptor leapt off Stella’s now-bald head and took to the air, circling the tree and surveying its targets.  It flew in an arc that took it high into the sky, then folded its wings back toward its body, pointed itself at the branch full of warrior rodents, and dove like a missile.  My vision blurred as I tried to fight the stupor in my brain enough to track the bird, but it was no use.  I heard the cry of the hawk, and everything went black.

 

Two weeks later, I was out of my coma, out of the hospital, and out of sick days as I found myself using my last one to hang out at Stella’s place.  We sipped tallboys while her turntable was playing some music I could not understand the lyrics to because, despite living in South Florida for over fifteen years, I could not understand any more Spanish than necessary to navigate a restaurant kitchen.  She lit a joint, took a toke, and handed it to me.

“You sure you’re up for this?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s actually the perfect time for it,” I responded.  “I had so many toxins and medications pumped into me in the last couple weeks in the hospital, I’ve got a perfectly valid reason for failing a drug test at work.”  I pulled a doctor’s note out of my wallet and waved it around like it was a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card.

We whittled away the afternoon like that, just like we always did.  We smoked, read, listened to music, and scribbled away on notepads and sketchbooks.  Finally, I thanked her.

“For what?” Stella asked.

“For saving us from the squirrels.  The hawk.  You know…”  I ran my hand over the middle of my skull, “… the hawk?”

Stella stared at me blankly for a few moments before telling me that she had no idea what I was talking about.  I recounted every single event, just as I remembered it while she continued to look at me blankly.

“Maybe I should have let you stab me with that arrow, it sounds like it was full of some potent stuff,” her blank look turned to a dopey grin.  “I’m glad you had fun, Phil.”

Stella stood, hugged me, and announced that she needed to burn some incense before her girlfriend got home so she wouldn’t walk into an au factory assault as soon as she hit the door. As she left the room to get some hippie potpourri, I felt a faint tickle on the side of my neck.  I reached up and found a feather on my shoulder, right where Stella’s head had been when she embraced me.

 

© 2016, Phil Rood

 

Screaming Guitar

Blurry-eyed and still clad in pajamas, I stumbled out my front door on a beautiful Sunday morning carrying a cup of coffee and a ¾ scale acoustic guitar I had picked up a thrift shop.  It’d seen better days (the guitar, not the cup of coffee), but a new set of strings and a forgiving ear made it worth every one of the twenty-five dollars I had paid for it.

I found a seat on the faux wrought iron bench on my front porch.  The metal made strange and overly complicated weaving patterns as it wrapped its way around itself in an attempt to elevate its status from “bench” to “hey, look at that bench”.  A pleather cushion was the finishing touch of class and served not only to add to the look of being one of the finer things in life, but to keep one from getting a series of bizarre red marks on one’s ass after having sat on overly complicated weaving patterns of faux wrought iron.  It was the kind of bench that was sold to poor people who wanted something for their outdoor sitting needs that was slightly classier than plastic chairs, but not as decadent as a throne made of human skulls.  It was the perfect patio furniture for those in denial of their white trash status.

I took a sip of coffee and felt life course through my veins as it woke my drowsy head and breathed life into my extremities.  Next to the bench was a glass-topped end table which matched the seat in both aesthetic and classiness.  I set the mug on it and strummed the strings of the beaten and battered guitar.  It released a chord that drew from as many different keys as possible.  An old man walking by with his dog heard these notes and stopped dead in his tracks at the end of my driveway.

“You need to tune that thing, son,” he called out, clearly not interested in minding his own damn business.

“It is tuned, sir,” I responded, as I started to pluck at the strings.

He wandered up the driveway, and dragged with him what could only be described as the ugliest dog in existence.  The beast was big-nosed but short-snouted, had a short body length, waddled around on four stubby legs, and wagged its sad nub of a tail.  Its eyes were wide-set and googly, like those of a concussed pug and its ears were small and pointy, like those of a minion of Satan.  It looked like the offspring of some type of hound and another dog who had been the offspring of a Doberman and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It was a short, fat ball of misery who did not at all appear to be a lover of guitars, music, walking, the old man, Sunday mornings, or existence.

“What kind of tuning is that?” he asked (the old man, not the dog).

“One of my own design,” I answered.  “Low to high it goes G, G sharp, F sharp, just flat of E, C sharp, and F.”

The old man looked confused, perplexed, a little bit high, and anxious.

“Why the hell would you tune it like that?  Trying to attract banshees?”

I told him that I actually was trying to attract banshees because I’d read that they make great pets for households with children.  He responded that I might want to read some more about them (Where, I thought, in ‘Banshee Fancy’ magazine?) because they are definitely not great pets.

“Thanks for the tip,” I responded.  It seemed easier than explaining the concept of sarcasm.  I continued to fingerpick the strings and an almost pleasant melody started coming from the thrift-store treasure across my knee as I continued to explain.  “I actually tune it this way because it helps me compensate for this.”

I held up my left hand and revealed to him my handicap:  the ring finger of that hand stopped at the second knuckle.  I strummed and picked a folksy kind of melody as I went on to regale him with the story about my boyhood trip to the World’s Most Aggressive Petting Zoo and how an incident while feeding unidentifiable food pellets to a wombat had resulted in my having my left hand ring finger disfigured.

This was, of course, not true.  I had actually visited the World’s Most Aggressive Petting Zoo as a child, but the only thing of note that happened that day involved a paperclip that I found, a picked lock, and a spontaneously free-range baboon… but that’s a story for another day.

The shortening of my left-hand ring finger was actually the result of a sacrifice that had to be made to save someone.  A wizard, who was oft-mistaken for a homeless man who lived in a 1974 AMC Gremlin behind the condemned Bingo Hall in my city (mostly because the wizard also lived in an AMC Gremlin, though his was a 1976 model and was parked behind a functioning Bingo Hall), had demanded it as payment in order to rescue my guitar teacher and bring him back to our plane of existence.  I agreed, severed my finger at the second knuckle, and my guitar teacher was brought back from the limbo he had fallen into when he played music he had found scribbled in blood on the back pages of the Necronomicon.  I was able to continue my lessons, though I soon found that conventional guitar instruction methods would no longer work with me, due to my shortened ring finger.  What nobody tells you about wizards is that they thrive on irony more than O Henry does.

My three regular fingers and my one hobbled finger danced around the fretboard, hitting notes exactly where my otherworldly tuning had placed them.  My right hand continued to fingerpick, gaining speed and momentum until it was a claw-hammer of madness.  The faster I went, the more perplexed the old man looked that the tuning was working and the more agitated his ugly dog got, waving its head back and forth and starting to yip and whimper.

The old man looked amazed that I had been able to make my unique tuning work and yelled something about me being a mad scientist of music theory.  I opted to take it as a compliment and continued playing.  The scratched and dented flattop of the guitar vibrated and sang with a madness that made sense once it was released into the air and all the separate parts were woven together.

The ugly mutt at the end of the leash howled, bayed, barked and yelled.  It paced back and forth and in and out and around the old man’s legs in a desperate attempt to stretch the line that kept it from running away as fast as its short and cankled legs would carry it.  I figured that something about the heightened sense of hearing that dogs have, even one as genetically messed up as this one clearly was, was what caused the mutt to be a complete spaz about what it heard.  Side effect of super hearing or not, I was beginning to take it personally.

Instead of stopping, I decided to keep playing and see just how wound up I could make this old man’s dog.  I’d show them both, and then maybe they’d think twice about interrupting my Sunday morning coffee and music session and questioning the tuning I use.

The dog sat up on its hind legs and wailed at the top of its stupid lungs.  I played louder, faster, more intense.  The dog threw its head back and opened its mouth wide, baying in a way I’d never heard a dog bay before or since.  The dog took the pitch higher and higher as my hand went lower and lower down the guitar’s neck.  My fingers slowed and picked a slower tempo melody as the manic dog on my porch demanded the lion’s share of my attention, along with the rest of my street that it was now waking with its unholy noise.

“You’ve done it now,” said the old man, as he started to inch his way back from his mutt.

The dog’s muzzle opened wide, as if the lower jaw had come unhinged and it was attempting to swallow an entire pig.  I considered the possibility that the dog was actually part snake and decided, based on the unholy ugliness of it, that it was not out of the question.  The dog’s howl was so high pitched and so intense that it could no longer be classified as a howl.  It was a scream.  It was the kind of scream that exists only in the nightmares of those who fear of clowns.  The wide open mouth revealed something inside and I would not have to wait long to see what it was.

Out of the unhinged jaws of the dog came a banshee, a wailing lady-ghost who was nearly as ugly as the dog she had been using as a disguise.  Her screams and shrieks cut through the stillness of the early morning air.  My coffee mug exploded and the strings of my guitar broke with a series of pops and pings.

The screaming spirit emerged fully and floated in place for a moment, leaving the dog skin that had held it lying useless and still on my sidewalk.  The banshee flew around me and the faux wrought iron bench, wound herself around my guitar neck, in and out of the sound hole, and seemed to occupy the whole of my front porch, the entire time, she screamed and wailed like a child who’d been slapped by Santa Claus.

“I told you they make horrible pets, son,” the old man screamed, fighting to be heard over the screams of the music hating ghost.  “They get in your home and you can’t get rid of them!”

The old man picked the dog disguise up off the pavement, wound up the tangled leash, and started down the driveway, leaving me to deal with the screaming problem on my own.  At that moment, a familiar looking 1976 AMC Gremlin pulled up and parked on the street at the end of my driveway.  A grimy, bearded man smelling like weed and trouble got out and looked at me, smiling through his gnarly whiskers.

“I can remedy this for you,” he said, “for a price.”

I looked down at the fingers on my left hand and sighed, wondering what kind of tuning I’d need to come up with next.

© 2016, Phil Rood