by ML Kennedy

(Author’s note: “The Mosquito Song” is now over 10,000 words long. As I understand it, that is halfway to novella.)

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Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, & Chapter 7

If you’ve been here all along…

Chapter 8

I always convince myself that Cleveland is at the state line. It isn’t. I tell myself that it isn’t worth stopping again till after Cleveland, until after 80 and 90 join up and I don’t have to exit the interstate to stop. I can go to one of those nice rest areas with giant futuristic bathrooms and showers for the truckers. I can wash the smell of soup off of my body, and buy a tacky T-shirt from a gift shop that carries far too many small unicorn “collectibles“.

But driving makes me impatient.

Driving makes me antsy.

Driving doesn‘t make me hungry, but it makes me want to eat.

I end up stopping half an hour from the Pennsylvania border. It’s the middle of nowhere, but the gas is really cheap. I squeeze as much mid-grade unleaded as I can into the Crown Vic, while also attempting to make the total price be an integer. I overshoot by three pennies.

The lights are on in a nearby fast food joint. Perhaps it is not yet closed. Opening the door successfully confirms these suspicions.

I commend our nation’s insomnia.

I step up to the counter. From behind a cash register, a ginger girl smiles at me even though it looks like she has been awake for the last three days. Her nametag shows the name “Ashley” or it would had it not been written in grease pen and smeared so much. As it is, it looks more like “Asniey”.

I would like some of those dollar chicken sandwiches, so I say to Asniey, “I would like some of those dollar chicken sandwiches.”

Her smile gets stronger on the left side, but remains the same on the right. She replies, “how many is some?”

“More than a couple, yet less than a lot.”

“I’m going to put that in as three.”

“No, three would be a few. I would like some.”

“All right.” She furrows her brow and says the next thing with the slow determination of a movie cowboy, ”four.”

“That sounds great.”

“All these years, who knew that some meant four?”

“I thought it was obvious.”

“And a few was three?”

“I know. I just blew your mind. “

“So I guess that six would be two fews, but ironically six is rarely too few.”

At this point, I’m not sure if she was joking or presenting me with weird mushroom based logic. But it is diverting enough to make me forget what an asshole I am, and stop worrying if that disembodied voice from the video store is going to get killed by Sloan.

I can smell that Asniey in menstruating; I probably shouldn’t tell her that.

The restaurant appears to be a two person operation at this time of night. Asniey is working the counter and the drive-thru, and a tall black-haired fella seems to be making all the food. Asniey tells me that chicken have to be dropped into the fryer for my sandwiches and that it will take six minutes, as though that were an inordinate amount of time. She tries to sell me a pop, and I am tempted to fall into a Bela Lugosi cadence when I tell her that I don’t drink pop.

Eventually, my sandwiches are all piled onto a brown plastic tray, and I take them to a small table against a wall. The table has two attached chairs, evocative of barstools. The seats look as though they should swivel, but sadly do not.

Even swivel-less I enjoy being able to sit down, eat, and not have anybody try to stab me. It’s the little things that make un-life worth un-living.

The first sandwich tastes three hours old, while the second one is astonishingly hot. Just the same, I manage to get an equal amount of mayonnaise on my shirt with each. As I unwrap the third sandwich, I notice six teenagers come through the door. They all appear to have arrived in the same modestly sized car, and a quick study leads me to the conclusion that none are armed with anything heavier than a wallet chain. They give the impression of people who just came from a late-running concert far from home, and not a team of vampire killers.

I’m also fairly certain that I have never heard of whatever band they just saw.

Four of them start madly pushing buttons on their respective telephones while waiting in line, and they don’t stop this thing even when ordering their food.

A large, old man wearing a Browns cap enters the restaurant and becomes instantly irate at the number of people at the counter. He steps in and out of the queue and begins yelling “can’t we open up another line?!” to nobody in particular. For every fifteen seconds that he is kept waiting, he shouts a frustrated phrase: “This is ridiculous!” and “I’ve got to be some place in twenty-five minutes!” or the always appreciated “C’mon!”

By the time the old man makes it to the counter, he is making these odd sighing sounds that are reminiscent of the noises bulls make in cartoons. Asniey delivers the politest, “what can I get for you today, sir?” that I have ever heard. The old man in the Browns cap pauses, looks at the menu over her head, and asks, “Do you have any specials or anything?”

The amount of time it takes him to order feels like a lot more than six minutes and I hate him. I hate this old man. Old. Huh. He’s probably my age.

I finish up my last bite of chicken and head towards the bathroom. It is surprisingly clean and smells like bubblegum shampoo. I take off Richard’s old coat to examine the dent in my forearm made by Richard’s old bullet. The coat sleeve pulls inside out, its lining sticking to my dent. I rip the lining off like a band-aid. The skin in the dent is fresh and sticky, but the same color as the rest of my flesh. Apparently, that is also the color of my blood now.

I rinse some lint out of the pit in my forearm. I wash my face, and note that every day it feels more like a latex mask. My skin has become slowly replaced by something that is not skin, an approximation of skin.

The old wives tale says your hair keeps growing after you die. It doesn’t really; it’s a trick of decay.

My hair stopped growing twenty years ago.

I turn a hand-dryer upside down to blow the hot air on my face. The cylinder is full of blue and green mold, and smells of it.

Exiting the bathroom, I pass the old man in the Browns cap. Apparently, he is no longer in a hurry.

I get in line once again. Asniey glances at me and says, “I knew you’d be back.”

“Why yes ma’am. It has come to my attention that I need an ice cream cone. Is that one of the many fine services you provide at this dazzling establishment?”

She says, “I think we can hook you up.” I hold out a five dollar bill, which she snatches and quickly replaces with a pile of smaller moneys. I pocket my change and Asniey grabs a cone with a tiny paper sleeve on it.

I decide to start a conversation. “So, that guy was a jerk, huh?”

“Oh him? He comes in all the time, in his little Suzuki Samurai. Orders a hamburger, only ketchup, and a senior coffee.“

“He gets the same thing every time and has to think about it?”

“Usually.”

“You know, if I were to punch him in the eyebrow with a downward force, I could make him bleed all over the place. It doesn’t do a lot of permanent damage, but it makes one hell of a scene. Of course if you wanted some permanent damage, I have been known to break arms.”

“No thank you.” She hands me the ice cream cone. The swirls have a beautiful sort of symmetry to them. “I think it’s creepy to even joke about these things. Violence is always unfortunate. “

I emit a noise designed to keep her talking, a thing she would like to do.

“Whether or not you were kidding, I understand that you are coming from a place of compassion in your, um, offer. But in either case, aggression is not compassion. Anger isn’t happiness. Pain isn’t love. Hate isn’t love.”

“You’re not a cult leader, are you, hon?”

“Nope. Not even spiritual.“ She says the last word with disdain. “Bigger atheist than Richard Dawkins, actually.”

I didn’t even know the guy from the Hogan’s Heroes was an atheist. I tell Asniey, “thank you for the ice cream and the company,” as sincerely as I know how.

She responds with “have a good one” or some such preprogrammed send-off that develops from saying goodbye thousands of times a week.

I finish the cone in the parking lot, accidentally eating the paper sleeve with it.

Considering the lot is all but empty, a Suzuki Samurai is parked way too close to the Crown Vic. I have to walk semi-sideways to get to the driver-side door. Even then I can’t open it significantly without hitting the Samurai.

I notice that the Suzuki’s undercarriage is still a little warm as I reach underneath its passenger side running board. With a movement similar to caber-tossing, I’m able to flip the tiny car onto its vinyl roof. The car slides a bit on the ice, and reminds me of a helpless turtle. Good news for the old man: his roll bar works.

There is now plenty of room to get into the Crown Vic.

Aggression might not be compassion, but you can‘t argue with results.

Related TOE posts:

• TOE Short Story :: The Mosquito Song – Ch 7
• TOE Short Story :: The Mosquito Song – Ch 6
• TOE Short Story :: The Mosquito Song – Ch 9
• TOE Short Story :: The Mosquito Song – Ch 4
• TOE Short Story :: The Mosquito Song – Ch 5

Tags: ::CREATIVE WRITING::, atheism, bela lugosi, fiction, hogans heroes, richard dawkins, Short Stories, vampire myth, vampire story

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