Just For One Day

2

      Daniel Halcey was on drugs. He was on drugs because, at the tender age of seventeen, he was close enough to graduating high school to long for it, but far enough away that he still felt like it would never come. He also worked at a diner some two miles out of his hometown, because he liked to have money at times that were convenient, which was whenever anyone was offering him drugs. In Daniel's opinion, the only thing better than working at a tiny chain diner right off of the interstate was literally any other job. The best way to deal with these facts, he concluded, was to get higher than a top hat on a giraffe in a hot air balloon, and to do it often. In fact, Daniel was still high at 10 pm in the evening on this particular night. The reason for this was that the boy that Daniel bought his drugs from, a dropout who went by the unfortunate name of Little P, had received a call from his girlfriend while he was mixing up a batch of what he would sell behind the school the next day. His girlfriend was calling him to inform him that she knew all about Little P and Jenny, that bitch, and that it was over between them, this was the last time, she meant it. This was the third time it had been over between them, the first two being about a girl named LaQuandary and the fact that Little P's socks tended to smell like a fish market on a hot summer day, respectively. It would also, perhaps unsurprisingly, not be the last.

      As they fought and Little P continued to mix the concoction of various hallucinogenic substances, the sum of which he referred to as Horny Dragon, it went completely unnoticed by Little P that he did not possess the ability to multitask. Had he been paying more attention to the task at hand instead of devoting so much energy to trying to convince his girlfriend that he had never done anything with Jenny, and in fact didn't know any girls named Jenny nor had he ever even heard the name Jenny before, he would have mixed the correct amounts of each of the powders in the bowl.

     But he hadn't been paying attention, and he had totally screwed the pooch in terms of correctly balancing the amounts of chemicals, and so the little speckled pills of Horny Dragon that he had assured Daniel would only give him a little buzz for a few hours were messing with Daniel's neurochemistry like he was a synesthete at a rave. The result of this was that, six and a half hours after taking Horny Dragon, Daniel was just finishing his break at Porky's Diner while his vision danced in a cornucopia of psychosomatic flashing lights and psychedelic colors.

      Aside from the wildly pulsating, amorphous visions, Daniel had spent the better part of his break talking to a large monitor lizard that was a particularly offensive shade of neon pink and wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Daniel suspected that this was not normal, although at the moment he had trouble recalling whether his hands had always been the size of hubcaps with little smiley faces on his fingertips, so he couldn't be totally certain.

      As he sat on the stairs around the side of the building which overlooked the cramped parking lot, monitor lizard notwithstanding, Daniel wondered how long he had left in his break. The last time he had checked his watch the hands sprouted chubby little legs and started doing what he could only assume was some form of tap dance, so what time it was was totally lost on him as he saw a small car pull into lot and park semi-parallel to the lines of a space. He was sure that there actually was a car there and that three people, two women and one very large man, did step out of it, but if questioned he probably wouldn't add that the car was on fire and each person had two heads.

      The three people walked into the diner and Daniel started counting the seconds. He had just hit fifteen mississippi when the door behind him opened and the voice of Burt, his boss, hissed at him.

      "Daniel! We have customers and your break ended ten minutes ago! Get in there and show them some service!"

      Daniel climbed to his feet, a little unsteadily, and turned around to see Burt, arms crossed and belly threatening to burst the buttons of his hideous yellow shirt.