Light Bulbs

Light Bulbs

At the bottom-most step of a squatter’s staircase you look down and left. An upside down cockroach carcass assaults your optics. Your little violated peepers gag and climb the jaundiced sheet rock away from the pulse-less pest. What to your wondering eyes doth appear, but three disheveled dimmers standing beveled and erect, looking as vacant as the house you’ve found them in. You consider your surroundings and make a mental note of how the marrow in your bones feels. No worries, it feels as it should, but the fact that your senses are heightened to the point of marrow awareness is somewhat odd and directly relates to the nefarious nature of your location. All things considered and mulled you haul a tiny and folded piece of paper from your tight thigh pocket. Dutifully, your hands go to work opening the note like a cagey Christmas. As your digits do their dubious deed your mind moons about somewhere less ominous. How did you get here? What is your purpose? Is there the possibility that this moment could alter the destiny of each and every one of us? More than likely you’ve been pilgriming for the answers to such riddles since your past life. But the fact of the present is you are still as clueless as a tequila hangover. In truth, the last thing you remember is peering through your watery cocktail as if it you’d just been convinced the world was flat. You were drugged my friend, drugged, and now the surrogate universe where you’d stayed in and played cribbage with your lonely roommate seems like a silky heaven. After assaying your formally canned clue you bewilderedly survey the vertical footfall that affronts.

Formally canned clue reads:

“The three switches you witness correspond to three lights in the room at the top of the stairs. You may turn up and down each switch as many times as you deem necessary, but you may only enter the room once. Which switch couples with which bulb? If you can illuminate (pun intended) the correct answer and divine the logic you’ll be freed and consequently rewarded with a pickle for the pickle you’ve escaped. God speed.”

Artlessly you look for a seam at the nadir of the door and wildly flip each switch. “No seam!” You reckon to the omnipresent void. (Insert inward thinking voice here*) “So a pickle is part of my carrot to crack this confounding nut! I don’t like pickles, carrots or nuts! How about a jug of water? I feel like a desert on the coast of panic!” You pull a punctuation of gesture from its pack; light it, smoke it, and unbend. Spraying a frustrated exhale through the smoky helix that lifts from your provisional sixth finger you spit up the steps and curse the whole scene.

Somewhere behind a damnable door adorning the address 666, Satan, Lucifer, IBlis, Mara, Hades, and Set all sit an a circle guffawing and pulling straws to see which will cajole for your soul.

A schism in your gnostics uncurls and you implore the numen of nicotine for resolve. The clip from your counselor rushes toward the filter and nudges between your fingers in a heated hurry. A remote recollection crops up: Ernesto, the 70 year old Peruvian dish washer you once worked with who smoked his “cigarrillos” in two drags. “It’s better this way. See, like a picnic?” His English was surely out to lunch. With old Ernesto on the mind you can’t help but hatch the image of that inch long cherry sizzling down to his roughened wet fingers, that 20 second lung exhumation that always awed his audience, like 50 clowns climbing out of a Volkswagen. My gods, those two puff heaters!

Your internal dialogue is suddenly arrested. The free arsonist betwixt your miffed members gives a fleeting singe. An ouch is followed by a pot boiling sense of verisimilitude. One might say the allegorical light bulb in your brain became abuzz. Now, in the ostensible know, you again light up – as this will take a few minutes- switch up, and still trapped, simper.

Brandon LaPrad Bye