“The police are obviously vile and hideous creatures! They simply want to exert their power over everyone!” She tossed her hair back away from her eyes, as if this added weight to her statement. “I've watched the news and seen the clips, the man was doing nothing. The police just grabbed him and threw him to the floor. They branded him a criminal on sight!”
The second woman was a polar opposite to the first. Her face was neither round nor smooth. Her nose, chin, cheeks, forehead and even her lips were all made up of sharp lines and angles. It was like looking at a representation of a fractal in human form. While the first woman had curly blonde hair that bobbed around as she talked, the second had close cropped hair that would only see movement after a few months of growth.
The second woman moved to retort.
“You watch all these clips on TV, but they never show you the full story! This man, who you are making out to be an innocent baby sheep, robbed someone at gunpoint beforehand. People who were there took videos and posted them online. It clearly shows he was being a hooligan beforehand. The police were acting correctly in light of the man's criminal actions.”
“You know what,” the doll faced woman leaned forward with her elbows on the table and raised an eyebrow to her interlocutor and said, “I think you are teensy-weensy bit of a police state loving fascist.”
The second woman sat up straighter, pricked by her counterpart's comment.
“What does that have to do with anything?” The second woman questioned. “I'm talking about how you can't just believe what the TV shows you and that you have to dig deeper —"
Without any warning the doll faced woman's head exploded with the force of a hand grenade detonation.
Her torso smacked against the table and the stump that was her neck oozed and seeped not blood and gore, but a green liquid and scaly skin. The trickling of reptilian flesh and green fluid across the table didn't last for more than a few heartbeats, for reality rewound itself. The explosion played itself in reverse and all the fleshy matter and boney bits flowing across the table and dripping onto the floor returned to their point of origin – to the doll woman's face. Upon returning to the past, the doll face woman was alive and well, but her head had been replaced with that of a dragon.
Hugh turned his attention to the fractal faced woman only to see that she had undergone a change of her own. She had transformed in prickly porcupine with hundreds upon hundreds of needles dangling from forehead to shoulders.
Hugh was used to these sorts of situations because he had been having hallucinations since his late childhood. In his adulthood he would sit back and observe his hallucinations like an anthropologist who had been stationed on an alien planet to do research on indigenous customs. Other times the hallucinations wouldn't involve being a mere spectator. Quite often the constructs of his mind would engage him in conversations and partake in activities with him. One time Hugh had hallucinated an elephant that fancied playing badminton and demanded a peanut for every point it had scored.
Luckily, the dragon and porcupine had no interest in playing games with Hugh.
The dragon raked her talons across the table and left wide fissures in the tabletop. She bellowed gray puffy plumes through her nose that filled the air above their heads with curls of dirty smoke. She brandished hungry carnivorous teeth and roared at the porcupine who had been sitting there and watching her interlocutor with a concentrated and pinpoint stare.
The dragon spat out a final column of smoke, tapped her talons on the table, and waited for the porcupine's reply.
The porcupine responded with neither shrieks nor squeaks but with a silent dance of hip swaying, head bobbing, torso gyrating, and shoulder shuffling. Each movement was precisely performed to send just the right amount of vibration through her needles. Hugh could see that the dragon's pupils were oscillating at high speeds back and forth to follow the messages sent not from the dance moves themselves, but from the vibrations of the needles.
The porcupine gave a final shake of her spines and turned her dark bulging and beady eyes towards Hugh.
“What in the world are you staring at?” The porcupine asked and sent her needles into a gesticulating frenzy.
Hugh felt himself a timed mouse because in the blink of an eye the dragon and porcupine were no more. In their place, staring back at him with bewildered looks, were the doll faced and fractal faced women.
“I apologize,” Hugh muttered and threw his sight on his coffee and sandwich, “I was just lost in thought.”
After a few raised eyebrows and a huff from the doll faced woman, the women shrugged and dug back into their food.
Hugh kept his gaze on his food, wanting to avoid any curious glances from the former dragon and porcupine, and realized that he had yet to touch his sandwich. He gripped the edges of the plastic wrapper, readying to tear it open, but put the sandwich down instantly after reading the label. It was a chicken sandwich.
He recalled Dr. I's baby chick framework and was overcome with pity for the chicken in the sandwich, a chicken who probably had been riding along a conveyer belt at one time. Hugh imagined the chicken chirping and flapping its wings alongside avian acquaintances, not knowing that it was on a ride that would transport it in slices to Hugh's hands.
Hugh put the sandwich down, feeling incredibly sad for chicken that had been born, raised, and fed just to end up between bread for a few minutes of consumption. Hugh was neither a vegetarian nor a vegan, but he saw a microcosm of himself in the wrapped sandwich before him. Hugh closed his eyes and told himself that he wasn't a baby chick on the conveyer belt of life, and that he wouldn't one day become a chicken nugget nor a piece of meat in a sandwich.
Hugh scooped up his sandwich and coffee, politely asked the former porcupine and dragon for space to scoot past their table, and went back to the cashier.
He exchanged his sandwich for a simple vegetable salad.
Hugh entered the fortress and passed the playground on his way to home.
Hugh watched as the children zipped down slides, built sandcastles, kicked the sky on swings, and called out to their parents to witness it all. This scene of children at play reminded Hugh of his childhood and sent a shiver down his spine. He wanted to recollect his childhood with nostalgia and yearning but all he could conjure were sensations bitter and sour.
Father dead and mother absent. Always alone and heart in solitude.
Hugh inhaled a few deep breaths to cleanse his emotions and tried to focus on the supersonic screams of children stampeding behind the playground's fence. The past was the past and he wanted to get home and try to find another doctor to call.
Hugh shook off the negative feelings, rounded the playground and stepped onto the path that led past the flowerbed and to his entranceway.
Walking down the path, Hugh noticed a young girl, about eleven or twelve, sitting alone in the flowerbed. He found it strange that she was here in the flowerbed while all the other children were dashing around the playground. Hugh had also never seen this girl before in the neighborhood. If he had then he would have remembered her because her hair was so black that it devoured the light from the sun.
Hugh considered that she may be a new neighbor in the fortress.
Hugh had found it curious that she was sitting alone in the flowerbed, but as he walked by the flowerbed he could see that she was digging holes in the most unusual manner. Not with a spade, but with her bare hands.
He stopped and watched the girl for a minute and was puzzled by why she hadn't been using a spade, or at least some instrument, to expedite her digging endeavors. He was even more perplexed by the fact that would pause and clean dirt from her nails after every single scoop of soil. Even if she lacked the proper tools at home and were forced to dig by hand, Hugh thought, wouldn't it be more efficient if she cleaned her nails upon finishing – or at least after a dozen or more scoops?
