They have wide, thin mouths, that by some conspiracy of anatomy and lighting appear to extend beyond the borders of their faces, improbable and frog-like. Irritated, emaciated amphibians skulking in plain sight.

“The soup is good, but it’s a little salty.”

Hunched over bowls of chicken noodle, holding court on the finer points of the food service industry. “A lot of diner cooks are smokers. It screws up their sense of taste. They wind up using too much salt.” It’s the wee hours, and they share a table squirreled away in some odd corner of a still odder hometown.

Someone’s hometown, at least. Not mine, certainly not yours. The local diner’s resting place, long since gone ragged.

Later, they don their jackets and walk out back, a scene strewn with empty boxes, grease-streaked and forlorn for lack of their former contents. Moving past the smokers who prepared their meals, all parties puff away silently and eye warily.

“If anything happened to my eyes, man, I’d be screwed.” And yet they’re already malfunctioning in their natural state.

“They’re called glasses. Don’t be so dramatic.”

Make of them what you will.

You open the door of the shop, start to walk in.

But before you can even pass through, the girl behind the counter blurts out a question.

“If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?”

“Uhhh…”

Bopping along to the humdrum store music, she notes your hesitation, adds a qualifier. “Could be anytime in history too.”

“Umm, well—”

“Me? I’d be on Soul Train!”

“Damn,” you think. Now that’s a good answer.

There’s a cockroach in the hallway. And it’s big. Enough so that I’m checking for a license plate number.

The doorman is performing an impressive little interpretive dance number trying to shoo it away. Balanced on one foot, swinging the other wildly with arms flailing. It’s some variant of The Twist we’ll call Don’t Touch the Critter.

The bug, for its part, is still ambling across the floor like a little drunken tourist.

There’s a pause, and now he’s back with a can of air freshener (no Raid to be found) in a bizarre attempt to somehow spray the thing away. Don’t ask me, I just live here. Maybe roaches have an aversion to Spring Freshness I never knew about.

After a few sprays only prove to make things wet, another pause. He screws up his face and walks off, a man on a mission.

When he returns he has the fire extinguisher in his hands.

“Hey, wait—!”

Ga-WHOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The air between us has gone opaque with a floor-to-ceiling cloud of nebulous white can’t-see-shitness. Powder everywhere, dense and choking. It looks like someone dropped a hand grenade in grandma’s makeup bag. From the other side of the mass I can hear his heavy accent lilting across a torrent of obscenity.

“Sheeeeeet! Sheeet, sheeet, sheeet!!!”

What he lacks in vocabulary he’s making up for with sheer enthusiasm.

The cloud is advancing and I’m starting to creep backwards on my heels. The hallway is narrow and I really don’t want to be sucking this junk down my lungs. Slight breezes from I-don’t-know-where are carving strange patterns in the powder as it drifts downward. It would all be quite beautiful if it wasn’t also so simultaneously screwed-in-the-head. A fire extinguisher? What were you thinking, MacGyver?

“Holy shit!!! What the fuck is that?! Is the building on fire?! Oh my God!!!”

Out in the lobby the natives have spotted the floor show. They are, oh, a tad inquisitive.

Now he’s out there talking to them, palms out, arms in front like he’s holding back an invisible wall that’s extremely close and pressing. A bald-faced denial of the patently obvious is taking place, even as an ominously large cloud slides in around him from behind. These are not the droids you are looking for. This ship is unsinkable. Of course I can drive, officer.

What could someone possibly say to get you to casually walk away from a huge cloud of billowing white smoke in your own home? Think about it. Yet somehow it’s working. They’re moving away. They’re going back to their daily chores, running their errands. Man, you need to run for office.

We return to the hallway. The dust has settled (quite literally) into an odd fire-retardant winter. Looking closely at the fresh fall of chemical snow I can make out the tiny but unmistakable trails left by six little insect legs scampering their way to freedom.

Forget this. Next time I’m just squashing your ass.