Bedtime Stories

"Tell me a story!" Terry's chin pierced solidly into his chest, crestfallen. Moments after turning out the lights on what he thought was his slumbering drunken room mate. The slurred speech twisted his words into a single, nearly incomprehensible word. Terry could feel his night slipping away from him. Every alternating Saturday in Terry's work schedule during college football season, he found himself babysitting his roommate Frank. Frank has a standard stool at O'Malley's every Saturday beginning at 9am, hours before any game began. Frank had a tendency to become the alumni of any team with a large following at the bar on any given day. Today was the University of Iowa alumni group doing shots for every punt forced. It was a good day for the Hawkeyes.

"I'm not hearing any yarns being spun!" Frank's sense of time was slipping and his grasp on his esophagus was serviceable at best as "spun" was cut short with a guttural eruption. A wobbly arm rose slowly from the bed like a mummy in an old horror movie before a clumsy snapping sound was heard. Terry glanced out the door to the stairway down to the noise of his friends arriving. Shoulders slumped, he returned to his inebriated companion whose snapping fingers had lost the ability to make more than a subtle slapping sound as he continued to fail on his snaps.

"Well, what kind of story do you want to hear, little man?" If Frank was going to act like a child, Terry though, then I'll would treat him as such.

"I don't knoooooow. Just tell me something to make the room stop spinning." Frank bragged about his iron stomach claiming stories helped for his mind to focus and keep the room from spinning and tossing him into a bucket. He never bought into the "quitters" as he called the people who believed they would feel better the next day if they vomited when they had too much to drink instead of fighting it. A collection of audio books were kept on his mp3 player for such an occasion as when NPR was in music mode or, if drunk enough early enough, if "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" is on.

The sound of something heavy falling downstairs increasing the urgency to put Frank out of his misery quickly. "Alright. I've got a story for you. Once upon a time in this very room, a poorly shaved slob of a man decided to grace the world with his lumpy form on the beach by the lake."

"It's too cold for the beach today." Frank could be imagined to be pouting though Terry could not see with Frank's face buried deep in his pillow.

"That's why I started with 'once upon a time'. It didn't have to be upon today's time."

"Oh."

"So off to the beach you go with your towel, your 5 SPF because you are too stupid to avoid burning and old school style boom box that you unconvincingly hide a six pack inside."

"I did that ONCE!" Frank swatted blindly in the air nearly slapping Terry from his seat now at the edge of the bed. Sliding a little farther out of arm's reach, Terry hurries back into the tale.

"Well, on this day, you tried and succeeded as nobody cared about your drinking due to the fact that the beach was been ravaged by a GIANT KILLER SCORPION FROM THE SEA!" Terry paused hoping for silence and getting a muffled chuckle in return.

"You drop your beer filled electronics and tube of sunscreen in terror as you back away from the enormous arachnid over body parts of fellow beach visitors."

"Crustacean!" Terry shook his head. Frank got a D in Biology in college and thought he was an expert at everything.

"It's in the spider family."

"How many spiders have you seen at the beach?"

"Scorpions are in most desert stories. They live in the sand."

"So it came from the sand, not the sea."

"A huge ass scorpion FROM THE SAND is lumbering down the beach clipping limbs and shearing bodies in half. The blood is turning the beach into a mile long kitchen sponge soaking up the nicks and cuts of a million botched dices and juliennes."

"Rough chopped? Sliced? Brunoise? Minced? Chiffonaded?"

"What? Yes. Right." The confusion drifted in and out quickly as Terry remembered Frank's obsession with Food Network. "A chiffonade of legs with minced piles of brains! Mashed eyeballs and a brunoise of liver! Intestines drug out for the lengthiest sausage you've ever seen..."

Frank began to chuckle and mumble under his breath. Terry tentatively leaned in and slowly processed the word he was chuckling. "Sausage."

"This is ridiculous. Moving along. You rush for the tunnel under the street by the beach but are spotted by the thing's beady little eyes. It clamors over beach umbrellas, briefly gets tangled in a volleyball net and paused to bat a lemonade stand aside like a small insect. You clomp and stomp noisily towards your salvation, but the beast closes in on you running to the tunnel because you are a man wearing flip flops in public and unable to run away. Thus your last breath is nigh and deserved. The beast lifts you in the air from the small of your back and begins spinning you like a basketball around and around and around. The world spins around you blending colors and lights into a swirling cloud of imminent death. To reiterate, you are about to die and being spun around and around and around and arou..."

Two hands grasp Terry unexpectedly feels two hands shove him away. He lands hard on the ground watching Frank leap over him in a rush to the bathroom. The sounds of a "quitter" fill the hall. Terry lifts himself from the ground and walks back downstairs to the gathered friend in a world where it is still only 7pm and everyone else is still sober.