A Friendly Reminder

It was a giant lizard, a Gila monster, maybe.  Whatever the species-- it was big, taller than Mitch by half a foot and it followed him around all day;   a grotesque slavering monster with mottled claws and a septic grin. The blunt tip of its heavy tail tapped a rhythm with its breathing; if anybody else on the bus noticed they kept it to themselves.

The ride through the city was absolute hell.  Every few minutes the
Creature from the Black Lagoon would reach over with one of its spiny fingers and tap him on the shoulder to ask if Mitch had any junior mints.Every time Mitch told him that, no, he did not have any junior mints, no, not even in the left pocket of his flannel jacket,  he got the feeling that the thing didn’t really want junior mints.  It wanted something far more sinister;   but what that actually meant he couldn’t say.  Staring into those muddy brown eyes was like staring up at the surface of a pond from beneath the muck at the bottom-- all yellow light and foul smells.

Mr. Lagoon followed Mitch home and went directly for the kitchen, ransacking the cupboards in search of junior mints, grumbling about the price of bus fare the entire time.  Mitch hid in the bathroom for half an hour, but when he came out the lizard was still there, in the kitchen frying a pair of steaks.  Mitch didn’t bother asking about it.

“You don’t have any jr. mints,” it said, almost apologetically.

“Sorry.”

Midway through the afternoon Mitch began to think of it in somewhat friendlier terms, but when it crawled into bed with him at ten o’clock and hissed goodnight he almost pissed himself, which in turn reminded him of the event in the men’s room at the bus station; sleeping suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. Mitch shuddered, closed his eyes, and focused on looking inedible.

He woke up freezing at a quarter to ten with eyes that felt like rusted ball bearings.  The monstrous depression in the center of his mattress was empty and half the covers were on the floor;   the other half MIA.  He was late for work.  Mitch jumped out of bed and stumbled towards the bathroom. He pissed for what felt like an hour before he realized it was Sunday and relaxed; no lizard and no work.  Life was getting better by the second, and Mitch stumbled towards the kitchen, passing the missing blankets in the hall.  He was barely halfway down the empty off-white hall when the
smell of bacon reached his nose and the clink of dishes reached his ears. Maybe Mr. Lagoon hadn’t left after all.
Mitch stepped into the kitchen and sat down at the table without looking up.  The chair squished under him.  He grimaced and looked down.

A large pyramid of jr. mints was smashed beneath him, a sticky mess clinging to his boxers.  Mitch wrinkled his nose and looked up at the stove.

From the rear, the girl at the stove looked to be in her early twenties;  she was frying bacon in a white tutu that was covered with red splotches. Every time she bent over to flip a strip her tutu crept up farther, and Mitch was relatively certain she wasn’t wearing any panties.  He scratched himself and admired the way her thighs flexed when she bent over.  He decided that the stuff on her tutu looked like strawberry jam.

He shifted in the sticky pile, opened his mouth to say something, took a breath, and closed his mouth.  He tried again but he still couldn’t think of anything to say, so he cleared his throat instead.  It was the only thing he could think to do, and under the circumstances he thought it wasn’t such a bad approach.

She hunched up her shoulders.  She was short, maybe 4’7” and she had to stand over the stove on her tiptoes just to flip the bacon.  The ballerina turned to face him, and it was an effort for Mitch to look up from her legs.  When he did he nearly swallowed his tongue, but he knew why she seemed so short.  She was missing a few inches at the top, the inches that would have been her head.  Mitch coughed, stared at the coffee stains on the table top, and did a bad job of not thinking about her head, taking a few seconds to straighten the papers that littered the table, uncovering
his W2’s in the process.  He laid them on the table and sighed, it was May seventh and he still had to file his taxes.  God, he hated late penalties.

She pushed the W2’s aside and put a plateful of bacon down in front of him.  Mitch decided that the stuff on the tutu didn’t look that much like strawberry jam after all.  It started to rain around noon, and the headless girl followed him around like a clipped shadow.  He undressed in the shower with the curtain pulled and tossed his clothes over the top
before realizing that he would have to get out to get his towel.  She sat down on the toilet and when he got out of the shower with an embarrassing erection he couldn’t grab his towel fast enough, but she just sat there headless and disinterested.  Mitch made a fumbling pass at her around four, but she seemed content just to follow him around.

When she crept into bed with him at ten he reached over and lightly caressed her thigh.  She shuddered, rolled over, and began to snore like a pack of rabid hyenas gargling crude oil.  Mitch felt vaguely disgusted with himself and got up to go to the bathroom, not in the least bit curious as to how she was managing to snore sans head.  His crotch was
throbbing and the fingers on his right hand were tingling.  He was curious about that.

He closed the door and fumbled for the light, hoping the snap of the plastic switch didn’t wake the snoring ballerina.  Her snoring faltered, sounded like somebody choking on a piece of wet chicken, and then resumed its former obnoxious gurgle.  He looked down at his hand.

There wasn’t anything immediately strange about his hand, and he was about to give it up and go back to bed when he noticed that he could make out the pattern of white tile on the bathroom floor through his hand.

“What the hell?”  He blinked a few times and looked again, but his hand was still transparent, and growing less opaque at an agonizingly slow pace.  The transparency had crawled all the way up to his knuckles before the scream caught in his throat managed to break free.  A loud crash came from the direction of the living room and Mitch kicked the bathroom door open, running in the direction of the sound.

Mr. Lagoon was back and he had brought friends.  There were now five giant lizards in his living room, Mr. Lagoon, a giant horny toad, two that looked like that lizard from the Geico commercials, and a frilly headed thing with tiny eyes that looked inexplicably female.

“Got any junior mints?”  Mr. Lagoon’s words were thick with Brooklyn.

“In the kitchen.  On the chair.”

The lizards cocked their heads in unison, stared at him for a few seconds, and disappeared down the hall with a rattle of claws that made Mitch think of teenage boys in search of frozen waffles.  Mitch swallowed the hard lump in throat and brought the stump of his wrist up to his face.

His hand was completely transparent now, and he flailed it in front of his eyes.  An invisible fingernail ripped a deep gouge in the flesh of his cheek and he screamed again.  He took a deep breath and reassured himself that it was going to be okay.  Everything was going to be fine.  His hand was still there, even if it was invisible.

And then all hell broke loose in his kitchen.

Mitch rushed down the hall and barely ducked in time.  The ceramic plate shattered against the wall and pelted him in a hail storm of blunt plaster and sharp ceramic shards.

He looked up in time to dodge a river of forks, but not the hand mixer. It thumped the side of his head and he slumped to the floor holding his invisible hand up to his head.  Blood molded the shape and contour of his fingers and Mitch cringed.

One of the smaller lizards, probably a gecko, spoke.  “Hey, you’re missing a hand.”

“I’m not.  It’s just invisible.”  The gecko gave him a strange look and shook its head.

“That’s a nutty thing to say, Mitch.”

The gecko jerked to the floor and the microwave sailed past, the cord trailing like a kite tail.  Mitch had time to register that it was plugged into an extension cord before it smashed into the refrigerator and exploded in a shower of sparks and plastic shrapnel.

“Nutty?  How about five giant lizards engaging in a battle royale in my kitchen?”

The gecko returned fire with a volley of coffee cups.  With his eyes on the gecko Mitch couldn’t see the target, but the grunt and crash that followed confirmed a direct hit.

“Us?  Nah, were not nearly as nutty as you.”

Offering no further explanation the gecko dove over the kitchen table with a toothy grin and landed on his fallen comrade, a four foot horny toad with a fat stomach and wide mouth.  The gecko shrieked something obscene
and dug into the soft underbelly with his long brown claws, parting the flesh and exposing a yellow layer of fat beneath.  For a split second Mitch could see intestines quivering in that yellow sac before they were covered in a sheet of blood.

Something soft brushed against his face and Mitch jerked.  The ballerina rushed past and plunged into the fracas wielding a mace she had fashioned from a lamp stand and his alarm clock.  The gecko looked up just as the
alarm clock smashed into the side of his face. The gecko’s left eyeball popped out of the socket and hung down the side of its face.  The gecko leapt up at the ballerina, hissing and flailing its stubby arms.  She swung once, and for half a second the lightbulb replaced the displaced eye before it shattered and severed the optic nerve.  The eyeball hit the
floor and rolled towards Mitch, leaving a trail of gore behind.

Mitch stood up.

“What the fuck is going on here?”

The activity stopped and Mitch wondered briefly if this was some kind of bad dream brought on by too many microwave enchiladas and too much late night tv.

The Gila monster stepped forward and motioned for the others to stay still.  The kitchen table collapsed and one of the pictures fell of the wall and shattered.

He revealed a row of long teeth, “I’m just here for the junior mints.”  He motioned towards the ballerina and the other four lizards.  “These guys are government issue.”

“Government issue?”

“Yeah, Department of Homeland Insecurity.”

“The department of Homeland Security?”

“Did I stutter?  The department of Homeland Insecurity.  It’s their job to inject a healthy dose of fear into your neighbors lives, kind of remind people that it’s a bad old world out there.”

“What about you?”  Mitch was on the verge of tears.

“I told you already.”  His smile broadened and revealed another row of teeth behind the first set.  “Junior Mints.”

Mr. Lagoon tapped his claws on his brown and green teeth.

“Wait a minute, my neighbors?”

Mr. Lagoon smiled, his amber eyes glinting red light.

“Yeah, your neighbors must have heard all the noise.  The police are probably on their way by now.”  He gestured with the hand that wasn’t tapping his teeth.  “Look at this mess, all the blood, and there’s the headless girl to explain.  Ain’t nobody going to believe you anyway.”  He continued to drum his teeth before adding, “By the way, that’s invisible
ink on your hand.  It’s already starting to come off.”

Mitch looked down.  Streaks of flesh were becoming visible again beneath the blood.  He protested.

"Hey-- you followed me around all day-- people saw you.”

Mr. Lagoon shook his blunt head.  “Nope.  The only people that saw me were agents Mitch.”

The lizards all got up, the eviscerated horny toad trailing it's guts behind it, and filed out the door and headed down the hall.  One of the geckos called back to him over the rising wail of sirens.

“Shoulda paid your taxes on time this year Mitch-- puts you way down at the bottom of the list.”  The backdoor slammed shut and there was knock at the front door.