She put down her wine glass on the table; the blackness surrounded her like it was both compressing around her, yet infinitely vast. Like she was floating in the nothingness, as if gravity couldn’t exist, but somehow did. And she was perfectly lit. She (mostly) swallowed the last sip of wine — it was too big to be a sip; a gulp, really — and used her tongue to chase the drips from the left corner of her lips. She used her shoulder to catch what the tongue had missed, and straightened the hems of her flowered dress while wriggling her butt a little in her wooden chair. She looked pretty good.
And she turned to look at the owl.
It looked back at her, expectant but defeated. It knew what was coming.
She considered it for a moment, then grasped its legs, lifting the whole bird vertically, like it was a paper cone of cotton candy, and stretched her jaw open; down, quickly down, and impossibly wide, as if it were simply a bag of latex, so that her mouth was suddenly and effortlessly three or four times the size of her own head, and she set the owl’s feet inside her lower teeth. It stood there for a fraction of a moment, motionless, gazing outward as if to say, “well, what did you expect?” And her jaw closed, effortlessly returning to its original shape, as a lump that had visibly been the owl, now condensed to the size of a tennis ball, made its way down her throat.
She burped.
A couple of feathers escaped, and her tongue chased them. Her shoulder chased the ones that the tongue had missed. She poured another glass of wine, took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, and settled back into her chair.
A guy entered, from nowhere in particular, and she watched him, lazily.
Whistling something catchy but asymmetrical, he reached inside the pants of his suit and pulled out a dill pickle. He held it off to his side and let go; it remained suspended, floating. He reached in and pulled out another, and it floated, too. He pulled out another and another, and they floated around him, like acid-green bacteria, until he was in an artfully-arranged cloud of pickles. When it was clearly too many to have been concealed anywhere in those slim-fit pants, he stopped, licked the pickle juice off of his fingers and began to gently gyrate his hips time with his whistled, asymmetrical tune.
Here came the sheep, of course, dreamily proceeding in a line behind them, and stepping nimbly in time with the whistled tune while their little tails picked up the counter-rhythm. They seemed happy, but they always did. When all twenty-eight of them were there, they turned and stood shoulder to shoulder, still dancing. Their little smiles grew wider until their teeth were revealed, and their mouths opened as if to sing… but surprise! when they all inhaled, the pickles flew down their throats like fireflies. And one by one, they turned and proceeded out of sight.
While you were watching that, you totally missed the guy disappearing into his own suit, as it collapsed into a pile on what would have been floor if it weren’t just the infinite blackness. The whistling continued, though.
She gazed, amused, at the pile, as it began to rustle and quiver. As the tune faded, out of the shirt collar, poked an owl.
And he had a fresh bottle of wine.
She smiled.
©2020 by Nick Trotter. All rights reserved.