“And now, if we move on to the next paragraph, as is congruent with clause D…” droned on the county commissioner, flipping to slide 492 of 837.  Inside the confines of my head, I screamed loudly.  Several times.

Swiveling slightly in the high-backed office chair, I gazed down the row of other City Council members, trying to see how they were managing to stay sane.

On the far side of the curved table, Steve Sonneman was leaning back in his chair and tossing pencils up into the composite tiles of the drop ceiling.  Several already hung precariously above his head.  Next to Councilman Sonneman, Karin Herbert was contentedly knitting what was meant to either be a very crooked scarf, or an extremely long tube sock.

Next to me, Duane Olson was hunched forward and snickering.  I scooted closer and peered over his shoulder.  Councilman Olson was holding his smartphone below the table.  I winced as I caught a glimpse of the screen.  The councilman was enjoying some very offensive pornography.  With a lascivious wiggle of his eyebrows, he turned the phone towards me slightly.  I held up my hand in protest and looked away.  Olson shrugged and returned his full attention to the video.

Great.  I looked up at the main projector’s screen, now displaying (on slide 495) a graph with no title, legend, or labels on its axes.  The head councilman had to at least be listening, right?

I leaned forward to look at Jim Valentine, the duly elected head councilman, seated at the center of the table.  His head was bent forward, presumably in deep concentration.  However, as the commissioner fumbled to once again replace the batteries in her laser pointer, I saw a long bead of drool slowly descend from Head Councilman Valentine’s mouth to sit, glistening, on the table.  So he was asleep, then.

Slumping back in my chair, I thought back to the chain of events that had landed me here.  It was actually quite a short chain.  I was technically filling in for Greg Pomeroy, due to his “temporary personal leave of absence.”

What this meant was that Greg had realized a couple of days ago that this council meeting would conflict with his fishing trip.  He had asked me to fill in for him, and because I was already on my second beer, and I owed Greg twenty bucks besides, I had agreed.  Like a fool.

Now, trapped and entering the third hour of the meeting, with no end in sight, I bitterly regretted that decision.  I should have just coughed up the twenty.  My brain, desperately seeking some form of escape, directed my eyes in a longing glimpse towards the fire alarm on the wall behind me.  I actually caught my hand reaching back, acting out of its own self-preservation.

Fire alarm, sprinklers, water everywhere, being forced to flee the building . . . wait a minute, that was the answer!  I stood up abruptly, causing the county commissioner to pause in her litany.

“Yes?” she asked, glaring at me for daring to interrupt her carefully prepared five-million-point speech.

I gestured at the doors.  “Bathroom,” I said, and dashed for the exit.

Fortunately, the local watering hole was only two blocks from the government center, so I wasn’t too out of breath when I came in the door.  “Hey Charlie, beer me,” I panted to the bartender as I sank, gratefully, back into my usual seat.

As Charlie brought me a mug of frothy beer, I nodded at the TV behind the bar.  “Hey, would you mind putting on the city council meeting?” I asked.  “I’m very interested in local government,” I added to his raised eyebrows as he switched the channel.  I settled back in my seat with my beer.  Now, this was how the meetings should go!

I felt the first seizing of panic in my throat even before the engine died, as it gave its first misfire and the accelerator pedal shuddered beneath my foot.  That sixth sense, that vague premonition, kicked in, and I knew that I was in serious trouble.

Hoping for a recovery, I pushed down harder on the pedal, trying to up the flow of gas to the choking motor.  It was to no avail.  The engine gave one last gasp and then gave up, filling the cabin of the truck with a heavy damp silence.

Shit.

I still had a little forward momentum, and I threw the wheel to the hard right, managing to make it halfway onto the shoulder before the truck came to a complete standstill.  Angrily, I hit the button for the emergency flashers, ignoring the honks already coming from the traffic behind me as they swerved around the bed of the vehicle.

Staring out into the swirling white snow, I gripped the key tightly, trying to channel some sort of good luck down through my fingers and into the spark plugs of the engine.  Taking a breath, I twisted the key forward.

A few coughs.  The engine’s clicking sounded wet, raspy, like a choking smoker laboring outside a hospital to draw breath.  I held the key for a few seconds, but the truck couldn’t take in that full breath of air it so desperately needed.

I slumped back in my seat for a moment.  I was miles from the shop.  It would take nearly an hour for anyone to come get me, even if they left immediately.  Thoughts of a tow, of a broken vehicle, of accident reports and service claims filled my head.  I shook myself slightly, trying to remain positive as I reached for the key once more.

Click.

Click.

Click – cough – cough – ROAR.

Somewhere, the gods of travel are smiling down on me.  The engine kicks into life.  It’s unsteady at first, uncertain, and I hesitate to even move in my seat for fear that I’ll somehow disrupt the intimate balance.  But then the engine manages to recover, and erupts into a steady purr.  Throwing the car into drive, I hesitantly tap on the pedal, and am rewarded with a surge of forward motion.

I make my way back up onto the road, looking for the nearest chance to turn around and head back to the shop.  I take a moment, just a single moment, to appreciate my good fortune, considering how much worse things could have been.

I yelled out a furious obscenity as the Buick dropped down into my lane.  I slammed my foot down on the air brake, the rear flaps opening to full as I frantically tried to slow my car.  The driver in front of me was idling along; he couldn’t have been going faster than eighty.  I barely managed to avoid removing his trunk.

“Are you freaking kidding me!?” I yelled at my windshield.  “What are you doing, merging right in front of me?  We could have both been killed!”

Still shaking with rage, I hit my signal and merged to the left.  I slammed my foot down on the accelerator, enjoying the visceral rush as the dual-injected Hexagon engine sent blue flames out the back of my car and boosted me easily past the idiot Buick.  I held out my middle finger to the driver, an elderly man hunched over the wheel and squinting through thick glasses, as I roared past.

“Moron,” I muttered to myself.  Glancing ahead, I noted that the lane ahead was occupied by a large freight truck, its engine struggling just to barely meet the speed limit.  I glanced in my overhead mirror, and then merged upward.

I had barely centered myself in the upper lane, however, when I heard an angry honk from behind my vehicle.  I glanced at my mirrors just in time to catch a blurred Corvette as it raced past.  I glanced down at my speedometer and estimated that the driver had to be doing at least fifty over the limit.  “You’re crazy!” I shouted at the rapidly shrinking blue flames zooming ahead of me.

I shook my head slightly as I checked the cruise control.  Man, I had always thought that flying cars would solve all the problems.  I can still remember being stuck in gridlock down in 2D, wishing that I could just zoom over everybody else.

The problem, of course, is that I wasn’t the only one who leaped at the opportunity to pick up a flying car.  They were being offered at aggressive discounts to the senior citizens, to boost sales.  Businessmen were being sold on their straight-as-an-arrow efficiency, soccer moms were being sold on twenty-airbag safety systems, and mod kits were letting anybody with an old beater and a few grand get their worthless hunk of metal airborne.  And if gridlock is frustrating in two dimensions, just imagine it in three.

I continued to make my way home, weaving through the maze of constantly shifting, slowly moving drifters, losers, and hobbits.  No wonder I was always more stressed getting home than when I finished work – it wasn’t the job, it’s the ride home!

I noticed it as soon as I walked into the room.  I mean, how can I not?  It’s a freaking elephant.

Halfway across the waiting room, headed towards the bored nurse sitting behind the counter, what I was seeing finally clicked in my head.  I stopped dead, nearly colliding with a geriatric’s walker.  Somehow, an elephant had gotten into this waiting room!  Had it escaped from a zoo?  Was it about to go on a rampage?  What do you do when an elephant attacks – do you look big and threatening, run away, or curl up in a ball?  I wanted to say that I was supposed to make a lot of noise, but that might be for bears…

As my heart pounded in my throat and my vision narrowed, the middle-aged nurse behind the desk cut into my panic.  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked, sounding as if she already regretted voicing the question.

I turned, wondering why she wasn’t running, screaming in fear.  As I glanced around, I slowly realized that none of the other elderly patrons of the waiting room seemed to be overly concerned.  The adrenaline in my veins slowly ebbed.  “Um, just checking in,” I said to the nurse, forcing myself not to glance over my shoulder.

After proving that I did indeed know how to spell my last name and could remember my birthday, the nurse directed me to take a seat and wait to be called.  Finally, I turned and risked another glance at the elephant in the room.

Now that my vision wasn’t being clouded by panic, I realized that the elephant didn’t appear nearly as threatening as I had first believed.  The animal was definitely a pachyderm: large, grey, and with two large tusks protruding from its head, one on either side of a long trunk.  However, it was also straddling two of the waiting room’s chairs, causing their legs to creak alarmingly, and was using its trunk to flip through the pages of a gardening magazine.

For several minutes, hiding behind a Reader’s Digest, I watched as the animal disinterestedly browsed through the meager selection of reading material.  I felt as though I was observing a piece of nature.  I felt as though I should be saying “blimey” more.  My observations were cut short, however, when the nurse called my name out, summoning me to the front desk.

“The doctor will see you now,” the nurse said as I approached, not glancing up from the files on her desk.

I turned towards the entrance to the offices, but something held me back, making me pause.  “Excuse me,” I said, leaning back on the window’s ledge.  “What’s with the elephant in the room?”

Finally, the lady looked up at me.  Her expression seemed to be a mixture of anger, disgust, regret, and panic.  “Look, Dr. Renner and I have agreed to remain professional at the office,” she said to me coldly.  “I would appreciate if you didn’t bring it up, thank you very much.”

Well that wasn’t much help.  I glanced over at the elephant once more before I left the room.  It shrugged back at me.  Shaking my head, I went off to see the doctor.

The moment I laid eyes on the girl, I couldn’t tell what adjective fit her best: deadly, or just dead.  Across the crowded bar, her pale face shone in the dim light.  What hooked me, though, were her eyes; they were a pale, icy blue.  They were doll’s eyes, flat and emotionless.

I turned back to the barkeep.  His name was Jimmy, as it always seems to be.  I’ve been drunk in a lot of bars, and one of the eternal constants is the presence of a bartender named Jimmy.  Makes things convenient, at least.  “Jimmy,” I said.  “What’s the story on that girl, over there?”

Jimmy glanced over at me.  “She’s called Cyanide,” he replied.  “Don’t know much else.  I’d warn you not to tangle with her, though.  She’s into the hard stuff.”

As I watched Jimmy pour out shots of pure grain alcohol, I wondered what he considered “hard stuff.”  But I was taking his advice and staying out of it.  At least, that’s what I thought.

I took a pull of my own drink, glanced down, and found that my legs had betrayed me.  They were walking over towards the girl, Cyanide, all of their own volition.  I was stunned.  Usually, it’s my mouth that gets me into trouble.

Cyanide was sprawled across a long couch, sipping something frothy and opaque from a tumbler.  She glanced up at me as I approached, her expression never changing.  “Yes?” she asked, her voice as uninterested as her face.

I had no idea what to say.  “I’m Randall,” I replied.  “I don’t think I’ve seen you in this club before.”  Technically true.

“That’s because you’ve never been in this club before,” she shot back, seeing through my mask of words.  She straightened slightly, sighing as if merely sitting up required a massive effort.  She gestured with the tips of her fingers on one hand at a nearby ottoman.  I grabbed it and pulled it closer, took a seat, took a sip of my drink.

“So,” Cyanide spoke, after spending several minutes gazing at me with her flat eyes.  “What’s your poison?”

The ice in my tumbler rattled slightly as I held it aloft.  “Whiskey,” I announced.  I took a sip to demonstrate.

I could feel the disdain from my new drinking companion.  “Slow poison,” she derided.

“Oh?  What’s yours?”

For the first time, an expression appeared on Cyanide’s face; the corners of her mouth perked up in a small smile.  “My namesake,” she replied, tilting back her glass.

I knew something was off about the guy from the moment he pulled out the tomato.

Look, who eats a tomato that way?  I know, it’s the Megabus, and when you’re paying just ten bucks for an all-night bus ride between states, you get what you pay for.  There are bound to be some crazies.  But here I am, sitting on the aisle seat halfway down the bus, and across from me one row up is some dude chowing down on a tomato like it’s a freshly picked apple.

I couldn’t avert my eyes as he happily took bite after bite out of this tomato.  I did swing wildly with my elbow, however, to alert my traveling companion.

After several blows from my arm, Janie, sitting next to me, finally opened her eyes with a grumble of displeasure.  “Zach, why are you waking me up?” she complained.

“Check this out!” I whispered back.  “This guy’s eating a tomato like an apple!”

When I pulled my eyes away from the sight to look at Janie, I caught her in the middle of an eye-roll.  “So what?” she asked.  “You eat pickles, and I can’t stand those things.  Maybe the guy just likes raw tomatoes.”

I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t appreciating this incredible performance by a wild humanoid.  Now that I looked a little closer, the man didn’t seem otherwise unusual.  He was wearing a rumpled grey suit that looked as if this wasn’t the first time it had been slept in.  He was in his mid-forties, I’d guess, with a pretty significant paunch extending to catch the errant drops from the tomato.

After the man had finished devouring his snack (which took surprisingly little time), he started gazing around the bus, the food boosting his alertness.  Most of the other passengers were asleep, since it was nearly midnight.  His eyes alighted on me briefly, but then slid onward.  They stopped on Janie, however, whose eyes were already sagging again.

“Hey, how’s it going?” the man said across the aisle to us in a stage whisper.  “Where you two headed to?”

Janie pulled her eyes open with a frown.  “Milwaukee, same as you,” she retorted.  “Same as everyone on this bus, in fact.”

The man didn’t seem disconcerted.  “Meeting a boyfriend there?” he pressed.

At this point, I thought that perhaps I should step up.  “Um, no, her boyfriend’s right here,” I inserted, indicating myself.  I thought maybe this would scare off the man.

His eyes returned to me blankly, but the comment didn’t seem to have registered.  “If you need a place to stay in Milwaukee, I can hook you up,” were the next words out of his mouth.  “I’ve got a double hotel room, and I’m happy to share.”

Janie looked at me for help.  I leaned forward, making sure that I was placing myself directly in the man’s vision.  “She’s not interested,” I said flatly.  “She’s already got a boyfriend, who will kick your ass if you keep on talking.”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure if these words were having any effect.  The man’s expression stayed blank, as if he wasn’t understanding what was coming out of my mouth.  Finally, after a long and uncomfortable pause, he sat back in his chair a bit.  “Okay, man, no need to get all upset,” he said before turning to face forward, away from us.

I stuttered for a moment, but Janie’s hand on my shoulder held back my retort.  “Maybe the guy is weirder than I thought,” she whispered to me.  “Maybe that tomato should have given it away.”

“At least we know now,” I responded, settling back into the seat so she could lean against me.  “If we see somebody eating a raw tomato, we should give them a wide berth.”