by Joel Schneier
12:00 . . . 12:00 . . . 12:00 . . . keeps flashing
on my clock. The actual time is beyond me at the moment. I could care
less anyway.
I know it's late . . . very late. I live in
a house full of ten other people and it's so late that none of them
are conscious. That or they all abandoned me . . . I'd be happier with
the latter.
I listen to all of the sounds of the night .
. . a cricket . . . a frog . . . the low volume hum of the television
. . . and then there's a loud crash.
Hmmm, that's odd. It came from the storage room
. . . but no one is in the storage room . . . I think.
I cautiously arise from my chair and search my
current location for any hard blunt object that I might need to bash
the skull in of the possible intruder in my home . . . I hope I won't
draw blood. I hate blood. I'm hemophobic. Not really, I just say
that so I don't have to give blood to the Red Cross. I'm a jackass.
There's a golf club underneath the couch. A
putter. Meh, good enough.
I walk across the room with the putter raised
above my head ready to attack. The door to the storage room is closed
tight and there is no light coming through the cracks. I reach out
and slowly turn the knob and nudge the door open. I can see only darkness.
I reach inside the room and maneuver my hand
around the the wall to flick the light switch.
With the newfound light in the room I can see
everything . . . and there is no one there.
I look around at every corner of the room with
all of the levels of shelves filled with junk and useless materials
that haunt any basement storage room . . . levels and levels of worthless
crap.
There is not a single soul in the room. I take
a deep breath of relief . . . and then I notice there's an apple on
the floor.
An apple? An apple? . . . What the hell?
It must be some kind of trick . . . it's a diversion
or something . . . and in the meantime someone is sneaking up behind
me with a large butcher's knife to impale in my back and leave me with
my life pouring out to waste instead of being given charitably to the
Red Cross.
Alright, so none of that has happened . . . yet.
My paranoia is running wild. I feel another
surge of terror weave its way up through my nervous system and I suddenly
realize that the apple has grown five times its normal size.
It keeps growing and growing and growing until
its bigger than me and then bigger than the room and now it's breaking
up the house because of its gigantic size and I see the house begin
to crumble around it and the entrails of the house fall on top of me
crushing me and cutting me and stabbing me until my entrails are spread
out over a ten foot radius.
Back to reality.
I keep staring at the apple . . . something has
to happen.
Suddenly there's a bright flash and the apple
is replaced by some wizard possessed of black magic. He glares at me
with black deadly lifeless eyes and says "Manzana!" and then
all of a sudden I've been transformed into an apple.
I think I'm getting delirious.
And now I hear the floor above me creaking louder
and louder and then the floor gives way and hundreds of assorted fruits
embrace me and they keep coming. Hundreds of pounds of fruits are crushing
my bones and suffocating me in an ironically unbalanced meal.
The apple is still sitting there.
I walk close to it and poke it with the golf
club . . . it rolls over on its side with such an ease. I bend down
and touch it . . . it's plastic.
I jolt up, "What the hell!?"
I get so upset at this mysterious occurrence
that I storm out of the house and walk around the neighbor hood for
an hour.
I finally calm my self down and head home. When
I reach my street I notice that there's a large house-sized apple in
place of my home.
