Bands

My mom left me at my grandparents’ house with a seven-foot bear. She also left a noisy coyote pup in the closet. The bear got sick of the noise so he killed the coyote and left its bones on the floor. My mom returned and I sat on a loveseat with her. My grandparents sat on separate couches. We were listening to War From A Harlots Mouth but my grandpa turned it off after a few songs and switched to bagpipe music.

Fear Before was playing inside the front entrance of a college and some of the kids in the crowd were in elementary school. There was no stage so David Marion performed with the crowd surrounding him. I was as close to him as possible. I went outside during the show and got a text message from Dave urging me to come back. I came back inside and the show had stopped. The crowd had dwindled and those who remained were sad because the show had been disrupted. Dave was gone and the other band members were sitting at the merch table. Nobody was buying. Dave found out that I was back so he returned carrying a head made of plastic.

I was in the employees only room at Wilbur’s Total Beverage and the ice maker was full of orange rotten ice because I hadn’t been there in a very long time. John Rzeznik showed up and said I did a good job imitating Goo Goo Dolls on a CD he found on the floor. I took the highway home but traffic wasn’t very good because it was raining and snowing. My mom’s car was behind mine in a traffic jam. We got out of our cars and decided to walk the rest of the way home. We saw Abby studying in an empty outdoor restaurant. She must have been there because school had been cancelled due to weather. The weather cleared up and Carly was gardening; she lived across the street from us. Both of our yards had large stones with the same engraved symbol. The door to my room was locked. A strange girl opened the door and she was in the middle of recording her webcam series. I joined her and introduced myself as Andrew Champion, Toyota employee. She was doing a lot silly things on her show, like putting paint in her hair. We couldn’t stop giggling the entire time.

I went on a road trip to California with my mom, Savannah, and a dog. We decided to go to Panera for dinner. I ordered chocolate milk and rosemary bread at the counter. The man behind the counter put butter on my bread. There was a skinny old bald guy next to me who liked my yellow The Fall of Troy shirt. I felt like I had seen him somewhere before. He said The Fall of Troy was one of his favorite bands and he also said it was a shame that they broke up. My mom told me the man was an actor named Dave. He got in the car with us and my mom started driving away before Savannah and the dog had gotten in.

Anne-Michèle was living in my house. She liked to have people over for dinner and she liked to play Scrabble with my dad. One day she told me that one of her regular dinner guests was a hermaphrodite and that he had gotten her pregnant even though she already had a girlfriend. She asked me to adopt her baby, and I wanted to, but I was unemployed so I thought it would be better for her to keep the baby. She got upset and went upstairs to be alone. I thought an A Beautiful Lotus concert might make her feel better so I went upstairs to invite her. She wasn’t in her room so I ran back downstairs to see if she was outside. There was a guy getting ready to drive away in his car so I banged on the door and screamed “Where is she‽” He said she was “in the back” so I screamed and banged on the trunk until she opened it and got out.