Nightmare in Purple Prose

I first met Charles in a pub in Upper Mandible in the province of Psittacina. But don’t ask me the name of the street or what the building looked like because I went there blind drunk, wearing a sailor’s hat and a pair of banana yellow corduroy pants. I have no idea who was wearing my shirt, but the windbreaker I had on had a McPhee family tartan on the flannel lining.

I continued to drink, each glassful making me thirstier on that strange evening, until I blacked out. My friends tell me that I did not sleep peacefully in a corner booth, with my head resting on a variety of useless purchases (that was Shelley), but that I challenged a trucker to an fish-tickling contest, and, when he refused, I let loose with a string of obscenities in German which were so lengthy, so profound, so obscure, and so numerous, that to this very day, my secret nickname is “Lungs.” Which, of course, is why Charles came into my life…

I suppose I should go back to the beginning…

The day had started in a fairly ordinary manner -- a bunch of us girls got together and decided to go shopping. We usually had a pretty good time together, each of us playing off the others’ strength and weaknesses, squealing over in-jokes and whispering puerile remarks to each other while waiting outside changing rooms or on benches set up for tired shoppers in each store. We trekked from store to store, sometimes buying too much, sometimes nothing at all.

There were six of us, and, by the end of the day no sorrier a gaggle of shopping-weary broads would you find. Twelve shoes, all overly full of feet, and a veritable halo of expensive boutique bags ringing our silhouettes, we had unabashedly spent the entire the day in a manic, unparalleled spree of self-indulgent materialism at its most peculiar.

Elsa had one bag full of pastries, cream and chocolate frosting oozing obscenely from their rustling waxed paper wrappings onto her purgative purchases from an easily aroused pharmacist.

Marguerite, wearing a truly stupid beret made of striped Icelandic wool and a jacket that would have looked better on a Grand Canyon donkey, had secured the last pair of harlequin patterned matching satin underclothes from a wholly disreputable shop that the rest of us refused to even enter. This questionable purchase was prudently contained in a self-effacing bag of dusty rose and covered with discreet pale turquoise tissue paper.

Shelley had overdressed for the weather and succumbed to a bad habit of her college peers, having tied her sweater around her waist by its arms, a sad, broad, flapping wooly nubbled tail signaling her irregular progress. Over her shoulder, in a Parisian plastic backpack, a German made brass windup clock leered at pedestrians behind her. It was nestled quite comfortably atop a box pattered with turtles and camels in lurid secondary colors which held a pair of round-toed flats in that year’s Persian Red. In her right hand, she carried her outsized patchwork purse, and her left held a large bag of fabric swatches and quilt batting, with which she intended to make a quilt for her as-yet unborn niece. The rest of us kept a respectable distance away from her, as she bristled with obvious poor taste.

Wilhelmina had had to be physically restrained from buying more sheets and linens than she herself could carry, but had purchased a king-sized comforter in paisley on a cobalt blue background and fairly dragged it behind her, plastic protection bag crackling like Melba toast in a toddler’s mouth. Her tongue peeked out of her mouth and sweat poured down her face and stained her shirt from the effort involved in transporting such a domestic burden.

I, myself, had suffered major credit card seizures in the bookstore and stationery shops, and leaned forward from the heavy load upon my back. Hiding under the flaps of my old Boy Scout backpack (a gift from a long gone lover) were hardback additions to my science fiction collection, soft cover versions of books of dubious merit, handmade notepaper, speckled and pebbled with pen-snagging bits of twigs and rags, and a brand new fountain pen with sufficient replacement cartridges to get me through the next century, should I choose to write longhand 6 hours per day, every day, for the entire 100 years

As we trudged northward, our parcels bumping one another’s and our mumbled curses faintly fouling the air around our heads, the fateful, yes, fateful words issued from MY mouth, and I hold no one else responsible for those things that followed. I asked, not knowing how it would end, “Is anyone else as thirsty as I am? Isn’t that a bar just up ahead?”…