Charlie

My sister Matie's friend Charlie kept coming by the house. Lord knows we all love Charlie, but he had a really big gun and he kept waving it around in a devil-may-care manner very in keeping with his personality in real life. It would discharge in every direction, burrowing huge tunnels the diameter of dinner plates through the entire house and probably into the neighbors' houses as well. It looked very much like a Wham-O air blaster, except made of bronze plastic rather than black. It was also much larger, about the size of Charles' entire torso. He could still swing it around with ease, though. Perhaps some kind of anti-gravity field was involved.

I decided that the better part of valor would be to leave the house for a while. Nobody wanted to tell Charles to knock it off. It was sort of like the Twilight Zone episode "The Good Life." We were afraid he'd wish us under the cornfield.

I went to the cafeteria at college, untroubled by the fact that it was approximately 180 miles away, to wait for Charles' departure. Unfortunately, it now seemed to be located in my elementary school's cafeteria. In order to cope with the change in venue, Catering had decided to let anyone in who had a student ID, rather than running them through the card reader. They figured that the number of students who had cards but no meal plan and decided to eat here would equal the amount of students with meal plans who didn't show up. I made a mental note to tell my freeloading friends.

The food was organized buffet-style, on the tiny folding picnic tables I remembered from elementary school. It was a standard UO dinner, with a salad bar, nice bland entrees, vegetarian options and a soft serve machine. That had been installed already. I got myself some chili from a modified Slurpee machine (this was a new addition) right next to the ice cream and took a look at the crackers. "Oh, hey, cool," I said to no one in particular, "They have the big kind." And yes, they did. There were Ritz brand crackers the size of moon pies and saltines the size of CDs.

I took my food outside. The cafeteria had good food, but it still smelled like a public school cafeteria. I sat on the lawn in the rich yellow twilight and ate my chili. It was pretty good.

Afterwards, I wandered around the playground. It was just like I remembered it, except smaller and there wasn't any bark or gravel. Where the bark or gravel usually was, there was a soupy and iridescent gel that lapped rhythmically at the bottoms of jungle gyms and slides. It clung to my shoes like mud until I tried to climb a ladder to a slide. Then it stretched elastically until it all suddenly snapped off of my shoes, leaving them clean. The grass was still there.

Climbing into a big slide, I found a suburban living room at the top. Several other girls were there, playing with dolls. They seemed to know me and I think I knew them. I came in and shut the door, and the feeling of height left me. I've had dreams where I enter seemingly normal buildings after long climbs, and usually I keep feeling vertigo throughout. This time it ended.

We were playing with one girl's big fashion dolls. They looked like Barbies, but were two feet tall. They were also more flexible than Barbies. All the clothes were elegant or fashionable, though, and I wanted no-nonsense clothes for my doll so we could stop screwing around with dressing them and get down to playing. One of the girls suggested that we get some male dolls. No, said the girl whose dolls they were. She didn't have any of the male version. One of the other girls said that she did and she'd go get them. "Are they the gay kind?" asked a girl, "I hate the gay kind. They're just like the lady dolls, but their clothing is harder to do."

The other girl returned with her male dolls, which were predictably effeminate. I looked at their feet, and sure enough, it said their name on one foot and their sexual orientation on the other. Nobody else seemed to notice this, preferring to argue about which ones were straight and which weren't. I took the opportunity to claim a straight one, who was named Mike.

We still ended up spending all our time dressing and undressing the damn dolls.