True Story: Part 5

It had been about a week since Haggins had been to the therapist, and he hadn't heard a thing about any other appointments yet. There were no calls from an overly-friendly secretary, no overly-friendly postcards with suggested appointment times, and certainly no overly-friendly visits from the therapist. This, of course, caused his mother to become overly-motherly.

"Dear," she started, taking a break from sweeping the oven, "Are you sure he said he'll continue the sessions? I'm just so worried..." She moved on to dusting the phone that she held between her head and her shoulder. "Just wait until your father hears about this..." She was now licking her hand and wiping his face with it, even though there was no dirt. "Maybe you should go to your room..." she drifted off as she wiped a tear from her eye. "But I don't want you hanging out with those kids from down the street!" she called to him as he walked into his room. She ran up to the door as he closed it, trying to fit in, "I love you!"

"Mom, I'm trying to take a nap!" he shouted.

"Do you need me to tuck you in? Fix your collars?" she offered from behind the door.

"No!"

"Okay honey, be safe!" He heard her walk down the hallway and fretfully titter about in the living room.

He wished that the therapy sessions would start soon, not just for his mother's sake, but also for the house and the people around him. So far, he had managed to turn the a/c unit into an angry bear, a cooking pan into thunder, and- through a very convoluted and dubious train of thought- the kitchen table into an old pair of slacks. There were two bits of good news, however. Despite the occurrence of these episodes, they were beginning to take less out of him mentally- as though he was getting used to it. His brain no longer collapsed after he altered reality; instead, he only felt a strong urge to take a nap. So not much was different from normal. The other good news was that the slacks fit him quite nicely.

He got in his bed, reached over to his dresser, and turned his lamp off. It was still early afternoon, and light poured in through his curtains. Slightly annoyed, he buried his head under his pillow in search for darkness. He quickly entered a restless sleep. Maybe it was the brightness of the room or the casual asphyxiation he was suffering from the pillow, but he had several unsettling dreams.

There was a sensation of his room shaking. Something was beating on the outside of all four of his walls. "Let me in.." a voice droned. Suddenly, his mother was in his room, beside him. She had baked an apple pie and was trying to force it on him. A slow tapping sound began getting louder. The more he tried to get away from it all, the louder and faster it got. It sounded like something tapping on his window. His room spun and flipped. It was chaos. He could still hear the tapping. It sounded like fingernails. More specifically, it sounded like long and dirty fingernails tapping on his window. By this point, it had climaxed to resemble a drum roll. Everything was getting louder, spinning and flipping faster. He started screaming.

He was still screaming as he woke up. Luckily, his head was still under the pillow so his mother couldn't hear him. He ripped the pillow off of his head, gasping for air. He noticed it was considerably darker now; the nap must have lasted a couple hours longer than intended.

In a very slick movement, he slipped the covers off of his body. He squirmed around in his bed for some seconds, searching for a satisfactory stretch. As he did so, he realized that his skin was very sweaty. Incredibly sweaty. It was almost unbelievable how sweaty he was. Every square centimeter of his supple skin was secreting a thick, cold, mucusy sweat. Using rhythmic waves of muscular contraction, Haggins slid out of the warm and now-moist environment of his bed and slopped on the floor with a squelch, leaving a damp and soggy trail behind him. He laid on the floor for a moment, wondering how, even after such a long nap, he could feel so sluggish.

And in the next moment, things had changed dramatically for Haggins. He didn't know how his power worked because no one had told him. And with no knowledge, he had no control over what happened next. Hardwired by nature and driven by society, Haggins' inevitable reaction was to observe his condition, make a connection, and take that abstract material to make it concrete through language- even if only to himself. He could only lie there hopelessly as he looked around and saw the slime. He helplessly realized that he felt slippery. He submitted to the squelching. He resigned to the now-familiar sensation. This was an incredibly literal life-changing moment for Haggins, and sadly, unfortunately, tragically, his last conscious thought as a human was, "Slugs. I feel like slugs."

And Cleatus Haggins became slugs. Three slugs, to be exact.

He looked around the room, immediately feeling sick. This was not, in fact, because he was suddenly slugs, but because he was suddenly three slugs with only one consciousness. He found himself looking straight up at the ceiling, back behind him, and towards his bed all at the same time. This new flood of visual stimuli froze his brain for a minute, leaving him nauseated. Eventually, he was able to get all of himselves facing one way, which helped cut back on having three totally different perspectives of his room.

He tried to move forward, but instead moved inward, collapsing in on his middle slug-self. Luckily while doing so, two sets of his slug eyes bumped into each other and reflexively withdrew into his heads. This left him with only one set of eyes and a lot closer to what he was used to as a single-bodied and single-perspectived boy. A few minutes later, Haggins was able to work himselves into a line of slugs. He found it much easier to move his bodies if he kept the back slugs' eyes closed, and finally he was off in search of a solution.

He left the room to tell his mother, hoping she could help. He could hear her still scurrying around in the kitchen, doing motherly things. At the moment, she was watching Dirty Dancing on tv while talking on the phone to one of her girlfriends about the groceries. "..I thought that dough I bought ought to be rough enough. Thoroughly tough, though Louise.." she was worrying as the universe ran out of o's and u's. She saw her son enter the living room. "h my Gd, I'll have t' call y' back," she rushed, hanging up mid-sentence.

She slowly stalked over towards him, eyeing him suspiciously. "Mom," he tried to say, "You have to help. I accidentally turned into slugs." But no sound came out of his mouth, because slugs can't talk. All he could do was try to move away from his mother, who was closing in.

She swooped in closely, confirming her fears. "Eeeewww!" she cried out. She called out to her son, begging him to come get rid of the pests that sat before her. When she didn't hear a response, she signed and turned around. Haggins sighed in relief and tried to find something to hide under, but his mother returned quickly with a paper plate. Tentatively, she placed it on the floor in front of him. "Come on, just crawl on. I'm not going to hurt you," she coaxed.

Hearing his mother's voice in that tone always calmed Haggins, and he instinctively did as he was told. He managed to get his bodies onto the plate, expecting his mother to take a closer look and finally recognize him. Instead he found himselves being taken towards the front door. He tried to scream out, but couldn't. All he could do was brace himself as his own mother threw him out of the house and into the yard.

The world was not like he remembered it. The grass towered over him, casting him in long shadows. Dirt now looked like rocks, and there was a lot more company in terms of other insects than he remembered. A beetle rudely scurried over one of him. Another of Haggins' bodies was being closely watched by an ant.The third happened to be positioned facing the sky, able to see every hungry bird above them. Panicked and nauseated, he tried to regroup.

He heard heavy thuds approaching him; tiny shock waves shook his bodies. He felt a sharp pinch followed by a brief sensation of flying before landing on something very high up. He felt it again. And during the third time he looked up. He saw something brownish-black. He looked a little closer. It was semi-solid and chunky, encased in a long, hard, and clear coating. It smelled awful. His last slug-body was dropped onto something fleshy.

It was flesh.

All three of him looked up and saw something vaguely humanoid.

It was a human.

He looked back to the gunky brownish-black dirt-like substance.

It was dirt.

Under long fingernails.

"I'm glad I found you," breathed the therapist. "Don't worry, I saw everything. I'm here to help." He was now cooing softly. "It was me tapping on your window. I think I woke you, and I'm sorry for that."

"Put me down! Go inside and explain this to my mom!" Cleatus tried to yell.

"Don't worry," the therapist continued, "I can help fix this."

Haggins struggled and tried to escape as the therapist closed his hands, concealing him in a hot, clammy darkness. The panic, nausea, and constricting conditions were too much for Haggins' overworked mind to handle. He felt sensory information disappear as, one by one, his slug bodies fainted. "This feels odd," he thought to himself just before he blacked out.

Jake and Amir: Restaurant Ideas

Intro

Amir: 

[Shot of Jake sitting on an office couch alone]
[Amir drops in from above and lands on the couch]

Amir: Hey, just thought I'd drop by to see you.

Jake: That's a really bad joke, man.

Amir: Well if you think that was bad, you're gonna love my restaurant ideas.

Jake: Wait, does that mean they're good ideas, or just worse than that joke was? Also, how are you going to open a restaurant? You can't even afford your rent.

Amir: ...probably..?

Jake: That doesn't answer anything I just asked. Look, I don't have time for this. My lunch break is almost over. I don't care if you lie, just please at least try to make sense.

Cut Scene 1.

Amir: So this restaurant would only sell scoops of vanilla ice cream and banana Popsicles.

Jake: That just sounds like an ice cream truck.

Amir: Well it's going to be different! We won't have any bowls and the Popsicles won't have sticks. So you just kind of have to hold everything in your hands.

Jake: That just sounds like a very sad ice cream truck.

2.

Amir: Okay, this will be like a take-out restaurant so customers can just grab their food and go.

Jake: Alright, sounds good so far. What kind of food will you sell?

Amir: Any kind they want. Whatever we can find.

Jake: What does that mean?

Amir: See, our customers will come up and order whatever they want, and then we'll call the real restaurant and have them deliver it to our store. Then they can just go up to the delivery, pay, get their food, and go.

Jake: So no real transactions actually happen in your restaurant?

3.

Amir: This restaurant will combine food and fun.

Jake: Okay..that's a solid start..

Amir: Each table will have one of those claw machines, and the customers will have to keep playing until they're able to grab whatever meal they want out of the machine!

Jake: Stop. Terrible idea. St-

Amir: Also, the meals will only be soup or jell-o. So, sorry if if spills or gets squished, but...no refunds.

4.

(I'm losing inspiration to write dialogue that would mostly be improvised anyway.)

A restaurant whose target market is early-rising meat-heads. It serves cereal with muscle milk from 4 to 6 am.

5.

A soup kitchen. To maximize the amount of food, there will be not only bread bowls, but bread spoons too. Better eat it quickly, though, or else the bread spoons will get soggy.

6.

A normal sandwich shop, but the sandwich special  is two scoops of chocolate ice cream on sourdough bread topped with mustard, pickles, pepperjack cheese, tomatoes, and toasted. Cut with the vegetarian knife as well. 

7.

Have Amir vaguely describe an already-popular food chain. Gets called out.

In My Apartment

In my apartment. Everything is fine.

In my apartment. Out in the rain. Everything is fine.

In my apartment. Head in my hands. Anger. Out in the rain. Everything is fine.

In my apartment. Focus on distractions. Head in my hands. Shallow breathing. Anger. Out in the rain. Everything is fine.

In my apartment. Focus on distractions. Losing control. Head in my hands. Shallow breathing. Feel my pulse. Anger. Stand up. Out in the rain. Everything is fine.

In my apartment. Focus on distractions. Losing control. Head in my hands. Shallow breathing. Feel my pulse. In my head, fingers, throughout my body. Anger. Stand up. Pull my hair. Hit the wall. Numb. Out in the rain. Everything is fine.

On the sidewalk. Relive the moment. Pulse receding. Breathing deepens. Head out of hands. Regaining my control. Dry off. In bed. Back to normal. In my apartment. Everything is fine.

On the sidewalk. Relive the moment. Breathing deepens. Regaining my control. Back to normal. In my apartment. Everything is fine.

On the sidewalk. Pulse receding. Regaining my control. Back to normal. In my apartment. Everything is fine.

On the sidewalk. Regaining my control. In my apartment. Everything is fine.

In my apartment. Everything is fine.

I'm in my apartment, trying to focus on distractions. But I'm losing control. My head falls into my hands, and I notice my shallow breathing. I can feel my pulse; It's in my head, fingers- all throughout my body. Is this anger?

I stand up. My hands have developed a mind of their own, clenching into fists as they pull my hair. I try to remember the last time I was angry. I can't. I only remember why I am angry now as I feel heat spread from the pit of my stomach to the rest of my body. It won't be long until the white-hot anger completely consumes me.

I turn away and face the wall. Every vein in my body expands and contracts in time with my heart. My body is pounding. I take in a breath and completely lose myself. I reach my arm back and swing it forward as hard as I can. My fist connects with the wall. The sickening thud rings throughout the room, and my hand instantly goes numb. I can't feel it grasp the knob as I slam my door. I storm out in the rain and lie down.

As I lie there on the sidewalk, I relive the moment. It felt so good as my fist was going towards the wall- the power of being able to unleash and act. I was truly satisfied and felt truly alive in that moment. I stay out in the rain for a few more minutes before making my way back. I stand up as I feel my pulse receding from my extremities back to my chest. My breathing deepens and returns to its normal rate. I take my head out of my hands, finally regaining my control.

I walk to my room and dry off. I change into clean clothes before I get in my bed. I am back to my normal self before I fall asleep. In my apartment.

Where everything is fine.