A Day Less Ordinary

It was a day just like any other day, insofar as it was not actually any other day than that one, but was probably closely related to most of the others. On this day quite like many other days but not actually another day, James Francis walked down the street with his friend Sally.

The day to him seemed to be like most others. The sky was blue, as it usually was, the grass as always looked green and he found that he could breathe the air and live. As he walked he was going to remark to Sally how nice this day quite like any other day actually was when, to the ordinary day’s surprise, something changed.

James fell unconscious to the floor. This could have been an ordinary happening, if not a regular one. However, the circumstances of it were not ordinary. A bowl of petunias had miraculously popped into existence some 40 feet above where they landed on James’s head. No one but the Petunias noticed the sudden appearance until five seconds later as they crashed into James’s head, with what James would later swear was an exclamation of “Oh no, not again.”

The fall to the floor James thought really wasn’t so bad; a cool rush of wind, a rush of adrenaline and the sense of weightlessness. If only he didn’t have to remember the need to hit the floor at the end. Why he suddenly thought of it this way he did not know. He could feel that something in the day had changed but he didn’t know what. One thing he knew for sure, it wasn’t how hard the ground was when falling unconscious onto it.

James decided being unconscious was quite enjoyable; waking from being unconscious may have inspired the decision. It was much better to be unconscious and not realize it then to wake, realize you have been unconscious and that you have a bloody great headache that nothing but a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster would get rid of. To be more precise, what a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster really did was take the headache aside for a while and then after training it all night bring it back in the morning.

“Owww, my head” moaned James. Sally bent over him with a look of concern on her face.

“Can I do anything to help?” she inquired.

“I doubt it. I need some way to make this pain in my head go away.” James replied.

Sally drew back her foot and kicked him sharply in the shin.

“Agghhhh” James cried, “Owwww, urrrggghhh” He groaned.
“Why the hell did you do that?” James asked.

“Does your head feel any better?” Sally asked right back.

James stopped and took stock. “Why… yes, all I seem to feel is my leg throbbing… Wait, no… Owwww, my head,” James moaned again.

“Can I try again?” asked sally.

“No!” cried James shrilly. “I’m fine, really fine. In fact, I’d never feel better if you’d just stop kicking me”

James wobbled to his feet. Getting to your feet with a wobble is a skill you can only master with repeated traumatic blows to the head. It is sadly a dying art.

“What happened?” James asked.

“You got hit on the head by a bowl of petunias,” Sally replied.

James stared at the wreckage of the bowl of petunias who seemed to be in a far worse state than him. For a second he felt a moment’s sadness for having killed the poor flowers, but a sharp throb through his head changed his mind. He gave the half-intact petunias a quick kick and turned his back on them.

“Are you going to be ok?” Sally asked.

“I don’t know. Is that man on the other side of the street balancing a haddock on his nose?” James asked warily.

“No, I don’t think so.” Sally answered.

James’s brow creased. “I must be going mad, then.” James was just launching himself into the idea of being mad--what his duties as mad would entail and if he could make any money out of it--when sally interrupted.

“I think it’s a kipper,” she said.

James brain did a back flip. If anyone had been looking at James’s head with an x-ray machine at that moment they would have recommended him for the Olympics.
Sadly, no one was and James’s opportunity to discover his calling to fame and fortune was missed.

“Huh, what?” he struggled.

“On his nose, the man over there, it’s a kipper.” Sally explained.

James was sure he didn’t have conversations like this normally. He shook his head. Nothing happened except for a sharp stab of pain. The man with the kipper was still there. He closed his eyes, put his hands over his face, shook his head and counted to ten.
He looked up and the man was gone.

“Thank god for that,” James said. “He’s gone.”
Sally, getting a bit put off with the way James was being so rude to her, decided not to mention the bus that was just pulling away with a man in the back balancing two kippers on his nose.

“Alright,” James announced, “I’m feeling much better. Shall we continue?”

They carried on down the street, leaving the petunias behind to feel sorry for themselves, and turned into the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. As they passed through it towards the entrance, James thought he caught a glimpse of a man in the back of a bus balancing two kippers and a fish stick on his nose. He pointedly ignored the thought. It tried to assert itself once more in James’s consciousness but was distracted by a pretty sleeping disorder in James subconscious.

James watched his feet as they carried him in through the automatic doors and came to the decision that today was definitely a day less like any other day than most other days were; all in all, an entirely weird day.

“Thank you and have a nice day,” the newly installed doors intoned behind him as they closed. James jumped out of his reverie and looked up. He looked around Wal-Mart, the bustling hubbub of people fighting over things that they didn’t know existed but desperately needed because they were now 20% off from the 30% overpriced cost they usually were. Perhaps things weren’t so weird, he thought.

He walked over to a display and casually thumbed through the greeting cards for all occasions. “Hope you die and rot,” caught his attention. He opened it up, “at this your funeral and my inheritance day.” He passed up the temptation on reading the one beside it saying, “Your dog has bite and no bark.” He remembered on the inside it said “I’ll see you in court,” and looked around for where Sally had gotten to.

He spotted her 30 feet down the aisle examining a sale.

He made his way towards her, was cut off by a shopping trolley collision, placed his handkerchief over his nose and detoured through the perfume section, barely making it through alive. He stopped by Sally gasping for air.

She was looking through a pile of towels that were on sale at 50% off. James noticed that the full priced towels in the next bin seemed to be twice the size. He also noticed a group of five or so shoddy looking men were standing around. Most carried knapsacks or a shopping bag, and all had a towel tucked under their arm. One was staring intently at a little black box with a flickering red light.

“Any second now,” he announced to his neighbor, who had a strange orange tinge and wore an eye patch in the middle of his forehead.

“What about this one?” Sally asked, holding a towel she thought looked nice up to the light.
James turned to comment but Sally was no longer there. He looked about but there was no sign of her. Only the five shoddy looking men had also noticed her vanishing act.

“Shit, they missed,” one said.

The one with the black box started smacking it with his fist and the others all waved their towels furiously in the air.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” James demanded. “Where’s Sally?”
He looked back to where she had been, just to make sure.
“You guys know something… umm…gg..” James stuttered to a stop. The men had vanished too.

A few people had noticed something had just happened. They stopped for a second, decided it was someone else’s problem and returned to their search for a bargain.

James spun around. Something was definitely weird, even for Wal-Mart.
It was something to do with the towels, he thought. He grabbed one from the pile, exactly the same as Sally’s, as all the towels were, insofar that weren’t the same one but probably had the same mother, and he waved it in the air. Nothing happened. He waved it again, more furiously. Still nothing happened. He waved it in the air for all he was worth. Something happened.

James collapsed to the ground once again as a passing old lady gave him a shot of pepper spray.

“Creep!” she stated and carried on.

James moaned and felt sorry for himself. He used the towel he still clutched in his hands to wipe at his eyes. Towels, he decided, could be much more useful than he had originally thought.

He wobbled up from the floor; something, he thought, with a bit of practice he could get really good at. The old lady was at the end of the aisle. She cast him a menacing glance and reached inside her purse. James prudently skipped into a side aisle and made his way to anywhere away from the crazy old lady.

Once he thought he was safe, or as safe as you can get in a Wal-Mart, he set his mind back to the previous problem while keeping a small bit aware of the passing trolleys and the need to every now and then dodge one.

He pondered the strange disappearances. They were definitely not usual occurrences. Or so he thought. They also, he decided, were not his fault but were clearly somebody’s fault. This being Wal-Mart he decided it was their fault and set off to find someone to complain too.

This task turned out to be harder than he had imagined. The workers barely knew anything except were he could find great deals, they weren’t even sure who they worked for; they referred him to the tellers. The tellers told him that if he wanted to return something he would have to go see the return department. James tried to explain that he didn’t have anything to return and simply wanted to complain about something. The tellers insisted that they couldn’t help him but maybe the return department could.
James got no further with them. They declared that they couldn’t help him unless he had something to return. James bought and tried to bring back an umbrella, but as there wasn’t anything actually wrong with it the returnees wouldn’t listen.

James walked away disgruntled. He twirled his umbrella around him, wondering where to go from there. The decision was made for him. The umbrella connected with a passing crazy old lady’s hat. She span on her heel, aimed her pepper spray faster than Jesse James and let loose a shot.

James, who was getting better experience with these situations, did something he didn’t usually do; he reacted. He opened his umbrella up to catch the spray and bolted in the other direction. An umbrella, he decided, was quite useful if you couldn’t find your towel.

Although James was becoming experienced he was hardly a pro; and sprinting through a Wal-Mart trying to look back at a pursuing crazy old woman around an open umbrella isn’t easy, even for the most grizzled veterans.

The side of James’s face connected quite forcefully with a swinging door. His momentum carried him through, dragging his legs, which were no longer carrying him anywhere, along for the ride. The floor, he noticed, was still as hard as it always was.

“Owww, my head,” James moaned.

He wobbled once more to his feet, this time with a little quiver. He was definitely getting good.

He was in a storage room. Huge piles of boxes reached up to the ceiling, threatening menacingly to fall over and crush him. He thought he better leave before they decided to, but a faint light caught his eye, it was coming from under a door at the end of the row of boxes. ‘OFFICE’ was marked in black letter on a golden plaque on the door. Maybe he could complain here.

He approached the door quietly. Faint voices could be heard on the other side.

“Ok, ready?” one voice asked.
“Ready!” another replied.

“Attention Shoppers,” the first voice announced. The speakers across the store echoed him. “There is now a one hundred percent off sale in aisle Z. Everything must go.
I repeat, aisle Z! Everything must go.”

The sound of the speakers echoing him was followed by the pounding of a mass off feet rushing through the store attempting to locate aisle Z which, in fact, did not exist.

The second voice behind the door sniggered. “I love experiments.”

James reached for the doorknob, pushed the door open, strolled in and stopped dead, or at least stopped dying.

On the desk in the center of the small office sat two mice around a microphone. They had both turned to look at him.

“Uhhh, umm,” one said.
“Umm, uhhh,” the other said.

They both dropped to all fours, scurried about the table over to a piece of cheese on one corner and started to nibble at it, casting nervous glances at James between bites.

“Urgghhh… nnggnnn,” James’s brained struggled. “Mmuuuccc, gggiiiicceee” James’s brained fought. “MICE!!” it sorted out finally.

The mice paused, regarding him briefly before returning to the cheese.

“You talked, I heard you!” he said.
The mice scurried about unconvincingly.
“I know you can speak,” He reiterated.
The mice looked at him and shook their heads.
“Look!! I’m up to here with weird today. Nothing past this point is going to weird me. OK? I’ve been smacked about the head only god knows how many times and I’m sure he does… probably having a good laugh about it too. I’ve been asphyxiated by perfume and mace and my best friend has vanished, poof, gone. You… you… you better say something or by god I’m going down to the pet department and getting a cat!”

One mouse turned to the other.

“What an utter frood,” he remarked.
“Oh yes,” The other answered. “Shame though.”

“What’s a shame?” Asked James. “What is this?”

“You see,” started the second mouse, “We own this planet. It’s bought and paid for.”
“Right now we’re running a few tests to see how much progress has been made.” the other finished.

James could feel insanity knocking on his door. He told it to piss off. It rang the doorbell. He let it in and ignored it.

James blinked. “Tests?”

“Of course tests,” The first mouse quipped. “Did you think that Wal-Mart has an actual purpose, or that it could have been designed by a mere human? Of course not; it was because of our sheer brilliance that we can manipulate so many people and observe their reactions. Hell, we even incorporated McDonalds into it.”

The first mouse leaned over and whispered in the second mouse’s ear.

“Hmmm? Oh yes.” He turned back to James. “Binkins just pointed out that to be entirely honest, we can’t claim credit for McDonalds. A homicidal clown bent on killing everyone in the whole world with cholesterol came up with the idea, but we made it work!”

Being insane helped James put up with rather a lot.
“Hmm ok, I can take that,” James said, “but what’s a shame?”

“Oh that…” The first mouse said. “Just that we have to kill you. We can’t let this get out.”

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” James grumbled.

“We’re very sorry,” the second mouse said, as he pulled a tiny ray gun from his fur.
He pointed it at James and flipped the safety catch. Now or never James thought and reached for his umbrella. Just then the day reasserted its weirdness in a bid not to be outdone and a sofa appeared above the mice.

“Awww nuts,” said one as they were squashed flat.

This was really too much for James. In an attempt to get in a familiar frame of mind he collapsed to the floor. He wobbled back to his feet and repeated. It wasn’t helping.
He grabbed the cheese off the only corner of the desk that still stood and took a bite. Not bad. He turned his back and walked out the door, past the boxes, quickened his step past the crazy old woman and stepped outside.

That was it. He was going home. He tossed the rest of the cheese into a trashcan. No more mice, no more umbrellas, no more flowers.
“No more weird,” he shouted to the sky. No one shouted back, “Too bad.”
Satisfied, he stepped to the curb feeling that things were looking up. They were however, soon looking down as he tripped over a foot.

As he fell he looked at the foot. It was attached to a leg, so he followed that up. This in turn was attached to a body and that to a neck. Finally on top was a head; a head with two kippers, a fish stick and an albatross balancing on its nose.

James brained flipped and cart wheeled; it did the stunts the likes of which had never been seen before and never would be again. Even the trained circus brains on Gargafunkton couldn’t have matched such feats. So preoccupied was James’s brain with the man with the kippers, the fish stick and the albatross, as well as it’s acrobatic reaction, that it forgot completely about the floor.

James bobbed a few inches off the ground. He looked up at the man.
“Excuse me, have you seen my hat?” The man asked.

Insanity sat twiddling its thumbs and whistling a tune.
“Shut UP!” James cried. He couldn’t think about what was happening. So he closed his eyes and didn’t. He floated up higher.
“Oh well,” the man called out, “have a nice day then.”

James drifted upwards. A loud cawing by his ear got him to peek out of his eyelids. A bird flew past him giving him an evil look. James looked down and didn’t believe his eyes; which everyone knows, in this situation, is a good thing. James didn’t believe anything, so there he floated. He drifted this way and that with the wind while looking down at the view below; he didn’t believe any of it. He drifted into a park, or rather, above one.

An old man on a bench shouted up to him.
“Hey, you’re flying.”

James didn’t believe him and kept on going; passing over flowerbeds he knew didn’t exist. They were however making a whining noise. Flowers, even the ones he didn’t believe in, had never made a whining noise. The noise got louder.

“Shut up!” James called down to the flowers that weren’t there.

The noise persisted, closer now to James than he imagined the flowers might be if they existed. A ship dropped from the sky and floated in front of him.
James goggled. He knew it didn’t exist but he goggled anyways.
Maybe it’s Sally, he thought. Wouldn’t that be nice.
He waved his towel at the ship.

A hatch on the ship slid open. A tall gray alien leaned out of it with a clipboard.

“James P. Francis?” it asked.

James didn’t want to believe this but insanity gave him a little shrug and denied any responsibility. James nodded.

“You’re a jerk,” the alien said “A complete asshole.”

James tried not to believe him.

“Oh, and by the way,” the alien added as it grabbed the hatchway to pull it closed,
“you can’t fly.”

James believed him.

Gravity rubbed its hands together, spat on them and threw James back towards the ground.

James fell, watching the flowerbed he was going to hit come towards him at a sickening rate. James waited for his life to flash in front of his eyes. Instead it only played a small mini series. He took it as a positive sign. The vision panned out with a sign: AND NOW FOR A MAN FALLING FROM THE SKY. He opened his eyes. He screamed and just as he thudded into the ground he heard the petunias he was about to decimate shriek back, “OH NO, not again.”