cookie visions
Ansel ate the cookie. It tasted vaguely of hotdogs. This was o.k., because right before biting it, he thought he might be dreaming, and as he couldn't recall ever making use of the sense of taste in dreams, this meant-- perhaps-- that he wasn't. As the cookie made its crumbly way down his throat, he had a series of visions. At this point, he didn't find that odd.
In the first vision, he was 7, making his way in the Big Thicket, an aptly named mosquito-and-snake Club Med in South East Texas. His little sister Clara loped behind him, singing an off-key and off-color version of a Presbyterian hymn. (It wasn't that she was overly satirical, it was that she didn't hear that great, and was making do, word-wise). His mother, thin and shining, was describing the
carnivorous plants one could find in the thicket, and the startling group mind of fire ants, capable of giving a phermonal signal to bite only when a critical mass had found vulnerable flesh, and the vicious and tusked wild boars, escapees from Arcadian farmers many generations before. Ansel was struggling to maintain a swagger of
unconcerned cool, at the same time strategizing how to sacrifice Clara if push came to swinely or entomological shove.
In the second vision, he was-- could it be him?-- old, really old, and sitting at a table, the top of which was engraved in the sort of hieroglyphics that soft wood finds at the hands of very tense writers. At his left sat a sherry glass. To his right, a manuscript.
The third vision flickered only a few seconds. It was a subliminal vision. It involved the slightly cocked hip and very seductive gaze of a hotdog recipient at a beach, then quickly shifted to a total-
body-immersion-feel of a July beach kiss. Ansel struggled to hold onto it, but like everything these times, it shifted into:
a vision of a computer screen. On it bleeped a diagram of Ansel's body, with arrows and tiny symbols pointed to the various insults of the past year. Scrolling across the bottom of the screen was a banner of iridescent letters:
ANSEL. FIND OUT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT. FIND THE VERYTHING YOU NEED.
Ansel blinked. Visions faded. Winslow sat before him. The finished ite in his hands shimmered like waves in sunlight.
"I've heard", Winslow began, "that one is either on the bus. Or off it. Did you have a station in mind?"
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