Last night I dreamed I got to go home, to my childhood home, to my parents’ house in Memphis where Dad and Grandaddy built a giant deck in the back yard. But it was the post-apocalypse, and mouth-breathing, overweight, screeching people-animals roamed the streets at night, devouring anyone who remained outdoors in the once-safe suburban enclaves. Something about a new strain of mad cow disease resulting from beef-fed beef … and the people who ate this mass-produced meat going mad with cannibalism.
Mom and Dad had resorted to voodoo to try to keep the cannibals away — and as night fell, we skittered around the deck, chanting incantations and offering up sacrifices of beheaded stuffed animals soaked in ketchup to try to appease the predators. At sundown, we barricaded ourselves indoors.
The next day, Mom tried to take me to school, in some type of tiny little electric car, over pothole-y gravelly roads peppered with food-stealing bandidos I had to fight off with an aluminum baseball bat as she drove. Mom waited for me outside the schoolhouse while I got in an argument with the teacher. Then, we watched in horror as her overtaxed, hard-earned automobile was flattened by a stretch limousine, which was owned by the preacher at the church next door.
no parking
Dressed pimpishly in an electric blue sharkskin Nehru suit, and flashing more gold chain than Mr. T, the preacherman waited for his driver to open the door and unfold a golden stepladder (the limo-saurus had monster-truck tires and suspension). Smiling in Kool Moe Dee sunglasses, the preacher insincerely apologized, citing his need for a parking space (the gravel lot was otherwise empty). Townspeople surrounded us, vibing us to the certainty that any protestations would be summarily dismissed with a wordless mob-style ass-whooping.
Mom and I had to walk home before the sun set, to get back to Dad and help with the nightly fat-zombie-be-gone voodoo rituals. We gave all our food away to the bandidos to avoid being murdered on the road.
