by William Smithy

Created on: September 30, 2009

The Gingerbread Man

the

Three Shadows

and the

Cat that had Amnesia

It was like a dream for those two musicians who were wandering the sweltering streets of Orlando on that humid summer day, or perhaps more like a nightmare. Yes, it was more like a nightmare, one of those nightmares where one feels disconnected or lost in a never ending cycle of some kind. Kind of like that dream with the door at the end of the hallway that keeps getting farther and farther away, except for the trumpet player, we'll call him the gingerbread man, it was the powder or the crack rock that he just couldn't seem to reach or get enough of. For the other guy, the sax player, it was like being someone with amnesia that couldn't figure out who he really was or why he was stumbling around some foreign place, around people he didn't know that were doing things he hadn't really seen done before, just lost, following the gingerbread man around like some stray cat following the first stranger it sees, looking for some kind of handout or hoping for some kind of answer that he'd never find.

The gingerbread man had found his next door at the end of the never ending hallway. He'd been chasing after that door all day, asking person after person at the greyhound bus stop where he could get that next fix. This door had led our wayward travelers through the 9th gate of hell itself. Opening the door, the shadow figures who beckoned them nervously into their portal of hell, stepped erratically from side to side as they anticipated their next fix. The smell of cigarettes and cheap liquor emanated out from the room, along with another smell, almost a sweet kind of smell like that of jasmine, but rotten, tainted somehow. The three shadows that had beckoned the musicians inside sat down around a table and took to their undead human forms. Visibly rotting from the inside out, the two men and the woman began licking their lips and wringing their hands, making idle chatter as they tried stuttering out words. Even though they were the ones who had gotten the gingerbread man his fix, they had already consumed theirs and they looked on in anticipation, saying how good the shit was, just waiting and fiending, lurking outside of their own shadow forms in their ghoulish corpses. Those three shadow people had not much of anything besides the clothes on their back and the hotel room for the night. Their skulls shown through the skin on their face, they were malnourished and frail, but still poisonous and dangerous

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