AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But today seems like the day.
Why not, right?
I mean, if some lady is living her best life sucking dong on the highway, certainly I can try to discover my convenience store comfort food.
If ever there was a day for comfort foods…
Although 9:30 in the morning is a strange time to eat wings.
Indecision tugs at my mind. Wings probably weren’t even available to order yet because no one eats hot wings for breakfast.
But maybe I do. Maybe this is my thing. What if this is the beginning of a whole new identity and people start to introduce me as Hot Wing? Ooh, maybe I’ll get a fun rapper nickname like Lil’ Hot Wing?
I cut off my rambling thoughts with a shake of my head, get out of the car, and march into the store. Happy to see wings are available on the menu this early, I tap my order into the touchscreen, grab a bottled water, and pull out my phone to wait for my food.
“Excuse me,” a feminine voice says, and I move out of her way without looking up from my Twitter feed. But the woman doesn’t move past me. “Pardon me,” she says, more insistent this time.
I glance up at her and my mouth falls open. Bottled water slips from my fingers to bounce on the concrete floor with a flat, dullthwack. On instinct, I back away, only to stumble into the cardboard Doritos display behind me.
Bags of Cool Ranch and Sweet Chili Doritos scatter like buckshot while more than a few snack-sized bags end up popped and crunched under my butt.
“Oh, dear! Let me help you,” says the beautiful woman in all black with far too many rows of razor-sharp teeth. She reaches a gloved hand toward me, and I know it’s to help me out of the tortilla chip massacre, but I can’t help flinching out of her reach.
Too beautiful for words, with skin perfectly smooth, angles and planes the definition of symmetrical, the woman raises every hackle and hair I have.
And those teeth.
Like a shark biding its time before it can sink into flesh and pull away a meaty chunk of me.
She withdraws her hand delicately. “I’m sorry to have startled you. I thought I saw kin. I’m clearly mistaken,” she says quietly, closing her lips around all those deadly weapons as she walks away.
I can’t keep my eyes from following her, my ears from listening to the clicks of her stilettos, until she’s out of the store.
“374. Order 374 is up,” calls the worker behind the counter, effectively snapping me out of fight-or-flight mode.
Except I didn’t choose fight. I didn’t even choose flight.
I’d frozen. Like a coward. Like a literal deer stuck in headlights.
Is that who I am? Who I want to be?
I get my feet under me and begin putting the display back in order. “Michelle never would have fallen into a pile of Doritos and not been able to get up,” I grumble to myself as I snatch bags from the ground and put them back.
Rhonda wouldn’t have either.
Tad… Well, I don’t really care what Tad would have done.
Once all the bags, busted or not, are back where they belong, I grab my wings, pay, and rush back to my car. The vinegary scent of hot sauce fills the interior, and before turning over the engine, I take a few deep breaths, check that my hands aren’t shaking anymore, and buckle myself in.
“Just talk this through,” I say to myself in the rearview.
“Maybe it is time to see a doctor. Losing time and hallucinating people with razor teeth, and my condo looking different but not aren’t things that should be taken lightly.”
Yeah. I need to make an appointment. There are too many scary things this could be—
Brain tumor, psychosis, schizophrenia. Things I’m not equipped to handle on my own.
Yup. That’s what I’ll do. Call a doctor and make an urgent appointment. I nod to myself and turn the ignition key, and as the engine thunders to life, so does a new confidence in me, as if simply making the decision, resolving on a course of action is all I needed to feel significantly better.
