JIFFY DOWN UNDER, Ch 1, part 2

Hey! Thanks a lot to those who read and commented on the first part of Chapter 1. I think I’m going to try to put these out on Sundays, although yesterday’s Sunday did not comply with my wishes, so here it is, Monday.

I’m going to paste in the last few paragraphs of the previous post to get you into where you left off. I’ve put the previous part in boldface types. If you like this/ don’t like this, let me know in the comments.

I really appreciate you reading and giving feedback. Querying feels like spitting into a hurricane.

JIFFY DOWN UNDER - Chapter 1, part 2

She shoved the cat off her lap. Fuck husbands, fuck cats, fuck living. All of this was a cruel waiting game for death. A Kafka-esque farce of suffering in all its varied shades and flavors. Dark, depressing, a black parade to the—

Ellis sat up as if electrified. “I know! I have an amazing idea! Let’s go see the sinkhole!”

“You mean, drive down there?”

“Yes!”

“What about parking?” She was really considering the annoyance of putting on clothes that didn’t fit and shoes that pinched. “I don’t want to.”

“You never want to do anything.” Ellis stood up, grabbed her wrist and pulled her up too. “No arguments. We’ll see the sinkhole, have some lunch, maybe go shopping. It’ll do you good. I think you need a change of scenery.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I’m not wearing a bra.”

“Who cares? Don’t wear a bra. I promise I’ll control my urge to jump your gigantic titties.”

“Snot.” She fake-slapped him on the shoulder and moved to find some clothes that didn’t make her feel like a stuffed sausage.

The sinkhole was situated near the waterfront, about three blocks inland, right next to a Nordstrom outlet store. Ellis found parking fairly easily, and within five minutes they’d walked to the site of interest.

Several other gawkers ringed the hole, gazing into the dark depths below. A few police officers also circled about to be sure no one did anything illegal. Yellow caution tape, the cover-your-ass fringe at all civil accidents, waved merrily in the breeze.

“I can’t even see the bottom,” a homeless-smelling man said as Jiffy and Ellis took their places in the circle of onlookers. “Can you see the bottom?”

Jiffy squinted. “Not sure. It does seem pretty deep. Has anyone gone in to check it out?”

“Nope.” The man sneezed and wiped his nose on his already-filthy sleeve. “Just the cops have been roamin’ around to be sure nobody goes in on accident.”

“I doubt they could stop that,” Ellis interjected. “I mean, if someone really wanted to go in.”

Jiffy gazed into the chasm. Black, black as a midnight in the middle of a moonless desert. Black as the yawning maw of a still, silent dragon. Black, empty, just like the place inside her where she used to keep love and longing and any kind of enjoyment of life.

Would throwing herself into this gaping chasm end the suffering? What was it the Buddhists said? Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Well, that’s some bullshit.

She thought about a lot of things at that moment. Politics. A world in chaos. Ugly sweaters. Her ex-husband and his perfect new wife. Peanut butter, that tasted so good but only made you fat.

The way every day felt when nothing felt good.

So, she ducked under the caution tape, and —

Darkness, complete darkness, is actually comprised of many colors. The human eye doesn’t see the subtleties, but they’re there. Black, of course, but also dark blue, purple, brown, deep dried-blood red. Behind the eyelids, little stars of silver punctuate the darkness like fireworks in a field.

On her back, Jiffy watched as those silver points of light that were really just rods or cones, or whatever helps you see, darted about like skittish fish in a pond. When she opened her eyes, the fish flitted away, and instead, she was treated to the extravagant banquet of the varied colors of darkness. She couldn’t see a damn thing.

“Hello?” she called out. The word echoed. Looking up, she could not see what she expected, a large gaping hole to the sky, lined with yellow tape and tiny people. Up was all darkness too.

She sat up, feeling around her to obtain some context of where she had landed. The ground was spongy, not like a comfortable hybrid mattress, but more like the insulation in an attic. Feeling around her, she could grasp nothing except the foamy sponge-like stuff. It was a sensory deprivation cave: no sound, no light, no smell. This was frustrating since she had at least expected singing, as per the crazy homeless man’s testimony on television.

“Is anybody here?”

Silence.

A small zing of fear started to grow from behind her belly button, spreading outward. The realization that she was alone, in the dark, and no one could hear her scream brought to mind all the horrible movie tropes: aliens, poltergeists, demons, closet monsters, right-wing presidencies. Just as she was about to abandon hope, a faint hum sounded from below her feet.

The hum vibrated the foamy floor, got louder, and then a glimmer of golden light seemed to suffuse the area about three feet away. She crawled toward it instinctively.

A vacuum-sealed pop! hit the air and vanished immediately, sucked into the void of space, or time, or memory foam. Through a square-shaped hole that appeared in the floor, something rose up, shining. Jiffy’s jaw dropped in awe at this beautiful, bright thing — it was a box of some kind, burnished gold, with elaborate scrollwork molded into the frame. She inched closer.

Then she saw what it was: an elevator.

It stopped.

The doors slid soundlessly open, and a blast of breaking-news music issued from within, heavy on the trumpets. A tall, white-haired man with ice-blue eyes appeared.

“Jeffra Pembroke?” he asked in his neutral-accent baritone.

“Anderson Cooper?” Jiffy squeaked.

The television personality smiled slightly, bemused. “Not exactly. But come on in.”

Jiffy scrambled from the foam floor and darted into the elevator. In the amber interior light, she could get a good look at Anderson: he looked just as good up close as he did on TV. “Am I dead?” she asked. “And if I’m dead, are you dead too, Anderson Cooper? God, I hope not. Did you die covering the sinkhole?”

The man shook his head, laughing. “Hang on, hang on. I’m not really Anderson Cooper, first of all.”

“But you look just like him. You sound like him.” She took a cautious step forward and drew in a huge inhale through flared nostrils. “You even smell how I think he’d smell!”

“And how is that?”

“Bay Rum, tobacco, and spiced chai.”

He shrugged. “Okay, sure.”

Jiffy looked around at the interior of the elevator. There were no numbers to press, no controls, just tasteful striped wallpaper in muted tones of ivory and umber, with the same antiqued gold filigree decorating the edges. “This is not how I thought it would be, I have to tell you.” She touched the wall. It was soft, spongy, like the cave floor outside.

Anderson put a hand on her shoulder, which sent a buzz of intense desire through her sensible shoes. “This isn’t how you thought what would be, exactly?”

“Well, you know…uh…the end. Death.”

“Oh, you’re not dead. Sorry if I gave you that impression. Totally did not mean for that to— Well, I can see why you might think that, but…” He winced and ran his hand through his perfect white crop cut. “Wow. Okay. First thing, I’m not actually the Anderson Cooper you know.”

“Well, sure, he’s not dead, I think, but you are him in some sense, right?”

The man squinted his face in an un-Anderson-like way and made a noncommittal sound like the whine of a too-tight fan belt. “No, sorry. I could give you an autograph, though.”

Jiffy ignored this, realizing she had neither pen nor paper, nor purse. “Do you know where my purse is?” She patted her hips in search of the missing bag. “And my phone?”

“Oh, that won’t work in here anyway. No cell reception.”

“Figures.”

Anderson nodded sympathetically. “You seem remarkably calm considering the circumstances.”

“About that.” Jiffy crossed her arms and gave him her sternest shushy librarian face. “I need some answers. This is obviously not where I was a few minutes ago, and I’ve drawn the conclusion that I’m mostly likely unconscious. I fell, hit my head, and now I’m having some vivid hallucination, possibly due to oxygen deprivation or concussion. So, I guess what I’m asking is: is that what’s going on here?”

“Uh, no.” Anderson sighed deeply. “Here’s the thing—” Suddenly, he touched his ear as if receiving an urgent message from an unseen control room. “Uh huh…uh huh…okay.” He focused on a non-existent horizon. “Breaking news at this hour. We have confirmed reports of an unidentified human male peering into the sinkhole.”

“That’s my friend,” Jiffy offered.

“Sources suggest this man may be a terrorist. All levels are to go on high alert.” Sirens whined outside the elevator, as the panicked sound of militaristic marching boots somehow beat a tattoo on the spongy floor. Gunshots pinged and zipped and explosions assaulted her ears.

“Wait!” she screamed. “Why are you trying to kill him? He’s not a terrorist!”

“Sorry,” Anderson said seriously. “Nobody ever claims to be a terrorist.”

“Yes, they do! That’s kind of the point!”

The buzzing thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopter blades hovered above her as Jiffy crouched on the floor, arms over her head, trying to block out the horrible sounds. And just as quickly, all fell silent.

“What the fuck was that about?” she whimpered at Anderson’s well-creased pants.

“When news breaks, we fix it.” Anderson gently took her elbow and helped her up. “So, where were we?”

“I have no idea. I’ve been trying to figure that out. You’re not helping. What happened to Ellis? My friend, the guy who was peering into the sinkhole?”

“That’s really none of my concern,” Anderson said matter-of-factly. “What is my concern is where you’re going to end up. That’s really what’s important.”

“Where I’m going to end up?” Jiffy felt a cold chill down her spine. “Can’t I end up back where I started?”
“Well maybe eventually, but of course, you wouldn’t still be you. For now, though, it’s imperative that I shuttle you to the correct arrondissement. And we can’t do that until we’ve gone through processing.”

Jiffy stood, smoothed her capris and decided to take this hallucination into her own hands. Because clearly, this was not real. None of it. She’d fallen, hit her head, and like Dorothy was whisked away by a tornado to Greater Downtown Oz, her mind had been airlifted to the loony bin.

“I need to return to the— where I fell in, you know— the edge of the sinkhole, please.”

Anderson leaned against the gleaming panels of the elevator and chuckled. “Well, all you have to do is click your Birkenstocks together three times and say, ‘there’s no place like Nome.’ Surely, you’ve seen enough movies to know that’s the mechanism for these things.”

“Did you say, ‘no place like Nome’? That’s Alaska. I don’t want to go to Alaska.”

“Then I guess you’re S.O.L., lady. Hang on.” He wrenched a huge lever, one of those brass old-fashioned things elevator operators in old movies used, and the golden box lurched nauseatingly to the side, rumbled a bit, and shot upward.

Jiffy grabbed desperately to a rail that had appeared behind her as the roar and rush of speed intensified, whooshing her flabby cheeks into waving flags of flesh. Involuntarily, a horrified burble issued from her lips, ascending in pitch as the elevator ascended upward.

“Stop screaming!” screamed Anderson Cooper. “It’s really distracting.”

This did not stop Jiffy from screaming.

Silence.

Gravity settled back over her like a familiar blanket, and she loosened her white knuckles from the rail. Her hands shook, and she felt hungry and nauseous at the same time.

“It has that effect on everyone,” Anderson assured her. He busily gathered up a gold-bordered folder (and where had that come from?), checked a few papers inside, checked what looked like a cell phone, pressed a few buttons on the phone, and then smiled at Jiffy with a reassuring twinkle. “Here we go.”

The door slid open, and the world outside was quite different from the place she had been: green, wild. The smell of cut grass and pine surrounded her, and a cooler breeze ruffled her shirt. “After you,” Anderson said, showing her the way with his manicured hand.

Bewildered, Jiffy stepped out of the golden box, and to her amazement, the dirt felt like dirt. The breeze was strong and lifted her hair from her neck. She turned to ask a question just in time to see the golden door close on Anderson’s smiling face, and then the elevator was gone. Just vanished.

She whirled in a circle, hoping she was just disoriented, but no, the thing was gone. So was Anderson Cooper. “Well, fuck-a-doodle,” she said, emphasizing the fricatives.

She was utterly alone in this green wood, which really did seem to be outside. Rolling white clouds dotted the sky above her, which seemed as limitless as the real one (real one? Which one was real? Was this the same sky?)

To keep herself company, she decided to talk out loud, something she did to ease her panic in awkward social situations. It never worked in crowds, but here, it might. “Let’s just be calm,” she told herself sternly. “Let’s just find an information booth or something, a white courtesy phone. Maybe a place to sit.”

She spotted a downed tree in a clearing within walking distance and that became her new mission: Get to the tree. Sit on the tree. You could count on a tree. But as she walked toward it, it seemed to move further away. “That’s not possible,” she assured herself. She kept walking.

After at least 10 minutes in what should have been a 30-second trek, she gave up on the tree. “I hope somebody turns you into Fifty Shades of Grey!” she yelled.

Discouraged, she plopped down in the dirt. “Ellis!!” she screamed as loudly as she could. No reply, just the creaking and cracking of tree limbs like old bones in the breeze.

Fear crept from her center, her creamy center, now I want a chocolate. “Stop it!” she scolded herself. “Eating is not going to solve this problem. Ellis!!!”

Ellis peered into what looked like a bottomless pit, the same pit where his best friend and asexual kinda-wife had disappeared into. “Jiffy!” he screamed into the black hole.

The homeless man in the plaid lumberjack shirt leaned over the caution tape. “Yeah, she’s a goner,” he said authoritatively. The crowd of scooter delivery people, shop owners, businessmen, and old women walking interchangeable dogs mumbled excitedly.

Ellis shoved him back and frantically looked for some type of law enforcement or emergency personnel. A yellow-coated Zachary Quinto-look-alike fireman peered into the chasm, a frown on his manly brow. Ellis immediately forgot (almost) about Jiffy. “Hey, you,” he said with his best come-hither purr.

“Yes, sir?” the fireman fixed ebony eyes on Ellis who momentarily forgot what he wanted to say.

“Uh…so, you’re a fireman?” Jesus, Ellis! Could you sound more desperate and ridiculous? “Sorry. I mean, I’m in shock, obviously. My best friend…my sister…just accidentally fell into that sinkhole.”

As crowds of bored onlookers do, they absorbed Ellis’ comment like insects with pheromones and transferred it through the mass of people and unto the news crews, who immediately jockeyed for a closer position to this Eyewitness.

Zachary Quinto (Ellis named him that mentally) put a strong arm around Ellis’ shoulders to shield him from the masses. “Let’s go over here, so we can talk,” said ZQ (Ellis shortened it, since they had now shared more than two sentences). He guided Ellis to a cordoned area full of exceptionally muscular firemen and police officers who mostly seemed to be standing around harrumphing and jotting things down into notebooks or iPads.

ZQ motioned for a very tall man in a suit to approach. “Lieutenant Stiltz, this is— what’s your name?”

“Lieutenant Stiltz? For real? Or is that your stage name?” Ellis blurted out before he could check himself. The tall man grimaced. “Oh, sorry. But do you do drag? You’d be so good— oh, sorry again. I have verbal diarrhea during a crisis.”

ZQ graciously ignored Ellis’ weird comments and spoke to Stiltz. “He says he knows the woman who jumped.”

“She didn’t jump!” Ellis proclaimed vehemently (something he’d always wanted to do). “It was totally accidental!”

The ubiquitous plaid-shirt vagrant somehow appeared at his elbow. “Nope, nope. She jumped. For sure.”

“Go away, you hobo!” Ellis swatted him with mincing girl-scout slaps. “You smell like dick cheese!”

“Takes one to know one,” the man muttered. “And my name’s Julius. I haven’t given up my dignity just because I’m housing-challenged.” He shuffled back through the throng of reporters who now swelled like a polyester wave upon the barrier, thrusting microphones and cameras toward Ellis as if he were Lady Gaga, JFK, and the ghost of Elvis all rolled into one.

“Sir,” ZQ talked loudly over the mob of reporters, “what can you tell us about your friend?”

Ellis, dazzled by the media attention, preened and smiled at the cameras. “She was—is—my very best friend and her name is Jif—Jeffra Pembroke. We came down here to see what the fuss was about, and she tripped, or maybe was pushed, into the hole.”

“How do you spell that? Jeffra?” ZQ was filling out a form on an iPad. He’d taken off his bulky yellow jacket, revealing a sweaty blue t-shirt which caused Ellis to nearly hyperventilate. “Do you know her date of birth?”

“October 8.” Ellis focused on the fireman. “Uh…I think it was 1965. Maybe. But she might be older than that. Or younger.”

ZQ nodded, jotting madly. “And was she despondent? Depressed? Would she have tried to take her own life?”

Ellis glanced into the maw quizzically. “I don’t think so. We had just bought rum.”

“Ellis!”

Her words echoed off the green hills and gently swaying trees.

Jiffy was not a fan of nature. Her earliest memories of the beauties of the outdoors had been poison ivy in her private areas (due to a dare her friend Lisa had casually hurled at her on a Girl Scout camping trip) and the subsequent embarrassment of asking the teen camp counselors what to do for the unbearable itch that could not be scratched. The teens, being teens, couldn’t stop giggling about it. Then it got around that Jiffy had an itch down there, which obviously meant she’d seen some action. Sexual action.

So, nature had betrayed her. It had betrayed her with parts that could itch but not be scratched. It had betrayed her with false friends and teen mentors who were supposed to be looking out for her best interest and nurturing the best in her girl-scout heart. It’s probably why she hated vegetables, when you really looked at it.

So being stranded in the wilderness, even in all its vast and verdant beauty, was like being left at an unattended Texas roadhouse gas station, dumped unceremoniously with no way out in any direction. But at least there would be a bathroom.

Jiffy considered: She had not felt the urge to pee since she arrived…and when had that been? Time didn’t seem to move in the conventional way here. She did a quick bladder check (something middle-aged women are quite astute about doing, especially if they know there isn’t a clean restroom within walking distance) and realized that no, she didn’t have to go. Weird. Good thing, though, since there were no signs of civilization anywhere. She could always go in the bushes, she reasoned, but that had never gone well before.

With a large sigh, she said, “Fuck it,” and started walking toward the horizon.

The light didn’t change. That was the first thing. Also, there were no birds, no animals, no sounds other than light winds shuddering the leaves and branches of the untrustworthy underbrush. It seemed perpetually to be midday. Not too hot, not too cold, a Goldilocks oasis filled with nothing but green trees and blue sky.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Jiffy muttered to herself. “Am I supposed to just wander around here for forty days and forty nights? Or just forty midafternoons? I don’t get this at all. If I’m high, it’s a really disappointing high.”

No answer. She kept trudging.

In order to stem the panic that threatened to rise from her belly like an acid wave, she started to recount Greek mythology. “Sisyphus was the guy who rolled the rock up the hill. It fell down, he pushed it back up, it fell down—” she made it a sort of song: trudge, up, trudge, down, trudge up, trudge down. Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Zeus, the paternal head of the Olympic mafioso. Caffeina, the goddess of coffee. Wait, no. That one wasn’t real. Thor, god of thunder. No, that was Norse. Chris Hemsworth. He was so delicious. And that accent…she imagined hearing it in her ear as he sweetly, softly asked her if he could clean her house. Okay, okay. Mars, the god of war— no, that was Ares. Mars in the Roman, Venus and Aphrodite— I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, your one desire— Chris Hemsworth without a shirt, with that little lower abdominal V that points like a flashing neon sign toward his most likely prodigious Australian outback—

The texture of the ground changed under her feet. Jiffy looked down and there was a flagstone path. Paths lead somewhere, don’t they? A path! Looking ahead, she couldn’t see where it went, but she absolutely did not care. She hoped Chris Hemsworth’s abs were at the end of it.

The flagstones curved around a storm-cloud gray boulder taller than a three-story house. The path ended at a quaint English pub. The weathered wooden sign, cadet blue lettered in antique gold, read The Virtuous Pagan, the letters arching around a carving of a deer’s antlers on the classic Celtic triskele. Jiffy exhaled audibly with relief. She’d never been so glad to see a pub in her entire life, and she really enjoyed drinking in pubs.

Squealing like a girl at Christmas, she scampered to the dark wood door bisected by wrought iron. She pulled with all her might on a three-foot black vertical handle terminating in a curlicue that looked like a kid sticking out its tongue. A familiar scent of stale beer and unwashed carpet slapped her in the face, and she liked it.

The door creaked shut dramatically behind her, leaving her to assess the dim room hazy with something like smoke…but she smelled no cigars or cigarettes. Pot? Probably not. That would be in heaven. Shadowy figures huddled on bar stools clumped around a polished brass bar and Jiffy could vaguely make out impossibly high shelves lit from behind with a ghostly green glow, shelves overstuffed with liquor bottles of all shapes and sizes.

There was a hum of conversation that stopped the second she walked in. She could feel all eyes on her. She felt her way forward, eyes gradually adjusting to the low light, and her belly found the brass bar first. What looked like a 6-foot-tall lizard wearing a red-striped bow tie and apron stood like a human, arms crossed as if he were impatient to take her drink order. It had enormous curled ram horns, and its eyes, set on either side of its scaly head, moved independent of each other.

“How did you get in here?” it asked, its voice raspy and strained. Jiffy detected a slight Long Island edge to the voice.

“Anderson Cooper dropped me off.” She folded her arms to mirror the lizard.

“Ah.” The lizard man unfolded his arms and picked a white bar towel up with one fierce-looking claw. Its long, forked tongue darted out quickly, smacking a fly in mid buzz. “Want a drink?”

“Jesus, yes,” Jiffy said, but immediately every being in the bar shouted “Jinx!” and made the sign of the cross, reversed. “Uh…rum?”

“What’s rum?” The chameleon-like eyes wandered in different directions.

“Uh. Whatever you’ve got, then.” A quick glance to her left revealed a tall pint glass filled with an amber liquid spilling a cascade of dry ice vapor onto the counter. “Whatever that is.”

“One Lucifer’s Asshole, coming up.” The barkeep grabbed a pint glass, poured from a tap, dropped two cubes of something in plop, plop, and handed Jiffy the beverage.

“Why is it called…uh… what you said?” She stared at the glass, expecting it to scream or sprout a tail or a churlish face with pointy horns.

Someone was suddenly at her right shoulder. In a smooth baritone, he said, “Because it’s cold as hell and you don’t want to put your mouth anywhere near it.”

The speaker was more than six feet tall. Jiffy assumed it was a man, because the voice was quite deep and resonant, with the suave assurance of a television anchor or Jaguar salesman. An aquiline nose and square jawline accented piercing silver eyes (silver eyes?) and plump, perfectly formed lips. Something quivered in Jiffy’s nether regions.

“Oh, sister, don’t bother,” the man said, waving a long-fingered, graceful hand at her as he slid onto a bar stool. “That would definitely be barking up the wrong tree.”

“Excuse me?”

“Of course, of course.” The long-fingered hand patted hers and she felt an electric shock. “Excused, of course. I’m sure it’s not quite what you were expecting, is it?”

“I honestly had no expectations.” Jiffy stared down at the smooth, cool hand, trying to identify what it felt like…not a human hand, certainly. More like snakeskin. Snakeskin framed by what looked like lace cuffs and a velvet smoking jacket.

“Move.” The tall person wiggled a finger imperceptibly at a squat, bearded, troll-like thing sitting on the bar stool to her left. The troll huffed crossly and jumped down, landing on the floor with a thud as the thin hand gestured for Jiffy to take the troll’s place on the bar stool. She gingerly hoisted herself up, parallel with the silver-snakeskin person. Although, weirdly, he wasn’t exactly sitting. He was floating in a sitting position.

“Can I ask you something?” Jiffy whispered.

“Of course.” The floating being snapped its long fingers and a stemmed crystal glass appeared in it, shining with a ruby liquid. He sipped and smiled delightedly. “Vintage. Nothing like it.” He turned his silver eyes to focus on Jiffy, which again made her ladyparts tingle uncomfortably. “Yes?”

“Am I dead?”

There was a silent beat, and then every being in the tavern erupted into some semblance of laughter, which, when blended, most closely approximated ten lawnmowers being pushed by grumpy donkeys running over assorted plastic cry-baby dolls and squeaky dog toys.

The tall man wiped one eye, as if to dab a tear. “Darling, you are far from dead. What is your name again? Jiffy, is it?”

She nodded as the cacophony died down.

“Lord. Were you named after the popcorn or the cornbread mix?”

“It’s really Jeffra.”

“That’s almost as bad. Drink your drink, dear. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I thought you said it was…poisonous or something?” Jiffy eyed the glass, which still frothed with white vapor.

“Not poisonous, no. It has a kick, certainly, a piquant sort of jolt to the human brain, perhaps. But that might be just what you need to process this whole experience. Isn’t that what your psychiatrists call it? ‘Processing’? As if you’re a slice of imitation cheese. Really.” He made a distasteful grimace. “Psychology. Ridiculous. Oh, well, go on. Drink up.” He pushed the cup toward her with a slight twitch of his index finger.

The beverage, still shedding vaporous wisps, smelled delicious, like caramel wrapped in hot chocolate and roses, and Jiffy sipped gingerly at first. Then she downed the entire contents of the glass, ending with a gigantic burp and tiny poof of white smoke.

“Nicely done.” The very tall being smiled, his silver eyes twinkling. “Araqiel, at your service. Let’s have a look at you.” He tapped Jiffy’s shoulder and she straightened up, did a little ballerina turn on the stool, and immediately felt dizzy. “Hmm. Not quite what I was expecting, but I suppose you get what you get these days.”

Jiffy’s head pounded. A thousand tiny men with tiny silver hammers worked the inside of her skull into a smooth, reflective surface. The lingering flavor of roses and hot chocolate filled her mouth and nose, but she at once felt out of sync with everything and at one with everything.

“Such is the power of a well-mixed drink,” Araqiel chuckled, nodding to the goat-headed bartender. The drink slinger pointed with a hoof at a hand-made sign on ragged carboard that read ‘Tips Needed for Horn Reconstruction Surgery. Please Give!’ From a hidden pocket, Araqiel produced a coin, ancient, silver, and tossed it into the over-sized Bubbie’s pickle jar beneath the cardboard sign.

The ability to speak returned and Jiffy sputtered. “Is that drink going to kill me?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Araqiel answered. “We need to get going. Follow me.”

“Follow you? Where?” As she wiggled off the stool, Jiffy steadied herself on the bar counter. A barely audible yelp focused her attention on an oversized cockroach amidst the glasses and coasters.

“Watch where you put your big fat ham mitts, lady,” the cockroach squeaked at her. She thought it might have flipped her off, but it was hard to tell. “Tourists.”

“After you, my dear Jiffy,” Araqiel said, motioning toward the door with a sweep of his long, majestic arm.