Nano 2012 day two

The mime walked away from the street, towards the sea. He could see the moon reflected in the waves., it looked gigantic and yellow. He smiled a slight smile as the smell of the salt hit his senses. He remembered the feeling of escape. Ten years old, in that rickety wooden box, feeling around desperately for some way of escape. He could remember clearly the rough wood under his hands, the splinters that he gained within his skin. He remembered the water rising rapidly, first it would be at his knees, then his waist, then over his head. His hair was wet before his socks were, the functional leather pouches bound tight on his feet providing a few seconds of an impression of waterproofing, though it didn’t laast.

As he reminisced he automatically went through the motion of “trapped in a box”, his hands expertly feeling around the air surrounding him, the waves crashing on the beach as if to applaud his performance. He crouched down and felt along the prison of his own design, testing close to the sand and moving up to the ceiling, his face set in a parody of both panic and sadness. The melancholy never ended, for a mime. A thought occurred to him, he didn’t need to be trapped in this box anymore. He had reinvented himself this night, his world contained a streak of colour. More the point, he was no longer a small boy being trained to demonstrate this silent sadness; he was a man. He stood in a sudden motion, violently expanding his arms out as he did so. In his mind he felt the walls splintering, in his ears he could hear a gun-crack of rotting wood. He was free, and he had gotten out with no tricks needed. He picked up his suitcase again, which he had dropped when he had set up his mental walls again. He was going to set more people free with this, and no one would forget.

--

Those night spent watching the moon waiting for a signal from his ‘real’ parents waned as Menhaus got older, of course. Other things took up his attention, like books, computer games, playing in bands and girls. On the night the mime was breaking free of his mental box, Menhaus was celebrating his twenty eighth birthday with a small group of friends in a little restaurant called ‘Tonsil Hockey’. They served Korean food. Menhaus looked around the table. His cousin Peter was there shoveling noodles into his face as fast as his chopsticks could reach them. His friend Tina was there as well, watching incredulously as he did so. Continuing to look around the table, he saw other friends he saw maybe once a year, normally around his birthday.

“Hey Menhaus!” One of them called out.

“Hello Patrick”

“Happy birthday!”

“Thanks! Thanks for coming.”

“Don’t…” Patrick stopped and appeared to be focusing. Menhaus guessed that he’d had a bit too much to drink.

“Don’t?”

“Don’t mention it. I think I need to step away for… a short while.”

Patrick stood up and started to walk away from the table. Menhaus noticed items on the table beginning to shift with him, then noticed that Patrick had the tablecloth tucked into the front of his pants.

“Patrick…”

A bottle of sweet chili sauce crashed down onto the ground. It bounced once and thankfully did not shatter but it did let loose a torrent of sauce on the floor where it landed.

“Oh… oops” Patrick spun around to see the damage he had caused, twisting the remainder of the tablecloth around him. Dishes spun off the table like a conveyor belt, along with sauces and chopsticks to a general groan of “hey…” from the assembled eaters. Peter, being a focused eater, managed to pluck his bowl of noodles from the table before it flew off the edge and continued pushing them into his mouth at disturbing speed and volume.

Tina squealed and stood up. There was a long streak of what looked like sweet and sour sauce down her dress.  Everyone went quiet, the only sounds were the various foods on the floor sloshing around, the sauce bottles emptying themselves out and Peter continuing to shovel food into his mouth like it had become illegal and he heard of an impending raid. Tine stomped her foot and exited to the restrooms, stepping into a small dish of soy sauce on her way and cracking it. Patrick took a step back from the carnage causing an all new semi-waterfall of condiments and Korean food to shift with him. He looked down and dislodged the tablecloth from his belt buckle.

“Oh.”  He looked up and shrugged. The rest of the table glowered at him.

“Err… happy birthday, Menhaus?” He said and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his back pocket. He tapped it against a palm and pulled the resulting smoke out and placed it in his mouth. “Well, I’m going out front.” He said, and disappeared out the front of the restaurant.  By this point the servers in the restaurant had noticed that there was some sort of commotion and sent someone over to deal with us.

She was a young girl in a little red flower print dress and her hair tightly pulled back. She was holding a notebook and had the pen poised as if she was hoping she could write away this whole tragic mess. “What happened here?” She asked, bewildered. All I could do was gesture at the carnage under the table and over our shoes, now leaking steadily towards a nearby table. I guessed the floor must not have been completely level. “You want to order more food?” She asked as she waved over several of the kitchen staff who were now armed with buckets and brooms and contemplating a plan of attack for our saucy battlefield. I looked around at everyone else. They didn’t seem too thrilled at the prospect. Tina chose this moment to stomp over from her restroom experience. She had actually done a pretty good job of dabbing away the majority of the sauce across her dress, although it was still lightly stained pink in the spots it had hit. If you squinted slightly though, you could convince yourself it was a fashion thing done on purpose. “Let’s just pay and go to a fast food place or something.” She muttered as she re-entered the scene of the crime, precongniscent of what we were contemplating. “Yeah sounds good to me, I said. Just the bill, please.” The waitress scuttered off and we sat there in silence as the carnage was cleaned up around us.

The bill arrived around the same time Patrick sauntered in after his cigarette. “Oh, what’s my part of that one? Should we just split it equally?”

“Maybe you should pay all of it,” Tina said, angrily dabbing at the pink stain still on her dress, “seeing as you dropped it all on the ground.”

“Hey that was an accident!” Patrick said, hands up in protest, “Peter managed to save his anyway.”

Peter, who had finished his noodles a few minutes beforehand and was now staring off into space, focused a glare on Patrick and let loose a long, loud burp in a low register.

“Classy.” Tina rooted around her purse, threw a twenty dollar note on the table and said, “Come on everyone, let’s just get out of here.” Everyone followed suit, I took the pile of money up to the register and thankfully all my guests refused their change. Aside from Patrick of course, who I just gave a random amount probably way more than he was actually owed so he would shut up about it before everyone else got really angry with him and begged me to drop him from the rest of the night’s celebrations. As we all filed out of the place, Patrick gestured to me to hang back. I stood back near our table, which was still steadily being cleaned up. Once everyone had filed out of the restaurant Patrick turned to me and said, “That was pretty messy, right?”

“You could say that.” Outside I could see my little group turning back and giving us “what is going on?” arm signals.

“Yeah not sure how that happened…”

“You had the tablecloth tucked into your pants.” Outside Tina shrugged and lit up a cigarette. One of my other friends immediately mimed a coughing fit and took a step back. Tina blew smoke in their face.

“Hey anyone could have ended up with that happening. I must have been adjusting my napkin or something…”

“You tuck your napkin into your pants?”

“Well that way it captures all the…”

“OK, never mind.. was there something you needed to tell me?”

“Yeah, happy birthday cuz!”

Patrick came in and gave me a hug.

“Ooook. Thank you. I knew you were tipsy, but…”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I drank a little.”

“So should we join everyone then?” Outside I could see drunken passersby were stopping to try and chat up the girls in my friend circle. Tina tried to put her cigarette out in one of their eyes. I had the feeling I’d be needing to defuse a situation soon.

“No no, I need to ask you something. Do you remember when we were little and you used to tell me how our parents were from outer space?”

“What? Umm… let me think about it.”

“You know, at grandma’s, you had that stone you buried and the whole thing with the planets…”

“Oh wow. Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. I was just a kid with an overactive imagination.”

“Yeah well, I found the stone.”

“You… wait, they sold the house. Did you break into the back yard of the new owners and dig it up?”
“It turned up by itself.”

“This isn’t making any sense.”

One of my friends, John, poked his head through the door back into the restaurant, “Hey, are we leaving now? It’s getting a little cold out here.”

“Look Patrick, tell me the rest later tonight OK? We’ll be at a nice noisy nightclub and no one will overhear. It does sound like you’re crazy though.”

Patrick grabbed me by the wrist, hard. “I’m not crazy Menhaus. Really.” He looked directly into my eye. “I have a lot need to talk to you about, I’m going to go home now because that bitch Tina blames me for getting food all over herself so…”

“It WAS your fault, Patrick.”

“Anyway she’s still a bitch and I’m going home. I’ll ring you tomorrow.”

“Alright. Catch a taxi home.”

“Why? My motorbike is parked only a couple of streets away! See ya!”

He raced out the door, waved goodbye to the rest of the group, narrowly missed a half hearted punch Tina aimed at him and disappeared around the corner. Menhaus sauntered out the door mulling over what Patrick had said. He found the stone?  Menhaus had assumed my grandmother had taken the pots with her at least and probably found it by now. He was shaken out of his thoughts by Tina screaming, “Peter!”. Menhaus looked at Tina then followed her gaze in time to see Peter stumbling into the road as a screeching car crashed into him.