Tale Of Souls (Cathartic Nightmare)

URBAN LEGENDS (Chapter Three)

(Before you read the rest of this, let me warn you I'm only adding up to chapter NINE.  Beyond that you'll have to wait.)

December isn’t the easiest month of the year; especially in the northern hemisphere where it’s so cold your dick can fall off if you’re on a balcony, half naked and smoking.  Wind chills of below zero; sounds like the heart they installed in me the last week before leaving the blasted prison.  I still don’t have a fucking clue what I did – and we just arrived at some place I’ve never seen before.

Except, the problem is that it sits right in the middle of what I consider my old neighborhood right on Hoyt Avenue.  Sure, there’s stories I wrote when I was a kid that this was in Japan, and everything was a reference to a more popular version of culture. Big eyes, small noses, small tits and strange passive women all wrapped up in a very inconclusive teenage dream. Well baby; not everything is cheap and easy and free in the land of the rising sun.

 I smell the world around me, just in case if I die tomorrow; a stupid way to live and breathe – but it’s the only way to survive.  Remember the things we have, and torture ourselves until they are gone. 

I take the last puff of my cigarette, and now strangely faced with a big ass poof of pink hair in front of my face.  Said lump of pink hair was on an average sized Asian male with hazel eyes and a heart shaped face.  Waving his hands nearly three inches from my face, he was trying to put the smell out from something.

“Nani[1] – I smell… MARLBORO CIGARETTES!!  BLEH! Bad BRAND! BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD!” And with that my cig is taken from my mouth and thrown out, along with the pack in my hand.  Said pink poof has now replaced it with another brand.

“HERE Have this brand! Much better!”  Strange, he is now forcing me to smoke mild sen-chi lights.  Is there any more you could do to kill me?  There is no taste to these pieces of shit whatsoever.  Seriously, never give a real man, super lights – it’s like smoking paper.

“Uhm, thank you – and you are?”  I could tell it was dye, his dye job was nearly impeccable, but it wasn’t a wig.  No, clue who this – ok I take that back, he’s oddly familiar.

“Nyeh – Pankii is what you know me by, but I’m Izuchi.”  He smiled at me and shook my hand; the crazy bastard just shook my hand and nothing bad happened.  My life must be in a roll of good luck for now.  I seriously was waiting for something bad to happen as soon as he touched me, I don’t know why – because I haven’t seen anything happen since I last woke up.

“Panki...  Punky?”  I blinked for a moment. This man was certainly familiar now, but what the hell was a Celebrity doing in this part of town?

“Hai, Punky...  Pan-u-kii da yo[2]!” He bobbed his smiling head around a few times, and looked over the balcony at the street below. 

I got this can of beer in my hand, and am now looking over the St. Paul sunset – watching the kids run by and wave at the strange Asian in front of me.  I couldn’t get what drugs I was smoking, let alone snorting and shoving down my throat.

“Huh.  Odd.”  I blinked further for a moment, confused as to why he was here.  “So why are you here?”

                “To keep you from buying Marlboro Brand Cigarettes! So you now have BETTER cigarettes!”  He interjected, grinning at me, and yet I still had no clue why the hell he was here.  It was really starting to disturb me - not because he changed my cigs on me, but because this was someone who obviously knew who I was - but was this the same Izuchi that Terrin and Saitou spoke of?

“Ok, uhm thank you?” Short, sweet and totally confused by this point,   I would gather if I was still a girl that there would be a problem with the fact I’d be screaming by now.  However, I couldn’t even pinpoint why he was even here let alone that it was him, I mean supposedly this guy is a major celebrity in so many books.

“EEP! Gotta go!”  He scurried behind and out the door to another end of the building – never explaining why he was here.  Think of a pom-pom from a cheerleading squad, fully pink with some streaks of black in and out – bobbing up and down as he skipped like a child, in and out of the room, out the door to the hallway and beyond.

The evening was rolling on and getting later and later; colder and colder - and as I watched the sunset, further along the way- I felt quite the chill coming in from behind me.  I had finished my cigarette and turned around before I could pull any reactions, or anything I just stood there stunned.

“Ok, so that’s why they warned me something different was happening around these parts.” 

Oh lord, there she was, and I was right back there to where we started from, standing in front of myself again. 

[1] Nani in Japanese means ‘What’

[2] “So and so da yo” is the informal way of exclaiming “I am so and so”