RAY VUKCEVICH

A HOLIDAY JUNKET

SO WE TELEPORT FOR THE holidays to a world where everyone is required to carry a
huge fishbowl all of the time. It takes both hands to hold the heavy bowl, and
once you're holding it, there's no way to let go. The fish in the bowl is a
barking goldfish. It likes to eat spiders. The so-called Kamikaze spider is as
big as a basketball, and it always goes for your face. Once you have a spider
trying to suck out your eyes, you have very little time to perform the only
course of action open to you. What you must do is plunge your head into the bowl
so your barking goldfish can eat the Kamikaze spider. None of this was explained
in the brochure.

Also big news to us is the fact that this is a world where the dimension
necessary for long distance telepathy is missing. Just as sound cannot cross a
vacuum, here thoughts do not travel in the ether. I could beam my intentions at
her until I was blue in the face, and it wouldn't do any good.

What we must do is somehow touch heads. If we can touch heads I can ask her if
maybe we shouldn't get out of here. If she agrees, and I can't imagine that she
won't, we can hotfoot it through the forest and across the creek to the exit
portal which if I'm not mistaken I can actually see from here. Touching heads,
however, is going to be a big problem, since we're both holding these really big
fishbowls.

The sky is sea green, and the puffy pink clouds racing across it move too
quickly to really be clouds, not that I thought there were clouds in the first
place, since we came to know everything we needed to know about this world as
soon as we popped into existence here. None of it makes me feel like singing
Christmas carols.

I suppose I could just take off running. Would she get the idea and follow? Or
would she misunderstand and think that I'd known what this world was like all
along and that I'd lured her here to abandon her?

I cluck my tongue at her trying to get her attention so she'll come over here so
maybe we can touch heads, but she's looking around fearfully like something
might jump out of the feather duster trees and grab her, and the look on her
face would be funny and adorable, oh you silly goose, if it were not the case
that her fears are entirely justified. Even the little bugs on this world are as
big as your feet.

She finally sees me making faces at her and comes over and our' fishbowls clink
together as we try to go head to head. Our fish thrash around barking like crazy
and snapping at each other through the glass. Whenever we lean in to touch, the
fish leap up out of the water and nip at our chins. Boy, if I ever do manage to
get a thought in edgewise what I'll think is maybe we should have opted for a
more traditional holiday with growling mall crowds and a rented uncle albert
singing drunken sailor songs and fruit cake and santa clause and colored lights
and disappointed children and eggnog.

I walk around her hoping we can touch from the rear, but as it turns out, and
this is not something I'd realized earlier, our butts are almost perfectly
matched heightwise. And the bowls are so heavy. I can't lean far enough back to
touch my head to hers without spilling water out of my fishbowl, and if I
spilled too much water and the fish got stressed and became maybe moody and
lethargic, who would eat the Kamikaze spider surely even now tensing for a leap
at my face?

I feel a sudden flash of irritation, and I'm glad we didn't connect just then.
Otherwise we might have exchanged unkind remarks about our respective butts.

I move to her side but no matter how e arrange ourselves we cannot connect.
Front to back? No good. All we do is produce a clinking clanking splashing and
barking cacophony of goldfish.

Our struggle to re-establish the connection we have always had suddenly becomes
desperate as I realize, and I can see it in her eyes that it has dawned upon her
too, that we may never hook up again. We could be stranded and alone like this
forever. We spend a couple of minutes jumping around making hopeless and
helpless hooting sounds, grunts and cries, whimpers and finally barks not too
different from the barks of our goldfish.

Then there is a quiet moment. The eye of the storm. And then we panic. I can't
see her fishbowl; I can only see her. She fills my vision, and nothing matters
as much as our reunion. I cannot rationally appraise the danger we face as we
rush together and meet like belly-bumping cowboys and our bowls shatter and our
fish fall into the high grass, and she wet, slippery and shivering rushes into
my arms.

There is a momentary riot of chewing sounds from the grass, and then the
worldwide bug symphony that I'd scarcely noticed before stops absolutely. The
pink non-clouds gather above us like a fastforward weather report. Those black
drops dropping will probably be spiders.

I pull her in close and we touch heads, and in an explosion of color and big
bands, jungle orchids and satin cat feet up and down my spine, it's like a big
part of your mind has just wondered off whistling, and now it's back and all the
pieces snap into place, a cosmic ah ha and she me we spiral down and down to a
perfect state of not quite seamless sameness, the two of us, the one of us. You
can phone your congressperson, and you can write a letter to the editor. You can
curse your luck, and you can shake your fist at the sky. You can drop to your
knees in an eleventh hour appeal to magic. But in the end there is really only
this.

We make a dash for it.

Frequent travelers' tories do not apply. (Carassius auratus not included.)