Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview
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At one point in our conversation, I recall thinking that Dieter sounded like a character from one of those Steppenwolf or Magis-ter Ludi books my girlfriend was into pre-Woodstock, so I began to wonder just how strongly Dieter was drawn beyond the familiar.
He was too young to know that all this had been done before and that one day he, too, would be permanently sucked into the comfortably banal. I’d once been open and experimental but had long since succumbed to the pull of the everyday and the substantial.
Now, I looked knowingly, but without jealously or regret, at myself 40 years younger.
#
The parking lot was half-full, but there was no one else around.
Approaching the front door, I was struck by the stillness. No sounds came from inside the building either, and the solid steel door swung noiselessly.
This was not the great entrance that Dieter had prepared me for with portals leading off in every direction to unending chains of stores and shops and vendors and maybe even phenomenal, unreal, and psychedelic adventures.
It was an ordinary warehouse reception area with cheap industrial furniture—one desk and a couple of chairs, papers and binders haphazardly stacked on a rickety metal bookshelf beside a three-drawer filing cabinet that supported a dingy coffee maker and an out-of-date wall calendar. Except for the desk and its orbit, the room was bare.
A door, to the left of the bookshelf, was the only way in and the worn carpet showed the way. I sat down and waited for the care-14
taker, but 15 minutes of unnerving quiet was long enough, so I got up to walk towards the door to find out where Dieter had sent me.
I opened the door with a slight push, and the sunlight rushed in to fill the rectangle of floor behind me, while in front of me the parking lot was still half-filled with cars, including mine. Only it was my red Opel with Cheryl’s glass beads hanging from the rear-view mirror.
First published in Down in the Dirt, Volume 121, January/February 2014.