The Amazing Misadventures of This and That

I'm committing this to writing because it may very well be the last thing I write. If anything happens to me, I want it to be known how I died. I want my story told.


I woke up in a moving van--to one side, the passenger's seat door; to the other side, Jen. "What's going on?" I asked calmly, "Did I get evicted again?"

Jen smiled and, keeping her eyes on the road she responded, "No, not yet. I thought we'd do something fun for a change. We're going on a road trip!" I turned to the window in a panic and heard the automatic car doors click into place. I was trapped.

Day 1
I scratched at the windows like a frightened animal and fumbled with the handle of the door. "Jen, you can't do this to me!" I pleaded, trying to undo the lock on the door. I turned to her, grabbed her arm, and begged for mercy. "I didn't plan! I didn't pack!"

"I packed for you," she said as she motioned towards a duffel bag in the back seat. I hurriedly tore into it, making sure she packed everything I'd need, and found it was full of McDonald's ketchup packets. "There are some honey packets at the bottom, too."

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"Because, dear Alex, I'm trying to teach you that you don't need to plan everything ahead of time. Live a little, man!"

"Jen, if you wanted to do that, you could have just taken away my day planner. What you're doing right now isn't just wrong, it's madness. It's cruel, it's heartless, it's--well, it sounds a lot like you, actually."

She kept smiling and cut off an 18-wheeler. I sat there horrified, with desperation in my eyes, watching as everything I knew vanished into the horizon behind us. "We're going to experience the country! Come on, it'll be great!"

"I spent my whole life avoiding as much of the country as possible. Do you think I just did that for fun? There are bad things out there, Jen," I wheezed, producing my copy of An Agoraphobe's Guide to the Monsters of America from my coat pocket, "real bad things."


"You carry that with you everywhere you go?"

"Yes. Yes, I do. That is how dedicated I am to avoiding situations like this." I reached into my other pocket and pulled out the book Yūrei: Japanese Ghosts and How Bad They Will Kill You, and flipped open to a page of reference. "Jen, Japan has real messed-up ghosts. They are dead, and they hate you. Sometimes they just laugh at you and destroy your self-esteem, but look at this one," I said, flipping the book open to show her the picture I had my finger on, "it has an eye in its butt. I don't care what that thing's motive is, if I had come back with an eye in my butt, I would kill everything that moved."

"Actually, the Shirime isn't so much a ghost as a monster."

"Shut up, Jen. You only know that because this is a narrative written by me."

"Also, we're not in Japan."

"So what? They're dead. They can do whatever they want to do, and if that includes terrorizing other nations, then they will do it." I hugged the books close to my body and whispered to myself. Jen gave the finger to a man in a Honda Accord. "How much money do we have, at least?"

"Oooh, I knew I forgot something."

My eyes grew in horror. I stared out at the open road, and I began to weep.


Continue on to part 2

-Alex