New Short Fiction: Hitlerland

Nina was your typical American 17 year old girl: Blond, petite, loved rock music and history, did well in school, had a line of steady boyfriends and even attracted the attention of a few older men here and there, much to her own delight.

But unlike most typical American Girls, Nina had a sort of twisted sense of humor; she would giggle at inappropriate times, like during her history class's viewing of "Schindler's List" or two years ago when a classmate died in a car accident and she started the rumor that the accident was caused because the classmate was giving the driver head. It was later told to her that it had been her father driving the car, which only made her giggle harder.

So imagine Nina's rapture when Hitlerland announced it was finally going to open in nearby Huntersville, a short two hour drive from where she lived.

Hiterland was exactly what it sounded like: A theme park which, as it's creator and chief executive officer Don Marty was quick to dance around, celebrated World War Two and primarily the history of Adolf Hitler.

Of course there was a whole storm of controversy that followed the idea of Hitlerland, from Jewish Leagues, Veteran's Societies, People With Good Taste, etc. Don Marty pushed hard for three years before finally being able to sell the idea as a "historical" theme park. With some funding from less than upstanding groups, Hitlerland was set to open this weekend.

Nina could barely contain herself. The whole idea, even to this twisted young lady, seemed completely ludicrous. How could this thing ever be built? She wondered to herself as she thumbed through the park's webpage. She couldn't stop giggling when she would read the ride descriptions: Himmler's Science Lab, The Holy Grail Cup Ride, A Night in Eva's Bunker, and it went on and on. Most of what she saw in the pictures was typical of most theme parks she had been to. A few stock photos of roller coasters, smiling children with pink puffs of cotton candy on sticks, with the captions that no actual photos from Hitlerland were available yet. Ticket prices were modest, a day pass would cost her forty bucks. Nina picked up her little cell phone and started calling numbers.

To her surprise, no one, all eighty-seven contacts on her phone wanted to go with her this weekend. Some of her friends laughed and asked if she was serious, her other friend, a young lady by the last name of Goldstein hung up on her. She just thought her friends were stuck up and needed a laugh.

I mean, it's a theme park about Hitler! She thought, it can't be taken so seriously!


The next morning Nina got up and got dressed. She had a thin little body, with tiny breasts, her blond hair cropped just below her ears. She put on her usual amount of eye liner, which was way too much, but it's what the popular kids did these days, and put on a tight pair of low rider jeans and a white tank top. It was just getting close to summer and she had a feeling this wouldn't be her last trip to Hitlerland before school started up again in a few months.

She hadn't told her parents about her planned trip because deep down she knew they would object, and likely make her stay home and do chores. It was eight am, and the park would be opening at about eleven. She figured if she took her time, she would get there right before the gates opened.

She picked up her keys, her camera, her little bag and bopped out the door, her parents not even noticing her leave. She got into her older brother's old Camry and drove off towards Huntersville.

When she got to Huntersville, traffic snarled wickedly. She thought to herself, wow, a lot of people want to check this place out. As she inched her way through the coils of cars on Rt 9, she began to notice the crowds and cars. Some of the bumper stickers on the cars were downright filthy, messages of hate were the theme on a lot of them. She snickered at one that said "My Child Bombed Your Child's School" in relation to the honor roll student bumper sticker that had been around forever. Another one was slightly less pleasant "If you let niggers and jews into your town, you're letting in disease and strife." Well, there was nothing really funny about that one, was there? She frowned and turned up the music in her car.

The people in the cars were disturbing as well: Fat bald bearded men in white tank tops, kids with scruffy mullets, shaved heads, women looking tired and worn out, smoking cigarettes between long withered fingers. Everyone looked poor and cheap, cars were more than ten years old and kept in poor condition, cracked windshields, loud hate filled heavy metal being blasted out of the open windows where children and dogs leaned way too far out of to be safe. A few big black motorcycles roared up the sides of the breakdown lanes. The men on the bikes were big, dressed in all black, with big Swastikas on the backs of their jackets. Nina's stomach suddenly turned as she wished she hadn't come alone.

"They're probably working for the park," she said to herself, her mouth dry, the thought that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time worming it's way into her brain.

By 1230, she finally found a parking space for twenty dollars about a mile away from the park entrance. She had pulled off of Rt 9 and parked where someone had opened up their front lawn to motorists with a homemade sign on white clapboard and red paint.

Nina hadn't worn the most practical shoes for walking, so by the time she had made it to the ticket booth her feet were throbbing and blistered. Just outside the gate were a sea of protesters with their own home made signs. Most called owner Don Marty an anti-Semite, a monster, an opportunist, etc. Nina found it very difficult to wade her way through the crowd to get her all-day pass.

But she did, after being called a number of not-so-nice names, and she was through the big red and black wrought iron fence with barbed wire adorning the top. Her eyes were wide and a little wet as she was marched through the gates and into the park. Suddenly Nina didn't think this was all that much fun.

The interior of the park was littered with more people she saw in traffic, in jackboots, shaved heads, white suspenders off their shoulders, tight white tank tops eating ice cream and wandering about. Her all-day pass was a bracelet that was covered in stylized Swastikas and she desperately wanted to take it off. Around the park were loud speakers on poles that blasted period music, mostly slow crackly jazz, which intermittently was cut off by the sound of a needle being taken off of a vinyl record, and a loud heavily German-accented voice would bellow out the park rules. This happened about once every twenty minutes and soon was very grating.

"YOO VILL NOT TAKE UNTA PHOTOS IN ZEE PARK, YOO VILL ENJOY YOURSELVES, ACH, YOO VILL EAT SWEETENS, UND YOO VILL HAVE UNTA GOODEN TIMEN, ACH" The voice screamed out. Nina wandered over to a section of the park called "Ceremony Walk Way" where elaborate Nazi decorations hung from high pillars along a walk way which lead to a giant stage. On the stage, big projection screens displayed old film footage of Hitler giving speeches, which would subtitled for the layman's advantage. At center stage, a large plaster life-like statue of Hitler himself, in full dress stood, pointing out towards the small crowd of obvious white supremacists that had gathered to take in the media propaganda. Nina raised her digital camera to take a shot of the scene, when from behind her, a heavy gloved hand fell on her shoulder.

"Sorry Fraulein, no photographs," the voice, which was very midwestern sounding, said from behind her. She turned and looked up at a very tall and very blond looking young man, maybe a year or two older than her, dressed in a black Nazi SS uniform. Her lower lip quivered, utterly impressed with this sight before her. "I'm going to have to take that from you," he continued, and held out his gloved hand.

"But it's a Cannon, it's a 300 dollar camera..." she said weakly, knowing there was no way she was going to win this argument.

"I don't even know how you got it through the gate, but I gotta take it from you."

"Well, can I get it back?" She asked up to his square chin. He glanced around, about fifty yards away two more, she guessed they were security guards dressed up like Storm Troopers, were watching them.

"I don't know, give me your name, and I'll put it on a slip of paper and keep it in the office here," and she gave him her name and asked where the office was. The SS man pointed towards the giant gothic-looking church at the center of the park. "Go in there and tell them that your camera got taken when you're ready to leave." She nodded dumbly and he walked off.

She wandered around some, getting more and more sick at what she was seeing. It wasn't funny anymore, especially the "It's A Perfect World After All" which was a play on the Disneyland's "It's A Small World After All" where sing-song little Aryan dolls sang about the Third Reich and eradicating those who had less than pure blood. She was ready to go.

As she made her way to the big gothic-looking church to retrieve her camera, she came across something rather peculiar for a theme park themed on such an ugly aspect of world history:

Batting Cages.

She couldn't believe it, and she wandered over to it, where mostly little boys were lined up with helmets and baseball bats. It seemed so out of place in a theme park that celebrated the existence of hatred.

Nina loved baseball, she was a rabid Royals fan, even though they were perennial cellar-dwellers. She stood in line and when she came up to the rack of bats and helmets, she took one of each and waited for a stall to open. When one did, she walked over towards it, but was stopped short by a big sweaty palm across her small chest.

"Whoa, hold on there missy, where's your gold coin?" A slow drawl spoke over her. She wasn't sure what she was most offended by, the hand lingering across her small chest or the smell coming from it's owner. She looked up and tipped back her helmet and dropped her jaw. Standing over her was Mick Gilpatrick, long time Royals catcher. What was he doing here?

"What're you doing here, Gil?" He was known by fans affectionately as 'Gil' and he had a wad of chew in his cheek as he slowly withdrew his hand from his fan's chest.

"Aw hell, they made me a deal, that if I came down here and you know, stood around, signed a few autographs, shit like that, they'd give me a hunk of change here," he leaned back and spat a long jet of black. "Now where's your gold coin?" Nina felt all the eyes in the line behind her burning holes into her body, which didn't help the fact she felt dumb for not having this gold coin on her person so she could swing the bat. What made matters worse was that one of her childhood heroes was standing over her, clearly not impressed.

"I, uh, don't have one, I didn't know I needed one," she stammered. Gil slapped a sign overhead that read, in three inch gothic letters "One Gold Coin Per Round."

"Oh," she said, her voice felt numb leaving her mouth.

"You get them over at the booth there, you ask for a gold coin, but they give you these silver ones. These are just as good," Gil said.

"So why doesn't the sign say silver coins? Why does it say gold coins if there's only silver coins?" She asked up at her hero. He looked over at the booth and rubbed his chin.

"How about an autograph then, just so you don't walk away here empty handed?" And Nina beamed, and the major leaguer avoided answering the question. This was the first thing that made her even remotely happy since walking through the big scary gates. She nodded, her eyes bright. Gil produced a Sharpie from his back pocket, and without saying a word, simply leaned down and scribbled his signature across Nina's white tank top. He pressed in hard across her breasts, even slyly cupping one to get a better surface to write on. Nina stood in shock, and before she could protest, Gil stepped back admiring his work, a black streaky scribble across this jailbait's chest. "There you go little missy, now get out of the way so we can get s'more batters in here," and dumbly Nina stepped out of the way, amid the snickers of some of the adolescent skinheads in line.

She was on the verge of tears when she finally made it to the gothic church and pushed her way through the heavy doors. This was such a bad idea, she thought to herself as she approached a big dark wood desk, a sharp looking, very serious woman in female SS dress sat behind it. Nina, in her ruined tank top and eyeliner-streaked face stood shaking a little in front of the desk, feeling tiny. The woman on the opposite side of the desk looked up at her from over her rimless and cold eye glasses.

"Vat," she said more than asked.

"Um, I was told I could pick up my camera here by a ... guy. He took it from me, and I gave him my name and he said I could, could," she swallowed hard, "get it back here. It was a very expensive Cannon Digital." The woman made a show of shuffling around paper work on her desk and then looked up at Nina.

"No camera was turned in unto us, I'm sorry," she said quickly and coldly.

"It was a three hundred dollar camera! It was a birthday present from my mom and dad!" She was getting loud and whiny, making the woman behind the desk shoot a glance to someone behind her. Nina spun around and saw two men dressed in SS garb walked towards her. Their boots clicking loudly on the stone floor, and terror struck Nina hard in the stomach.

She puked a little and it ran down her shirt, over the Gilpatrick autograph.

Nina soon found herself in a jail cell somewhere beneath the church. She was crying hysterically, scared out of her mind. The cell was cold and drafty, wet and dank, where you'd expect political prisoners of the Nazi Party to be held as they waited to be dragged out to the woods kicking and screaming before being shot in the back of the head while standing over a shallow ditch hastily dug by some Nazi underling.

After she was alone for about ten minutes she heard a whisper from behind her, she stopped sniffling and turned her head towards the sound.

"Hey," came a sharp short whisper.

"Hello?" She said in reply. The whisper shushed her and she crawled on her hands and knees towards the far wall. "Hello?" She whispered.

"Hey," the whisper came back. "I'm in the other cell,"

"Why are you here?" She asked.

"I was handing out these," and a small white pill came rolling into her cell from between the wall that separated the captives. She ducked down and tried to peek through the crack where the pill came from. There was a little light but not enough to see. She picked up the pill and looked at it.

"What is this?"

"Try it and see," the voice came back.

"No! How do I know this isn't a drug!"

"It is a drug, but try it, you'll feel better," the voice was strangely soothing. She looked at the pill with a sense of dubiousness and blew the dirt particles from it. She slipped it into her mouth and dry swallowed, coughing a little. The voice came back from the other side of the wall.

"Prepare for lift off," and before she could ask what that meant, the wall to the cell melted right before her eyes, and on the other side stood a giant toad smoking a cigarette. Suddenly Nazis marched past her on the other side of the bars to her cell, goose stepping, rifles at right shoulder arms, each one staring at her with glowing yellow eyes. It was like she was watching a very real version of Pink Floyd's "The Wall," which she'd only seen parts of with her older brother when he was home from college last year.

She couldn't taste anything, but she could smell something burning, and instantly thought it was her brain. Her head was on fire she figured, that would explain the burning sensation in her scalp. She began to wither and she fell to the floor of her cell, and around her the floor rippled like a pond and she was a pebble. She let out a scream but it came out too deep to be her voice. She felt another charge of vomit working it's way up her throat but she couldn't seem to work it past her trachea, and she committed to the idea she was going to die on the floor of this wet cold cell, choked to death on her own drug-induced vomit that was handed off to her by some racist Nazi skinhead piece of white trash.

Why had she gotten herself into this mess?



Nina woke up in a hospital room with a tube in her nose and machines surrounding her. She jumped with a start and panicked but then settled down. It was night time, the lights were off in the hallway that made up the hospital. Her mother was asleep in the chair to her right, her dad was no where to be found. On a tiny table next to her was her Cannon Digital.

Her hand felt like a thousand pounds but she manages to reach the camera and put it on her chest. She opened up the little panel on the side and dug around for the memory stick, but couldn't find it. Well, she thought, at least I got the camera back. Just then, her mother stirred and came awake.

"Nina?" She called softly.

"Momma," she replied. Her voice was weak and throat sore. She glanced over to the table and a blue cup of water with a straw sticking out of it rested there. She motioned for the cup and her mother was on her feet in a second. She handed the cup to her daughter and patted her head.

"The police brought you here," she started. "They say you were passed out along the side of a road over in Huntersville? What happened?" Nina couldn't avoid her mother's eyes and at the same moment she loathed this woman for prying into her personal hell, she had never felt more secure in her life. "You didn't try to go to that... that.. park out there, did you?" What could she do, a lie would be obvious at this point. She looked out into the hallway from her bed, took another sip of water and looked back at her mother.

"Yes," she said softly. Her mother looked absolutely horrified, but not surprised. She sat back down in her chair, which she had pulled closer to the edge of the bed.

"But why?"

"I wanted to see what it was like, I guess," Her mother simply sat looking at her.

"We won't tell your father about this, you know how upset he'd get. He'd probably march down there and set the place on fire," and to Nina, that sounded like the best solution for Hitlerland. Burn it to the ground with everyone inside. Give them a taste of their own medicine. And make sure if Mick Gilpatrick or Don Marty ran out of the flames, trying to escape Hell itself, daddy takes them out with a rifle blast to their heads. She let a slow smile spread across her face but hid it quickly when she noticed her mother looking at her funny.

"I'm ok mom," she said softly.

New Short Fiction: Minimalist Canada

The sweat in his body smelled richly like cigarette smoke, but his dazed disposition didn't allow him to take that bit of information into his brain. Neuron receptors were effectively blocked from receiving signals like smells, touches, the whole bit. He drove though, endlessly north, he'd been on US Rt 89 for what felt like a week, through it'd been only about two hours.

He felt that if he could share this with anyone, he'd share it with her. The pills he swallowed, two every forty-five minutes – just when the affects would be starting to unhinge and he could feel again – did allow him to take in the rich fall colors that were spreading across the Vermont landscape like the wildfires in California. The switch backs he found himself driving on, narrowly going over a guard rail, displayed god's grace readily. God's grace or a rogue glacier. His brain was too fried to really differentiate between the two ideas.

He chuckled to himself then, the idea of going off the edge of a switch back in northern Vermont seemed to get through the Klonopin and tickle the funny nerve in his brain. He sucked on his Camel and pressed the gas pedal down a little harder, down shifted, and passed a slow moving Honda CRV on the right.

Brian Vicks was twenty-eight, college educated, graduated with a degree in sociology from a decent, but not ivy league, New England school. For the five or so years he was out of school he worked in a variety of different jobs: Court Houses, out-patient clinics, metal shops, printing shops, and two years ago he took a thirteen-dollar-an-hour gig at his local bank branch working at the counter. He didn't think he'd stay more than the usual six months, which was par for Vicks. He was never happy with the idea of working, and he never stayed around long enough to actually feel like he was in a career. He often thought about going back to school for maybe something in law or something that he could actually put to use, other than a degree in sociology, which he only took because it was a pretty easy major and left him a lot of room to bullshit in papers for classes.

But then Brian Vicks got into a horrible car accident, and had to undergo surgery to repair a snapped femur, and a set of shattered ribs. He spent a year out of work going through rehabilitation and developing a hidden, if not crippling, addiction to different flavors of pain killers.

When he returned to work at the bank he learned that two of the senior tellers had retired and quit respectively. Instantly the branch manager elevated Vicks to a senior teller position which had less to do with dealing with the public and more to do with the goings-on behind the scenes with people's money. That lasted about two months when a loan officer's position opened and Brian went in and interviewed for it.

He didn't think he'd have a shot, but much to his surprise about a week later, the branch manager called him at home on his day off and told him if he wanted the loan officer job he could have it. Vicks, who had just taken on a fresh load moments before barely answering his phone, croaked that he'd be thrilled.

He was now making between forty and forty-two thousand dollars a year, and granted his own loan to buy a house on the outskirts of town. He also granted his own loan to buy a new truck, which he was currently driving towards Montreal.

He had asked for about two weeks off after working tirelessly for the last fourteen months. That morning he took two bottles of pills, each with two hundred count of his favorite pain killers, packed a light bag with a change of clothes, passport, money, a paperback book, digital camera and an extra prescription pad that he'd stolen from a doctor's office a few months ago when he went in for a check up. That's how he got his pills you see. He'd been "weaned" off from prescription pain killers over a year ago, but his addiction ran too deep. He tried at first to drown it with booze, but it wasn't the same feeling. He hated feeling weighed down by the alcohol; that boot on top of his head slowly pushing him down into the earth. With pills he had the same slowed responsiveness and floaty feeling, without the hangovers. With the pills, the anxiety of life would just fizzle away and slowly seep back into the picture. And when it did, he just swallowed another handful of the white chalky pills and returned to a blissful existence where the lens had a careful smudge of Vaseline around the outside edge.

He'd never been to Montreal and so that was the draw. His friends told him that it was a fun time, the girls were hot and flirty, the food was good, and people generally treated Americans like retarded school children: condescendingly nice. He just wanted to get away from his existence in a way the pills couldn't do it for him. He needed to see new scenery and different people. The faces of the people he saw every day were enough to drive him to blow his brains out in the back of his new home.

He routinely turned the same people down for loans from the bank. That was his job, that's why he got picked to be the new loan officer. The same sorry sack of shit would walk into his office, sit down across from his impressive oak desk, hat in hand and plead for help. It was always the same story, just with different components involved.

"Gee sir," they'd start nervously, already knowing what the outcome of this charade would be in the parking lot, sitting in their rusted out fifteen year old car that wouldn't pass it's next inspection. "We could really use about five thousand dollars to fix up our place. You see, we need a new roof, the one we have now leaks like a sumabitch – excuse me – and the furnace don't always kick on, and winter's comin' and the kids – " and they always paraded the kids in front of him. They always came with pictures of grubby faced, dirty-shirt-wearing children sitting in a dirt pile playing with trucks. They'd mostly be shoeless but gleeful. Vicks always thought that if it weren't for the pills, he'd probably have quit the position by now.

Because it was always no, that was the answer. He'd go through the motions, even if it was the same people every week. He'd dig into their credit history, he'd go through their work history, he'd even look into how much they spent on groceries every week and the answer was always no. It was too risky for the bank, and he even had his own rejection speech memorized by rote to tell these people. He sounded like a broken record, like a denial-bot set on automatic.

"The bank can't give you the loan Mr/Mrs whoever, because we just feel that it's too risky of an investment for us. We need to make money on the interest you're paying us back, and we feel, based on your finances, you wouldn't be able to make the minimum loan payments," and he'd stare through them, at some point in the wall behind them, passed their broken hearts and crushed egos.

Yes he sometimes got death threats in the mail, on his office voice mail, and it was always readily identifiable. He'd just dealt with the people and likely they were calling from the road or even the parking lot on pre-paid track phones, telling him he'd "regret it" or they'd "see" him "soon." He went through the usual motions and reported the threats to the police, who would or wouldn't take action. All he knew was what his boss, the branch manager told him when he first took the position.

"It's tough work Brian, you're gonna say no to some really hard-up people, and they're not always going to want to take no for an answer…" and then Vicks faded out from the conversation. The pills working their magic like always, whisking him away from a harsh scene that was his reality. He giggled at the thought of "harsh scene" like he was some hippie.

He was about ten minutes from the boarder, where I-89 became Canadian 133. He finished his cigarette and took a quick glance in his rearview mirror to make sure he didn't look too stoned out of his mind to not pass customs. The last thing he wanted some was Nazi boarder agent with a sense of self-entitlement to go rummaging through his shit, killing his buzz, making him sweat more than he had to.

He was fine, at least so he thought. With the pills in his system it was hard to keep track of thoughts. It made him feel stupid but he'd soon forget that too. He fiddled for a rock station on the radio, tired of his cds he burned for the trip and came across 97.7 the "CHOM" or something to that affect, Montreal's Classic Rock Station, the radio said at him. He thought for a second that he should invest in one of those fancy satellite radio rigs so he wouldn't have to fiddle with radio knobs, but then forgot about it too.

He crested a small hill and came upon a very official looking structure that seemed to sprout from no where in the wilderness. He took his foot off the gas pedal and the truck, a rather large truck, seemed to slow with it's own weight. He sweated a little and loosened up the collar on his shirt, pushing his sleeves up to the middle of his forearms. One of the nasty side effects of the pills, that over time he'd gotten used to, was his bladder would become so full it'd be painful. And it'd be at very inopportune times that he'd need to empty it. But with being hooked for over a year, he'd develop an early warning system, a little tick that would let the rest of him know he was about five minutes away from pissing himself.

He'd had one nasty accident during a loan meeting where he wet himself from behind his desk. He didn't see it coming and right during a prospective borrower's speech he let loose in his trousers. He tried to not notice the smell of his own urine in a puddle under him, but the pills had just worn off at the same time he let go, and the stank dry smell for something so wet filled his office. The man across from him stopped not in mid sentence, but in mid word and looked at Vicks. Vicks just smiled slowly and didn't even bother to get up, the man let himself out with his hand over his mouth.

It became known at that point that Brian Vicks had a problem with incontinence.

If you asked his co-workers or even his boss, no one would suspect that Vicks was addicted to pills. They just thought he was a little eccentric or forgetful. One or two of the newer tellers, young girls fresh out of college were hip to the idea that he was probably on something, but never narc-ed him out to any of the other bank employees. And besides, they both would occasionally hang out with him if they had days off together, and all get high at his place.

At the boarder there's toll booths, but you have to stop about five meters from the actual booth while the person manning the booth takes your photograph. This for some reason made Vicks nervous, and he could feel his bladder at it's straining point. He waited with his foot pressed into the brake pedal, his other leg twisted against himself, trying to trap the end of his dick between his thighs, as if to physically pinch it off. The guard in the booth then motioned with her hand for him to drive up.

He slowly approached, feeling the sweat trickle down into his eyes. He removed his Ray-Ban sunglasses and put on his best professional smile. He glanced at the clock on his radio and saw it read two in the afternoon. Licking his lips he said,

"Good morning," the boarder agent didn't miss a beat.

"Good morning to you too sir," her accent was heavy Canadian and she had only a slight pleasantness about her. Vicks took a shallow breath through his mouth and wondered to himself what was taking her so long. He figured that as soon as he got clear of customs he was going to pull over and piss all over this hunk of the Great White North. "What brings you to Canada today?"

"Just on vacation," he answered. The sound of his own voice was as if he was yelling across a lake and only able to hear the faint echo. The boarder agent didn't seem all that affected.

"And how long will you be staying?"

"About a day or so," he said, the sweat feeling like it was being applied with a hose. She punched a few things into her computer and then asked to see his ID, and he dug into his bag and produced his passport. He took a look at it, and then at him, and punched a few more things into her computer. She handed it back and told him to enjoy himself. He thanked her and sped off down the road.

About a twenty second mile later, he pulled over to the side of the road, threw the door open and ran into the woods, ripping his jeans open. He reached down into his boxers, produced his dick and sprayed a long yellow jet of piss all over the ground in front of him, sighing out in a near orgasm as he leaned forward on a pine tree. Every muscle in his body seemed to relax and constrict at the same time, and a wave of nausea hit him and while he was pissing he managed to puke all over the place too.

He changed his clothes outside of the truck, throwing his soiled clothing into the woods, dousing off with a bottle of water he'd been sipping on.

He immediately popped two new pills and drove off up 133 North towards Iberville and Montreal.

He knew a girl in Montreal, her name was Marie and they met on the internet. They'd become close and she kept hinting that she'd like to meet him in real life. He always kinda kept her at arms length, unsure of himself that he would really want her to see him as the person he really was, which in his own mind registered as a pill addicted bed wetter who was a stone faced loan officer for a local bank in his own town. But with the idea of getting away from it all, he thought that why not surprise her. Why not see if she's who she really is. The last thought he had before his world went back to the cotton candy version of things was that she probably had her faults too. We're all human beings, and if anyone could see past anyone else's faults, it was Brian Vicks.

About two miles outside of Iberville, twenty miles south of Montreal, he pulled over at some roadside diner and dialed her phone. He let it ring through until a female voice in French told him that he should leave a message after the tone.

He closed his phone and went inside the diner and sat at the booth towards the back. A hard-faced lesbian of a waitress came up to him and asked him what he wanted in French. He plucked a menu up and tried to read it, but it too was all in French. He set it down and looked up at the waitress who looked impatient and asked for a cheeseburger and fries and a coke. She nodded, not bothering to write anything down. He sat looking out the window, and noticed how much grain they grew out in this part of the world. It looked like the American mid west, with the grain silos dotting the horizon, endless fields of gold at a hundred and 180 degrees. He tried her number again, and still got no answer. This time it didn't even ring, it just went right to voicemail.

He cursed, rubbing his numb face with the flat of his hand, pinching his nose, hearing the clatter of the kitchen, the voice in French. He wondered if they'd spit in his food, but that thought was chased away by the flood of endorphin releasing chemicals. He dug for a cigarette and found a fresh camel, then his lighter and lit up, blowing the smoke roofward.

A moment later the waitress returned and set his food down in front of him. The burger looked raw and the fries were soggy. Distastefully she said something to him which he couldn't quite make out, but when she pointed across the way to a sign that was slightly different than the no smoking signs in America but got the idea across just the same. Vicks plaintively looked for a place to put out his smoke, and found none, so the waitress just plucked it from his fingers and walked out the front door to the porch and smoked it herself.

"Fucking bitch," Vicks cursed under his breath as he lifted the bun off the top of his burger and inspected it for signs of expectorate. He glanced back up at the no smoking sign and marveled at how different it was than the ones in America. But that was the case throughout Canada, things were slightly off kilter. They were almost minimalist in a sense, strangle and unfamiliar. There wasn't a red circle with the line through it, in the middle a cartoon cigarette, what he'd be used to in the US, but instead a picture of a cigarette with a red X over it. No circle, and even the lines that made up the X were inoffensively thin, the cigarette was basically just a white stick with a black scribble for smoke coming out of an end.

Minimalist Canada. And he couldn't even blame the pills this time.

He bit into his burger after putting some ketchup on the meat and replacing the bun. He watched the hard edge waitress finish his camel and pitch the butt into the dirt drive way by his truck. The door jingled when she came back in and she shot him a look that dared him to ask for something else. He'd never so much felt like a stranger in a strange land before, and for that he blamed the drugs. He inspected his coke next, found it to be what he could consider spit-free and sipped from the edge, because there was no straw. He wondered what was going to happen when he paid in American currency.

He finished, leaving a twenty on the table without asking for a bill and got the hell out of there. He was wondering if he was going through a bad trip or not. He had them from time to time, usually when he chased too many pills too close together. The puking in the woods was a good sign that he had too much of the synthetic dopamine and now he was running a cold sweat. He got into his truck and continued north towards the city.

Twice more he tried her number and got nothing. He was developing the shakes and had to pull over anyway to get gas. The sun was starting to set and he thought to himself it might be a good idea to deal with the rural Canadian hicks while he could still see them clearly.

The gas station, again, was something out of a stereotypical American mid-western scene. Only two pumps, dirt driveway, big trucks rumbling by on the road. He pumped forty dollars worth of gas, noticing how it was in litres and not gallons. An older model van packed with middle aged women wearing designer knock-off clothing pulled in behind his truck and he gave them a once over. The driver got out and struggled with getting the hood open. Vicks went inside to pay.

Once inside he picked up a fresh bottle of water and went to the counter to pay. Ahead of him was another French woman, maybe from the van, buying lottery scratch tickets and carrying on with a loose conversation with the 14 year old girl wearing a cheap Guess shirt behind the counter. When he finally got up to the cashier, he told her about the gas and she rung him up for the water too. He thanked her with a heavy American "mercy" and not the stylized sounding Canadian "Merci."

The woman was still struggling with the hood and his pills were wearing off. He cleared his throat behind her and she turned and saw him standing. He motioned towards and hood and silently she stepped aside. He glanced and saw the little yellow button that would release the hood and jiggled it. The hood came free and the woman expressed her pleasure with several "mercies." Vicks smiled and shrugged it off, opening his water and getting back into his truck.

By now, night had fallen and she still hadn't answered her phone. He popped two more pills and sat in his truck on a hill top looking down on the city that was once built to be a fortress. The lights shined so bright because unlike every other American city, this one was purely surrounded by blackness, wilderness, god's unknown country of untamable mystery. His eyes narrowed down as he slipped into a Klonopin sleep, his mouth dry but hanging open.

He had no place to go, but he was in no hurry to get there.