Madame Melantha

I’m so fucked! I can’t find the bitch. She was right here yesterday. Small tent and everything. “Madame Melantha, fortunes and destinies” on a big fucking sign. Me and Paul walked in, still a bit buzzed from the beers he managed to nab from his older brother. Both of us a bit disappointed in the few attractions the traveling carnival had to offer. The beer mixed with the incense, or whatever those scented candles are called, made it feel like a pressure building inside my skull as we entered her tent. “Should you two be out this late?” she’d asked. “Aren’t you the one that should answer that?” I wisecracked back. “So you wish to be grown up as quick as you can. Dash through discovering what life is, who you are, who your friends are. Youthful adventures, learning the wisdom of your elders in school, days in the forest without any responsibilities. To discover emotions, relationships and bodies in mutual inexperience. You want to jump past that, straight into adulthood.”

I didn’t understand even half of it. I don’t think I had do, since she presented it as a fact, not a question. “Hell, yeah we do.” She took my hand in one hand, ruffled my hair with the other in that condescending way I hate, and looked into my eyes with her big, sad, black eyes. “So be it”, she said and let go. She went back to sit down, as if we were done. Paul and I walked out confused over what had just happened. Worst sales women ever. How could she earn anything?

The early hours in the morning I woke up a grown man, hair and muscles all over, drenched in sweat and with a skull-splitting hangover. At least I think that’s what a hangover feels like. My PJ torn to shreds at some time during the night. I felt dread. The kind of dread when you do something your parents told you not to do, and now the thing they didn’t want to happen happened, and you are in big shit. Unless you can fix it well enough that no one will notice.

I sat up and banged my head in the shelf mounted too low for a 6-feet-whatever tall man. I was dead still, straining to hear if I’d woken anyone up. All I needed was to find the old hag and have her turn me back. Say I’m sorry, that I was rude, that I will never drink beer again, whatever. Dad’s sweatpants were in the laundry. Mum’s keys were in the kitchen. I could get to the park and back in under an hour, and have all of this sorted before anyone wakes up. How hard could it be to drive a car?

Well, my plan didn’t account for her tent to be gone without a trace. Fuck! No school today I guess.

Read my commentary.