Singed Synapses and Deranged Dendrites

Chuck (#prize)

It didn't seem possible to Glen that he could sweat more profusely until that familiar, awful feeling of getting whacked in the nards began to build. He sucked in a breath from beneath the suffocating plush mouse head he wore.

"Mother fucker...," Glen hissed now doubled over. He craned his neck up to look into the laughing eyes of the seven-year-old who had skillfully thrown the stray Skee ball. If he'd had the strength to, he would have punched the munchkin in the face and given him another missing tooth.

Glen felt the room spin just a bit more now than it had with the buzz he had achieved at the start of his shift. Three or four airplane bottles of cheap vodka had taken off the edge and eased the indignity of another day spent dressed as a mouse and entertaining children's birthday parties.

Another day of watching kids get crazy on free soda refills, rainbow-colored cake, and cheap ice cream. They would scream the whole time unless they were crying and usually half of the party was crying at any given time.

They lost a game, they cried. They lost their tickets, they cried. They didn't get picked by the birthday boy or girl to go into the ticket blaster machine to catch as many tickets swirling through the air as they could in thirty seconds, they cried. Several would cry when they couldn't buy the prize they had hoped for with their tickets, a cheap mass produced plastic toy behind a counter. Or, as their high-fructose syrup-fueled bender came to an end and their blood sugar crashed, they simply cried.

And today the birthday boy took one look as Glenn dressed as Chuck E Cheese and burst into tears, terrified. His friend, not wanting to let the giant smiling mouse intimidate his buddy, had taken aim at Glen's privates with a wooden ball from one of the oldest arcade games around.

"...you little asshole!" said Glen finishing his sentence, as the vomit rose in his throat.

He felt the weight of disapproving stares of eight or so mothers–not sober themselves he'd noted–agast at his foul language. Glen knew he'd get another talking to by the manager. These housewives would certainly register a complaint. If he could have, Glen would have laughed. It didn't matter. There was a certain amount of job security when you took the job that nobody in their right mind wanted.

The multi-colored neon lights of the arcade seemed to swim together in the corner of the room reserved for birthday parties. As his vision grew dim, Glen noticed the tongs from the salad bar lay on the floor again. The salad bar. Limp romaine, canned beans, and carrots that were so dried out they had a dusky hue. A sad joke of a nod to good health when eating the cheap cheese and processed meat on cardboard that was supposed to pass as pizza was all anyone really wanted.

As Glen succumbed to the blackness he stuck up the middle finger of his hand not covering his testicles. And as the crowd around him closed in, he wondered if perhaps he should have applied himself more in school.