Flash Friday for 6-13-14. five days late, Every perpetrator is equivalent, every victim is unique ---Julio Ortega in Flash Friday

“… so, see? I was a kid scared to death of clowns. Ain’t that a hoot?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No, it ain’t a hoot. It’s the most common god damned story I’ve ever heard. It’s like finding Jesus in a fox-hole or, I don’t know, a rat in your coke. Common. Common and … and bullshit.”

“Get the check I want to go home.”

“Go home then. I told Chuck I didn’t want to go on a blind date. I didn’t know he would set me up with the dullest woman in all Nebraska. Go Home, go swimming, go jump off a train, I don’t care.”

Nobody had been paying attention before. Now they weren’t paying attention really, really hard. She sat there for a minute with her mouth open, maybe it was sixty five seconds. Then she closed her mouth and made tight little fists.

“Ok, so, Mr. Unique, what scared you as a kid?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. My company bugs you so much I … I might just follow you around all week. I might be common in front of your friends, your clients, I might …”

“Ok. The house of Mirrors.”

“What?”

“The house of Mirrors, you know, a fun house, there was a carnival came through in the summer of 72, had a fun house, a house of mirrors, scared the shit out of me.”

She laughed. It was forced. She laughed. It was snarky.

“Yeah, if I was you mirrors would scare me too.”

He didn’t say anything. He rattled the ice cubes in his drink, sipped at the melted water and missing whisky.

“Wasn’t the mirrors exactly. I spent an hour in there. It was the idea of the mirrors. I kept thinking if I looked long enough I’d get the trick. Maybe two hours. I don’t know, a carny kicked me out when they were closing.”

He rattled the melting ice cubes. She didn’t do anything.

“What scared me was … I don’t know … how untrustworthy the world had just become. I mean you look in a mirror and brush your teeth, pop a zit, think about a … date, and whether you look right. You accept that’s how you look right then and there, in real time, at the moment you are looking at it. You expect a mirror to tell you the truth, you expect that it has no choice but to tell you the truth. “

He rattled cubes, she did nothing, everybody else was smug about how well they had done at not paying any attention now that the tension and ugliness seemed to have passed.

“It’s not just that one mirror might have lied in that funhouse. It’s that only one out of a hundred could be telling the truth because each one had a different image. My whole life, and yeah, by seventy two there wasn’t a whole lot of living I had under my belt, still … I hadn’t ever considered that a mirror could do anything but reflect what was in front of it. It’s not like the funhouse mirrors did anything more, they just did it dishonestly. I looked at everything differently then. I mean you take a wheel, for instance, it rolls true, and sure, if you think about it it rolls true because someone trued it, but the basic shape and idea of a wheel is roll true. A fun house wheel though … you get what I’m saying? Scared the shit out of me. Scares the shit out of me.”

“Call me a cab.”