Can You Master A Wheelchair In The Dark?

By Eric Malcolm

            We all sat at the dinner table drawing pictures, huddled around the burning candle in my friend’s house late that night.  They stopped paying their bills, but the only real change since the electricity went out was that there wasn’t the constant stream of music coming from the living room and vibrating up the stairs from down in the basement.  There was no television before, so we knew ways to keep ourselves occupied while we went on with our aimless lives and embraced for our questionable futures.

            At that time I had a pitiful yet oddly fulfilling job, stocking milk at the local Marc’s store.  To me, it meant all the free strawberry milk I could drink, and my friends enjoyed coming in and stealing things while they visited me.  Nobody really told me what to do, and I could come in with a really bad hangover and no one would know the difference.  Working part-time, I was still able to spend about as much time out at my friend’s house as everyone else without jobs had. 

Out at the house, the faces never really changed, only the habit for the moment.  For some reason, I was wearing safety glasses, most likely just for the hell of it.  That night was a crystal night.  On benders like this, we gave into our brimming creativity by drawing murals of pot leaves, and such, all with very detailed hidden images you never quite saw at first, and possibly didn’t even intend to put in the picture in the first place.  I also mastered the art of extreme wheelchair riding.  I still get tempted to show off every time I’m in a Wal-Mart and see a wheelchair.

            When the sun came up that morning, we all went outside to have a cigarette, and enjoy the seasonably brisk April weather.  I eventually went home, ate a sandwich, and fell asleep on my couch.  They stayed awake.

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