The End:

Furrowing her brow, Janey stepped back worriedly. Still kneeling, I tried to formulate the words to explain who I was and how I had came to be here in her Mom’s living room, but right before I got the chance a man came galloping down the stairs Janey had just came from. When he got to the bottom I brought myself up, stepping in front of Shirley while looking for something to use as a weapon to defend her and her daughter. He smiled at me, his long hairy tail bushing out behind him, and said, “Hi there buddy, I’m Phillip.” Then, turning his gaze to Shirley he asked, “Is this him?”

Gently stepping around me, Shirley’s tail brushed against my hand making me shiver in disgust. “This is him.” Phillip’s smile brightened as Shirley said something else my ears couldn’t quite grasp, nor make sense of, causing me to try to shake the confusion out of my head once again like a bout of swimmer’s ear.

“What is going on her?” I asked, trying to get some clarity on what I maybe had misinterpreted. I began to figure he was her brother or something. Nobody answered me, instead opting to continue talking about me as if I wasn’t there listening. My legs began to slowly backtrack to the front door behind me.

Squealing gleefully, Janey ran towards me and wrapped her arms around my leg, slowing my escape attempt. Looking up at me, her eyes gleaming, her tail wrapping around my hand, she said, “I can’t believe you got him for me!”

Shirley and Phillip embraced and kissed one another. Like an animated love story, their tails seemed to intertwine and form a small heart shape next to them. “Shirley, it’s incredible moments like these that make me fall deeper and deeper in love with you.”

Smiling and blushing slightly, she looked at him coyly, responding, “Only in incredible moments?”

They both chuckled and turned to me and the little girl with her arms completely wound around my right leg and her tail vines around my hand. My other leg was mid-step towards the front door. She asked, “Can I keep him? Can he sleep in my room? Can we bring him to Grandma’s house tomorrow for cake and ice cream?”

Reaching out and giving Janey’s hair a tussle, Shirley said, “Yes, my little sweet pea, I brought him home for you. Your very own loyal good boy for your seventh birthday.” Janey laughed and giggled as Shirley continued, “His name is Travis. You are going to have to make sure he takes a bath each morning, gets fed three times a day, and that his bedding and clothing are cleaned and washed each day. He will also need to go on a few walks, but take it slow because he is a bit older and didn’t exercise much in his old home. If you want him to do tricks, he responds well to cannabis-filled treats.”

I looked at them in confused horror. “I’m not a fucking dog.” Trying to push the girl away, I failed to notice Phillip stepping forward until it was too late as he put a metal square against my throat that expanded and wrapped completely around my neck forming an unbroken circle. It wasn’t uncomfortable, nor was it painful, as it began to gently pulse to the rapid beating of my heart. As the pulse of the metal ring slowed, so did my heart, until a deep calmness settled over me. Fatigue taking over I garbled, “Not a pet. Shirley.”

As sleep started to overtake me I heard Shirley say, “Here’s his leash Janey, now take him to his new bed so he can get some rest. You can play with him in the morning.”

My eyelids fluttering, fighting to stay open and awake, I felt myself being pulled along the floor. The voice behind me, Phillip I think, “She loves him, and I can’t wait to take him hiking with me. You always know what is best for our family.”

Part 4

After laying a number of bills on the table, she grabbed my hand and guided me through the tables of the restaurant towards the elevators. The fates smiled on us in that moment by having the elevator doors open instead of having us wait for a good bit of time for an empty one. Unfortunately, there was a large group exiting the elevator slowly, and another decent group waiting to enter the elevator to head down once the one group was done exiting. Instead of queuing in the line, she pulled me into the stairwell. As the door slowly closed behind me I heard a worker yell, “Hey, you shouln’t go—“ Then the world seemed to pixelate around me.

“What. The. Shit.” My screams echoing into the void of pixels around us as we seemed to float through them at light speed.

“I’m sorry Travis, I had to use the pass before it expired and explaining what was going to happen to us once I did wouldn’t have helped stop you from the side effect of sudden explosive vomiting. Just deal with it, and don’t let go of my hand.”

“I feel fine, just a little dizzy.” The world sparkling and each pixel melting and pulsing around me suddenly made my stomach twist and attempt to squeeze out everything I had ever eaten in my entire life. “Blech! Oh, my god. Blech! Blech! Okay, I think I’m done. Blech!” The vomit continued to explosively rocket out of my mouth for what seemed like forever, each time taking on a different color and hue as it merged with different groupings of melting pixels passing by and through us. Then just like that, everything stopped, and we were standing on a nicely manicured yard outside of a two-story brick house. My stomach no longer retching as the violent queasiness became replaced with nervous butterflies as I became aware of what I’d done.

Shirley let go of my hand and reached around to her butt and unzipped a hidden compartment. A tail, long and skinny like a monkey’s tail, came out of the hole the zipper had left. Turning to look at me as I gaped at this tail ridiculousness she said, “Come on, this is my home. Let’s go inside.”

Guiding me to the front door, she reached out and turned the gold handle, a tumbler could be heard unlatching as a robotic voice said, “Welcome home.” The door swung open slowly revealing weathered gray wooden floors and a large family room with an open floor plan leading into what seemed to be a kitchen. Everything seemed fairly normal except for the decor on the walls. Each piece of art decor wasn’t really even decor, more like a small monitor or television. Some of them had a small girl with a monkey tail dancing, others had her fishing, and another one had on what looked to be a basketball game on filled with seven-foot tall men with tails so long they wrapped around their shoulders. One monitor had men and women hiking through a forest, their tails twitching back and forth, as some other men and women wearing collars and leashes walked ahead of them smiling and pointing at birds in the trees. Shirley didn’t seem to pay the monitors any mind, instead yelling, “Janey, where are you? Mom is home!”

Shaking my head like a swimmer with water in their ear, attempting to dust off the cobwebs from the edible and Shirley calling herself mom I asked, “You have a daughter?”

My question was answered by a stairwell lowering out of the ceiling near the wall on the right side, revealing what looked to be a fairly spacious upstairs floor. A little girl, maybe six, came running down the stairs with her tail slapping each step behind her as if they were drums to be played. She ran headlong into a kneeling Shirley’s open arms, screaming joyously, “Mom is home!”

They held one another closely for a a few minutes, their tails intertwining, until I felt the need to help them notice the elephant in the room by coughing quietly into my closed hand. Shirley and, whom I cleverly deduced to be her daughter, both turned to look up at me. The little girl’s smile falling away into confusion, she stared at me as her curiosity seemed to completely freeze her feet stiffly in place. I kneeled down to put myself at Janey’s level before saying, “Hi there, I’m Travis. Nice to meet you.”

Part 3:

This one statement blew me completely away, I did not know how to react, a mushroom cloud explosion went off in my brain. I did not know what to do and it almost completely and utterly made me drop everything and leave the table at that moment, and I would have if hadn’t been for the fact that my whole body was melting into the cushion due to the THC in my system. This woman believed she had a tail and that I would believe she came from a whole other world filled with tail people, but insanity aside, she was remarkably beautiful and I had not been on a date with any other woman, especially one of this caliber, in a good long time. I kept listening.

She put her head down seemingly trying to figure out how to put her thoughts into words. "Look we got tails long ago. We were just like you, but somewhere along the way we started gaining more and more intelligence, which I'm sure in time your plane here will too, but as we gained more and more intelligence we needed to go somewhere with our brains so to speak. So our bodies started to evolve. We grew tales that basically are nothing but muscle and brains and bone. The brains within them are, I guess you could say specifically used for the purposes of controlling all of our bodily functions, leaving our brains in the skull to think, grow, and expand all thoughts, creativity, and technologies.” 	My jaw was now nearly on the table, drool falling out of my mouth, and at that moment the waiter chose to come over and get our orders. Before the waiter could even get a word out I looked at him and said, “Could you kindly fuck off a second while I chat with my date? She just told me she is a chimp from another planet." The waiter scoffed and walked off to more than likely find the manager. 			

I turned back to her and said, “You're telling me you have a tail that holds a whole other brain and that you need me, somebody who has basically nothing to offer you in terms of intelligence, or wealth, or even in good looks to go with you to another planet, or world, or some shit? And you expect me to believe that you need me to go with you because I'm critical to your family?”

She smiled. It was a beautiful smile, no maliciousness, just a calm peacefulness to it. "Look Travis, I promised that I would find a man to make my family happy, and now I am making a promise to you that I need you in my life and I want you in my life. I don't care that you spend your days just using weed all the time. I don’t care if you never seem to be getting anything done except figuring out ways to cover up all of your embarrassing qualities, which seem to be most of your qualities. I need you in my life, and if I don't come back with you my heart will be broken."

My thoughts were racing. She was going to take me into another world to and be by my side the whole time. She would do it as my wife, or lover, or whatever they called it on her side of things. I grinned at her and made my decision. "Alright fine, let's get out of here. "

The next section is planned but not finished.

Part 2:

So here I was, back in the present, with no clue to where exactly I had veered this relationship off course. Shirley sat down at the table across from me smiling as she reached for her glass of white wine. I inadvertently looked away into the corner of the restaurant to keep from quickly confessing that I had been looking at her phone, knowing that if our eyes met I would blurt out the question in regards to what the fuck that text message meant. She started saying something, but it became static in the background as I ignored it and tried figuring out what all this between us was. Meanwhile, that question began to gain mass and substance as it weighed upon my heart. Honestly, things might have been okay as I calmed myself and just tried to play the hand being dealt, but that's when her phone started to vibrate again, snapping me into attention and putting my focus onto her entirely.

She picked it up, reading the message as a slight gasp escaped her lips. She muttered under her breath, "I thought I had more time. "

Looking her dead in the face and waiting for her eyes to meet mine I found myself blurting out, “Shirley what the hell is a portal? Where in the hell do you have to go? Again what the hell does a portal got to do with anything? Are you an alien or something?" 

The first question got her attention, but the last one got her to snicker and her laughter combined with the ridiculousness of the whole situation nearly got me into a laughing fit as well. I had to be careful in this situation, remembering suddenly the rather large edible I had taken before this date to calm my nerves for the time when i needed to commit to my  big reveal at the end of the dinner where I would tell her that I was broke and living out of a storage garage. 

Tilting her head ever so slightly, quizzically, she asked, "Did you read my text messages?"

With too much work having been put in between dates one and four, it was time for this woman to explain to me more about these text messages. It wasn’t time for me to explain my one small indiscretion and invasion of privacy. I mean, come on, someone was texting her to help bail her out of what she considered a date awful enough to use some ridiculous Science Fiction excuse on, or maybe she was looking to have a nice dinner and then stiff me with an expensive bill. Well, no way, no how, I wouldn’t be the one shamed in this whole sordid affair. 

Taking a deep breath I said, "Shirley, listen. I didn't look at your phone.” She squinted ever so slightly in response to what I had just said causing me to backtrack, “All right, all right, that was a lie. I did look at your phone and I am sorry but it was going off and it was like an earthquake at this table as it jiggled all the silverware, and cups, and plates, and everything. People began staring. And it just kept going off! When I saw that message I didn’t know what to think. A portal? Do you think so low of me that you're just gonna skip out of here? You know if you don't wanna be here just tell me.” With each word the fight seemed to drain from me.

 A small smile formed in the corner of her lips as she stared intently at me, probing me, looking for some sort of information. "Travis, would you want to maybe accomplish your dream of becoming a travel rider?"

I looked at her, taking in and processing what she just asked me. I did really want to become a travel writer, it really was a dream that I held in very high regards, but at this point in my life I really had no clue how I was going to travel anywhere let alone even get on the correct bus home after this edible fully took ahold of me. I decided I would go with the half-truth. "Yes, I would love to travel and write all about my experiences, but it just doesn't really seem like it's in the cards for me right now. I'm just kind of between things right now. Very busy with—"

Shirley’s eyes bugged out of her head and she spit the wine she had been sipping out onto the table at the start of what became a roaring laughter. Some of the tables began staring at her. Placing her hands over mouth she stifled her laughter and apologized through her fingers to me and those craning their necks to listen in. Getting her composure back she looked at me again and said, "Travis, you and I both know that you probably haven't written a word since high school, and even then you probably couldn’t have written anything to save your life, let alone save your grades. Not to beat a dead horse that currently resides in a storage shed near the bus stop behind Lucky’s Lotto & Liquor, but you’re a real loser. You don’t work at all, and any money you do get ahold of you spend on weed and jerky. We went on how many dates and you paid for none of them, nor even had the decency to tell me the truth and ask to see if I wanted to help pay for us going out.” 

My heart sank into my gut as I sat listening to her words. Then she went further and my gut seemed to sink into my ass pulling my gaze and posture down with it in defeat and embarrassment. I tried to say something in my defense but she wouldn’t give me space to do so and continued on. “Look I'm going to give it to you straight. I am from a different plane, a different frequency if you will. I needed to find someone to help make a family with. I thought I had a lot more time, but time in this plane doesn’t exactly move at a one-to-one ratio with my plane, and I have been on more dates with more people than I planned for and completely lost track of time. But honestly, and you need to hear this Travis,  you're the best one I have found. You are the most loyal man, for all your faults, I have come across.” She reached for the last bit of her wine and gulped it back as if it were a shot, then gently setting the glass down with her left she reached out with her right and took my hand in hers and squeezed it reassuringly. “Travis I know you don't understand what exactly is happening, I'll explain it all to you eventually, but I do need an answer. Would you want to join me when I go through that portal into my plane, my world if that concept makes more sense to you?”

I suddenly saw red, her words toying with my emotions, I hissed, “What the holy hot fuck Shirley? You just want me to get up from the table and go to some other world with you? First of all I don't even believe you and I think you're insane! You told me you were a doctor. We both know you can’t be a doctor when you’re actually living in an imaginary life where you can walk between worlds.” My train of thought got lost, forcing me to stop in the middle of my tirade as the edible hit me in waves in and out of full couch lock mode. 

“You’re right, I am not a doctor.  But here your doctors don’t require much education to become a doctor. In my plane, six year olds could figure out in minutes what your best and brightest doctors couldn’t figure out in a lifetime. Don’t take offense though. Our plane made a decision to see intelligence as a guiding light, whereas yours focused on resource control and the best ways to snuff out life quicker and easier. We may seem alien, but we aren’t. We do have tails sort of like monkeys though, which I know might be weird to you when you get over there, so I have to warn you now.”

Part 1

Now I’m not one that likes to snoop, or at least get caught snooping when doing it, but in this case the phone kept vibrating again and again as text message after text message kept getting sent. It became obnoxious and forced me into reaching for it to silence it and when I did that the phone opened and let me read the whole damn message being sent on repeat. Each one read, “Time to call it, your exit portal will be expiring in an hour otherwise you will be late.”

The dating game is a tough game, but so far the dates with Shirley had been surprisingly easy, like we were best friends from the start, but now I had maybe read the worst message ever sent in the history of date texts to help somebody bail. My mind drifted, calculating my steps, trying to remember where exactly I had went wrong on the last three dates over these recent weeks.

Date one we met at small coffee shop on the outskirts of town that had some amazing espresso served in in tiny porcelain cups next to a crystal glass filled with sparkling mineral water. We shared and discussed our love for coffee, and extended the date well into the evening as we decided to sample every baked good the shop offered. Fortunately for me, the barista was a buddy of mine and after already serving us free drinks he dug into the bag of day old baked goods he normally saved for me—he even nuked them up and served them on a nice plate.

Date two we met at the zoo and walked around pointing out our favorite animals and discussing our careers and where we saw ourselves one day. She saw nothing wrong with me floating between a set of pizza delivery boy jobs in my attempts to become a travel writer that lived off of hotel freebies and small payments from publishing companies and websites, in all honesty I already had the living off of hotel freebies part down in my life. This was also the date where she told me she was a doctor, which was the exact moment I immediately felt like my choice to smoke as much weed as possible and read self-help books really didn’t replace a college education like I thought. Somehow, maybe through sheer will to charm and listen, she kissed me lightly on my cheek in the parking lot after walking her to her car.

Date three was when things got a little hairy. I was getting to the point where cheap dates, meaning free, were getting harder and harder to plan for. We met Saturday night at the amusement park a bit outside of the city. By getting on the early afternoon bus the day before I was able to arrive around two o’clock and wait in the parking lot until some kind individuals leaving gave me their ticket stubs. This amusement park had an awesome special written on all their ticket stubs that stated, “After three next day free.” The next night’s date went as planned. We rode all the rollercoasters to avoid the arcades, danced to a bluegrass band to steer her attention away from the smell of waffle cones, and rode the ridiculously long and slow boat ride for a bit of time to chat and just hold hands.

Date four’s idea turned into a doozie when she texted me to ask about my dream to become a travel writer, getting me to think about what parts of the job would be the best to experience and write about. I told her about my love for fine dining and how I wanted to be able to go around the world tasting some of the finest dishes offered by the best chefs. Now what I really meant to focus on was that I wanted to actually try fine dining, but she took it as fine dining was one of my favorite activities. As soon as I had hit the send button she called me and asked me to go to Franco’s with her. Franco’s was a fancy restaurant on the top floor of a fancy building downtown. It was named after Franco Columbo, the bodybuilder. I was pretty sure that the owner was a huge fan of Franco’s and even sought him for chiropractic care when his back gave out for trying to deadlift as much as his idol did. Anyways, after hearing her sultry voice on the phone, my brain was forced into the backseat at gunpoint by my balls while my dick hopped into the driver seat pulling the strings on my mouth and making it utter a very enthusiastic, “Sounds great! How about Friday night?”