Mark Henry_Amanda Feral 01 by Happy Hour of the Damned Page B
Authors: Happy Hour of the Damned
Ads: Link
shattered Plexiglas column. It stood unlit, shadowed, and ineffective under the dark gloom of rain clouds. It was a wonder I’d found the place. There were no oaks, as the name implied, nor any trees, at all. The site was the opposite of an oasis, a patch of bland in an otherwise evergreen landscape. The little foliage to be seen, a variegated ivy, furred the low brick structures; windows pocked their surface like mange.
6106 Suite B squatted amidst the willy-nilly cluster of buildings, like an imposter. Cars dotted the parking spaces of the other buildings, but my destination was marked by only two: a gray VW Vanagon suitable for serial killing, and a far-too-yellow Xterra, that seemed puffy, Fisher-Price, except for the heavily tented windows. Wendy’s Audi was conspicuously absent. I wheeled into the handicapped spot outside the smoked glass doors, and snatched my purse.
The lobby was humdrum; flat white paint, industrial grey carpet and dropped ceiling; boring. It could have been a prison common room. A copper-topped zombie head examining nails that wanted a French manicure, bad, stopped and glared up at me. Gerilyn would be my greeter and warden for the day’s event, and happy to be so. Though her teeth were in desperate need of veneers, she showed them off with the pride of a psychotic pageant mother, albeit a white-eyed and dead one. She sat prim-postured at a cheap plywood table skirted for the Fourth of July, in pleats of red, white and blue plastic. A handwritten table tent read:
REGISTRATION
A–Z
She extended her hand with the stiff-jointed squareness of a robot. I took it.
“Welcome to Getting the Most from Your Afterlife with Bernard Krups .” The words flowed out from monotonous practice. I could, almost, hear the italics. “I’m Gerilyn. Did you get a field guide?”
I broke off from her jerky handshake. “Just this brochure.” I extracted it from my purse and held it in front of me like a used Kleenex. It was a poorly produced tri-fold of the kind I could have manufactured at age seven. “I’m Amanda Feral. I’m supposed to meet my friend Wendy. Has she checked in?” I knew the answer, but one could hope.
Gerilyn scanned the names on a brief list and returned a pert, “Nope, not yet.” She handed over a stapled stack of lightweight bond printed with the title of the seminar in slipshod blurriness. Under Bernard Krups’s name, I saw that the workshop was subtitled, A Field Guide to the Supernatu real. I hadn’t caught that the first time. The sloppy creators loved their plays on words. Me? Not wowed.
The woman wrote out my name on a “Hello my name is…” sticker and passed it to me, along with a pen that pronounced, “You’re a winner.” Duh 46 !
Gerilyn pointed to double doors to my right. “The seminar is through there. There are snacks if you’d like, depending on…well, you know.” I didn’t pick up on her meaning until I saw the buffet.
I slapped the Balenciaga and paperwork down at a table near the back of the room, the kind you don’t cross your legs under for fear of becoming attached to it by a wad of moldy gum.
There were two others in the room, one held a bottle of red liquid and slurped at it, occasionally gnawing on the spiral threading the top, with a fine-pointed canine. She was a woman, vampire, clearly, and bored. Her head rested in her palm. She stared at the wall, window and then the other person in the room, a man wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, a beige polka-dot oxymoron. Gag! My eyes followed hers, from the man’s laptop, to its connected projector. Oh shit, I thought. The woman turned her gaze to me and mouthed, “PowerPoint.” Her head rolled back on her shoulders as though she was near death and she shoved a pretend stake through her heart.
The man was average height and weight—you’d never pick him out of a crowd, except for one oddity. Grey hairs sprouted from above his ears like wings on either side of his bald head. Was
6106 Suite B squatted amidst the willy-nilly cluster of buildings, like an imposter. Cars dotted the parking spaces of the other buildings, but my destination was marked by only two: a gray VW Vanagon suitable for serial killing, and a far-too-yellow Xterra, that seemed puffy, Fisher-Price, except for the heavily tented windows. Wendy’s Audi was conspicuously absent. I wheeled into the handicapped spot outside the smoked glass doors, and snatched my purse.
The lobby was humdrum; flat white paint, industrial grey carpet and dropped ceiling; boring. It could have been a prison common room. A copper-topped zombie head examining nails that wanted a French manicure, bad, stopped and glared up at me. Gerilyn would be my greeter and warden for the day’s event, and happy to be so. Though her teeth were in desperate need of veneers, she showed them off with the pride of a psychotic pageant mother, albeit a white-eyed and dead one. She sat prim-postured at a cheap plywood table skirted for the Fourth of July, in pleats of red, white and blue plastic. A handwritten table tent read:
REGISTRATION
A–Z
She extended her hand with the stiff-jointed squareness of a robot. I took it.
“Welcome to Getting the Most from Your Afterlife with Bernard Krups .” The words flowed out from monotonous practice. I could, almost, hear the italics. “I’m Gerilyn. Did you get a field guide?”
I broke off from her jerky handshake. “Just this brochure.” I extracted it from my purse and held it in front of me like a used Kleenex. It was a poorly produced tri-fold of the kind I could have manufactured at age seven. “I’m Amanda Feral. I’m supposed to meet my friend Wendy. Has she checked in?” I knew the answer, but one could hope.
Gerilyn scanned the names on a brief list and returned a pert, “Nope, not yet.” She handed over a stapled stack of lightweight bond printed with the title of the seminar in slipshod blurriness. Under Bernard Krups’s name, I saw that the workshop was subtitled, A Field Guide to the Supernatu real. I hadn’t caught that the first time. The sloppy creators loved their plays on words. Me? Not wowed.
The woman wrote out my name on a “Hello my name is…” sticker and passed it to me, along with a pen that pronounced, “You’re a winner.” Duh 46 !
Gerilyn pointed to double doors to my right. “The seminar is through there. There are snacks if you’d like, depending on…well, you know.” I didn’t pick up on her meaning until I saw the buffet.
I slapped the Balenciaga and paperwork down at a table near the back of the room, the kind you don’t cross your legs under for fear of becoming attached to it by a wad of moldy gum.
There were two others in the room, one held a bottle of red liquid and slurped at it, occasionally gnawing on the spiral threading the top, with a fine-pointed canine. She was a woman, vampire, clearly, and bored. Her head rested in her palm. She stared at the wall, window and then the other person in the room, a man wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, a beige polka-dot oxymoron. Gag! My eyes followed hers, from the man’s laptop, to its connected projector. Oh shit, I thought. The woman turned her gaze to me and mouthed, “PowerPoint.” Her head rolled back on her shoulders as though she was near death and she shoved a pretend stake through her heart.
The man was average height and weight—you’d never pick him out of a crowd, except for one oddity. Grey hairs sprouted from above his ears like wings on either side of his bald head. Was
Similar Books
