(This is a work of flash fiction. Enjoy!)

I sat eating frozen cherries and cashews with one knee cocked ‘cause I lost my job after just one night. Okay, you caught me. There might be some dark chocolate too. What’s a girl gonna do when she’s blue but pig out on health food? Yeah, I’ve reached a new level of pathetic.

My eyes burn, so I pick up the vial, try to squeeze out a few tears. Did I nab ‘em? I shake the vial, and my lips flip into a moue of disgust. The bottle’s not full enough yet to sell. Yeah, I cry antidepressants. My other bodily fluids produce a range of pharmacological effects, but I don’t know you well enough to explain.

So, yeah, I lost my job after just one night and not the whole night either. I thought it’d be easy money spreading in my legs, but I never got to the legs spreading bit. I started unbuttoning my shirt and the John just keeled over dead. Now there’s a stiff cooling in my chiller of an apartment. I can’t see him because he’s in the other room.

I’m sitting here letting my pathetic life crush me into the settee cushions. I think small worthless thoughts about how life royally sucks, so the Over-mind passes me by. I don’t know who’s on Over-watch tonight nor do I care. I’m getting out. I have my freedom right here, and it’s a die with 12 sides in this reality, and the Over-mind knows how many in others. It’s my ticket to freedom. I grip the glittering die between my long, sock-covered toes and roll my bid for freedom.

The fluorescent tubes spotlighting my misery flicker and spark until the bulbs pop sending glass shards flying. I fight a grin and slap down the happy thoughts fizzing up from deep in my soul. I can taste freedom on my tongue. Like my cherries, it burns me with cold until I bite into it releasing the sweet flesh trapped in the ice. But I picture razors, bathtubs and how life would be better if it drained out of me into the tub. Come on Over-mind, sample those thoughts and ignore the joy fluttering in my belly and exploding on my tongue.

In the shadows blanketing my apartment, a star blooms and stretches its rays out in all directions and dimensions. Its edges strobe around a slice of darkness, beckoning me to a better place where there’s no one policing my thoughts. Anticipation makes my toes curl, but I make sure they nab the twelve-sided die kicking me out of this realm and this rundown apartment. Paint peels in slow-mo until it stutters, stops and all is still.

Somewhere an angel screams and a devil cheers. I leap off the stained settee knocking over a cup of raspberry green tea laced with a finger of vodka. It was a bad idea for a mixer anyway, and I won’t need its fake buzz where I’m going.

The light show’s building me a portal, an exit outta here but I keep my mind on the stiff in the other room as I scoop up the die and slide it into a slit pocket on my electric green mini-skirt. No more subterfuge needed now so I drop the pretense and let my thoughts speculate about where I might end up. Fates forfend the place be as frozen as the sweet dark cherry seducing my palette. Why let a good thing go to waste? I savor the last one before tossing the re-sealable freezer bag onto the dingy shag rug, and its sweet center melts me. Gravity sweeps my ripped-stocking clad legs out from under me, and the portal sucks me down toward a new life all my own. I let go of everything and revel in the swirling colors breaking up the black.

I fight a laugh at all those dumb suckers stuck here because they’re too stupid to get out. Anybody could have acquired the die but little old me scored them. They’ll be some dames crying tonight, wishing they had thought of it. But they didn’t. Now I’m off to a world where a girl who’s a walking pharmacopeia can make some serious money and start some trouble.

Spat out of the portal, I fall, and I let the laughter out because who cares if the Over-mind catches on. I’m too far from his reach. He’ll never catch me now, not even with his winged horrors. I’m an intergalactic bullet speeding toward a whirling blue-green ball, laughing because I’m indestructible while in between.

Below my stripy sock-clad feet, city lights twinkle a hello as Mama night enfolds me and the wind tickles my furled wings, begging me to fly. So I shake out my indigo wings and dance with the clouds of my new home. I give the disappearing portal an air kiss before I swoop off to find some mayhem to perpetrate. There’s gotta be some bad boys looking for a wild time, and I’m her. After all, what’s life without a twist of trouble?