SSSSD: Day Three

Okay, no prefaces this time, as I have been warned against it. Except that I would like to point out that this family is also named Purvis, as in my "Purvis Family Portrait" from grad school, but it's not the same ones-- just possibly the best catch-all fictional last name.

Oh, and also, I've been writing the name down wrong-- it SSSSD-- Seven short SHORTS in seven days. My apologies!

Here's the prompt.

***

Purvis family vacay 2006, and where are we? Niagara Fucking Falls. Again. Like last year, and next year, and every year until I graduate and blow that cow town and all the bourgeois vacation shit that comes with it.

Like this: shoving through tourists to Clifton Hill, wet and half-blind with mist from the Falls, to where we end where we always end: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!.

This, despite my pleas to go to the Wax House of Criminals or whatever that shit is down the way. Figures of Manson and Capone. Still lame, but it’s not: SEE THE BUFFALO WITH EIGHT LEGS! SEE MANY SHRUNKEN HEADS, TOO FUCKING MANY SHRUNKEN HEADS, SINCE YOU’LL LOSE INTEREST AFTER THE FIRST THREE! SEE THE BIG MODEL OF THE WORLD’S TALLEST MAN! BELIEVE IT! OR! NOT!

But my stupid little brother Louis wants to go there. I think he wants to live there, live in that tunnel with the spinning lights, that always makes you think you’re falling.

We walk in and I stop at the two-way mirror—so and so many people can curl their tongue—can YOU?—and look at myself. Everyone here can tell I’m too old for this shit. Seventeen and not impressed by snakes with two heads anymore. Hair blued with Kool-Aid—it works, that shit, it does. Nose ring. It’s magnetic, but fuck it, as soon as I graduate I’m getting a real one.

I look down and Louis is looking into the mirror with me. At me. So I flash him a shot of my tongue—I can roll it, I’m one of the so and so people who can—and walk off, leaving him there to try to perfect his own tongue roll.

My parents are off asking Canadians to take their picture in the SEE THE COMICALLY OVERSIZED CHAIR! chair, so I just cut through to the end, through the falling tunnel, to the other side of the two-way mirror. Guess Louis doesn’t know, or forgot, or is pretending not to know—it’s the big treat at the end, watching the spazzes roll their tongues through the mirror.

And he’s still standing there, concentrating so hard he’s squinting. His tongue a leech careening from his mouth, making all shapes but curled. He can’t do it. But I know he wants to—he does everything I do. Little sheep. I stand for awhile and watch him do it. He tries so hard to be like me, but he just ends up looking like a freak.