It was cold outside. So cold in fact that the nose drippings of globing fluid were freezing as they slid out of my frigid nostrils. I wanted to run back inside my equally cold apartment and turn on the stove top and place my face right over the flames and let them lick the frost that have seemed to have accumulated on my incredibly dry skin. The sad part about it all was that it was too cold to snow. All that meaningless suffering in the tundra like temperatures and I had nothing pretty to look at while I scraped the ice off of my car’s windows.
I tucked the scraping device in the trunk of my car before shutting it and jumping into my car. The key had already been left in from my earlier attempt to just defrost the ice with the car’s heater. It did loosen it up a bit, but I still had to get out and scrape the rest of the ice of myself. Leaving the car on also warmed up the engine and the inside of my car so that it wasn’t unbearable for me or my car to move around and get to work that day. Goodness knows that I would have just called it a day and went inside to read the rest of the Hunger Games and sip molten hot overly-priced Starbucks coffee in bed, but that’s not an option.
I couldn’t just call it a day. I had a very important job to do. I had received a call yesterday. One that was impossible to believe had happened; one that I thought was just some cruel joke played by some sick-in-the-head-kid using Frank’s phone—but it wasn’t some kid—the voice that I heard on the other line was my estranged father’s. He told me that he needed me to go to his house and help him with his unfortunate situation. I almost hung up the phone that was half dangling from the crevice between my shoulder and my ear before he quickly told me something that no one but he would know.
“Years ago when you were a little girl you had fallen ill and had a temperature that read one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit. You wondered into your parents’ room and came and found me. I carried you in to the living room and we watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on the couch. You asked me if a place like Wonka’s factory actually existed and I told you that it probably didn’t but that if someone had dreamt this in their mind’s imagination that it could be possible to create. Anything really is possible. Like Wonka said, ‘we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’”
It turns out Wonka wasn’t the first to say it, Arthur O’Shaughnessy was, but regardless, it was him—my father, Frank Williams, on the other side of the line, awakened after death had dragged him into a sleep not long ago. We hadn’t even buried his body yet, and being the optimistic and open-minded person that I am, I decided to go over to meet my father’s ghost and see what he wanted. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?
Jazzed About Stuff 