Maybe I have been here before. It smells familiar but all the lines on the windows seem… warped. Designed on a slant. We arrived by donkey. His name sounded like popcorn or sock shawn or something, but I can’t remember. Maybe it started with a j?
I had heard of the road to this city through a cousin of my great aunts. They seemed to say there were mysteries to solve under the nails of the left hand of the cities heart. A strange way to describe it, whatever it was. But it sounded like something I wanted to see and touch and smell.
Keeping my costs down I headed straight for the hammock fields and set up between a nightmare from my childhood and a family of six struggling to light a fire to smoke some fish. I wondered why they had parked a car from the future nearby but i felt momentarily mute and couldn’t ask. Maybe later.
I found my way on to a boat up the main river to the suggested open air cocktail emporium. A place custom made for strangers to meet strange others to ask questions of a cities fingernail. There were tables as far as the eye could see filled and empty and overturned. You could smell recent fire and sweat and the combined perfumes of the rich, the poor, the famous and the overworked. But who does one ask about a mystery unknown to most. Like an unmapped island populated by those that speak no discernable language.
I was nervous. I was mute. I was craving pineapples.
The pineapple cart was pulled by a young lady in a fur coat. I bought a pineapple and decided what I really needed was a nap.
….I woke up sweaty.