The giant is cool, fey even, as knights and lesser Gods swarm his castle trying to kill him. His eyes light up as the best country's warrior ascends the old stone stairway, once twice and again...clones. He knows he will beat them though, he was the one who cloned them, and soon they fell, even faster than the original. The giant adhusted his sunglasses and slinked back into his robe. Ironically, the actor who gave him life was no more than 5'4". Computers.
I'd seen the film once before, but on the curved screen, in a different state it was better. My parent's friend however had a different idea, especially when the high God of the temple came down to discipline his giant and seemed to be talking to her. This part wasn't in the original, but I thought nothing of it. Test audiences had gotten them to add new scenes, or remove them. The terrible sounds behind me were the product of wonderful new technology in Surround.
"We're getting out of here."
It was an old woman's intuition, and I trusted it but I still protested.
"Hold on, let me get dressed."
I buttoned a shirt over my tee, and pulled my jeans up over my shorts. We were the only people that left, everyone else was transfixed. The hallway and lobby below it were ghost towns. The building was shaking and the lights were off. The sky darkened.
"It's been my experience that when the sky changes color in front of you, it's best to run."
I went for my trike, but they pulled me away. We got out just in time to see the building start crumbling in on itself.
"I think I left my phone inside."
"Too bad."
"I want my tricycle."
"Sorry."
"There's still time, I can make it."
"Let's get to higher ground."
Instead of going back inside and up through the parking garage, we climbed the steep incline to the road, where a line of jammed cars heard the sound of the theatre collapsing. I reached in my pocket and felt my phone in the shorts pocket below. We couldn't find my Mom's friends. We looked down and saw that, when viewed from above, the colorful patio outside the theatre gave the impression of a three-dee teevee dinner, a 6-foot by ten-foot box of Lean Cuisine. Tania had joined us at some point, as we bumped into her ambling down the road, but since she couldn't help any of us, she just looked at her shoes.
We tried to wave down cars, which was annoying, because no one would roll down their windows even though they were jammed for miles, so we could see therm looking at us and deciding not to hear us out sand pretending not to see us afterward.
Out of one of the many disinterested was a very dark, very slick black guy with his light skinned girlfriend and her two tremendous fake breasts.
"Show us your puppies!"
What?! I didn't say it, just thought it. My Mom was making a joke because she thought they wouldn't roll their windows down. They did.
"I, um, I like your kitties." Even as weird as she was acting, and as weird as the day was, she couldn't say the
T.
"Thanks," and the girl started going through the slow and arbitrary task of lifting her tank top and bra
one more time. Cameras started popping up everywhere, the hippie in the Land Rover in front of us, pulled out a twusted movie camera that looked like it had been carved from a branch. She lowered her top until all the cameras were taken away, and liften it back up to showoff her breasts to my Mom. I wasn't sure what to think. Oh, and they didn't look fake, kind of fatty with small nipples though.
"Were you all out there," he spoke with a South African accent, or maybe I'd never really heard a north African speak.
"Yeah, we just maded it out before the collapse."
"Bery lu-cky, my friends," He was as cool as the moviegiant, only relaxed and not bored, "Hop in."
I squeezed in, next to Tania and my Mom, and the girl with the breasts. My Dad got up front, traffic started to move."
He looked at me and told me that his name was Mi-2-Ki-Te and asked if I would like as a line, I looked around without turning my head and eventually declined.
"Oh, are you weeth these folks?"
"Yeah, they're my parents."
"Oh, do you want a line." Tania's eyes lit up, "Maybe just a button, please." A button was an odd measurement, in beytween the size of a bump and a line, the ammount you could fit on a loose jacket button. I'd never heard it used, but he knew what she meant.
"I'll give you a bean," he reached under my Father's legs and grabbed a clay chalice, then reached into his door pocket and grabbed a big ziploc of offwhite powder. He poured one into the other and then took out a little golden bean, kind of like the eggs you get Silly Putty in, unscrewed it, scooped it, and handed it to Tania with a wink. He passed another one back and I licked my lips, "Hand dees to Tricia."
"How 'bout you folks."
My Mother's eyes lit up. He handed my father a bean. My father unscrewed it and sniffed it, trying to look like he didn't want it but also get a little in at the same time, "Coke, eh? We're a little bit old to try any PFWs I think," and he handed it back. I didn't feel like correcting my father and telling him it was ketamine, or asking what a PFW was. I looked down and the floor was littered with pieces of these little egg-beans. I waited for him to hand me one on the sly, and I think so did Mom, but he poured the chalice back into the bag, and shook the leftover dust out the window.
We drove. It was a different part of California then I'd ever seen, it was all mountains and viaducts and gangs of idle teens sitting on grafitti-laden stoops.
"Hey look, it's fake-Kyle."
"Oh yeah, remember when we saw him all the time back at home and the one time we saw him driving and we were like, 'What is that, Nate's car?' "
"Yeah."
I explained to my parents and our hosts who Kyle and Fake Kyle were and, anticlimactically, I woke up.
