ERIC LAWSON  is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry collections Backseat Emperor, Processing America & Orphan Poems, Time for Plan B, and Leaving Long Beach and the monologue collection Medusa Coils. He hosts the Make Your Own Fun podcast on YouTube and currently resides in North Aiken, South Carolina. Learn more at ericlawsonauthor.com.

Meltdown

“There’s mud in your eye!” Nathan shouted as he pelted Harold square between the eyes with a hard-packed slush ball. 

Mud in your eye? As soon as he blurted it out, he regretted it. How did that even apply to a snowball fight? Had he lost his senses? Perhaps Uncle Snooticus was right—he really had been raised by feral Melville apologists. How could he have been so foolhardy? Mud in your eye? This wasn’t a dissing contest with Oscar Wilde—this was war! Then again, maybe it was nothing. An oversight. It was entirely possible that no one else had heard the ominous brain fart. 

As wet, slushy remnants dripped from his freezing hand, he darted his eyes around the tundra of the parking lot. Everyone—long-time friends and first-time winter warriors—shook their heads, their faces twisted in shock and disgust. Clearly, they had heard. Clearly, his dim-witted dialogue had brought their fun game to a standstill. Clearly, his foot was going to taste delicious. 

“Who needs enemies with friends like these?” he muttered under his breath. Breath? That was it! His mother—forever sighing over her well-worn copy of Wuthering Heights whilst sipping her store-brand basic bitch chamomile tea—had force-fed him a lunch that included beef jerky and potato and pea stew foul enough to poison an inebriated Poe villain. Surely his bio-hazard breath, even hours after eating, should flummox even a stubborn donkey at twenty paces.

He breathed out and tried to smell it. No good. The frigid breeze stole the stink as soon as he stank it out. He pulled down his mitten, breathed on his wrist, licked it, and held it to his face. “Eureka! It tastes just like my cat’s ass!” he stated gleefully. He immediately slapped his forehead with his other mitten-covered hand. Stop saying your every insipid thought aloud like some Dickensian ventriloquist brothel scandalmonger! he scolded himself.

Interestingly enough, the other participants in the snowball fight were all now pointing at him and were growing more anxious by the second.

Great, he thought warily. Here it comes. Soon, their comedic barbs will no doubt puncture my weakened defenses, and I will be banished from the playing fields and become a social outcast. I’ll be doomed to wander the world in search of soggier climates. I’ll be forced to live in a mud hut, eating mud pies, and wiping mud from my mud-filled eyes. Oh, the shame! If only I could have just farted from my ass and gotten the easy laugh! Instead, I reached higher into the collective cerebellum. From those lofty heights, I fell to earth—a disheveled and disgraced, foul-breathed version of a worthless excuse for a human being! Let loose the dogs of war, fair naives! It is my sentence, your right, and our destiny! Let me succumb to my ghastly fate, and may God alone have mercy upon my very soul! 

“Hey, guys,” he offered, utterly defeated and suddenly bereft of vernacular.

His opaque opponents didn’t budge. They merely stood their ground and pointed eagerly at him. Or was it beside him? They seemed to be mouthing the words: “behind you.”

Oh, no. I’m not falling for that old trick, Nathan surmised. Then again, it might be over quickly if I just turn my back and let them gang up on me. Perhaps only then will their morbid fascination and bloodlust be satisfied. But maybe, just maybe—if the planets are aligned today—I suppose I could make a run for it. He then considered his irritable bowel syndrome—Curse your insanely Lovecraftian lunch stew, Mother!—and realized he may have to flee in stops and starts. A gentleman’s retreat, if you like. 

He took a tentative step back. They didn’t move. He took another bolder step back. They grew panicky.

Are the fools just going to let me off the hook? So much the better! Something eldritch growing in his bowels flipped (for joy?), and Nathan took it as a positive sign. 

He turned to make his escape. It was too late, he soon realized as he felt Harold grab his coat collar and jam a huge handful of packed snow into his unsuspecting face.

“How do you like that, funny guy?” Harold bellowed. “There’s snow…in your ear!” He then stood back to admire his handiwork. He laughed the overly triumphant laugh of a man who has destroyed his enemy but has let him live if only to prolong the agony of his victim. His lone snaggletooth only exacerbated his devilish onslaught. His wool cap, which when pulled down read Bad Ass, but today was half folded up so that it merely stated: Ass. The donkey was not flummoxed after all, apparently.

Nevertheless, he had avenged himself. “Man, Nathan, you need to move around. That was way too easy. You got me good back there. But then you just stood there like a statue, staring off into space…or whatever. You think too much, bro.” He began his vile snaggletooth snickering yet again.

“I do not!” Nathan protested. “I never divulge my masterplan!” But it was no use. Constipation of the brain had struck again, and it was obvious to everyone there. Even the three-legged dog, which up until that very moment had been showering a nearby fire hydrant with his steaming urine, seemed to have been amused by the entire debacle, and cough-gagged-laughed in its stray dog judgmental way. Until he started pissing again, that is.

“Hey, next time,” Harold offered, “don’t hesitate to see how we react. Just roll with it, okay? You have to protect yourself. Just go with your instincts, all right?” As if to emphasize his undisputed parking lot alpha-ness, he belched loudly and scratched his snowsuit-covered crotch. 

“Go with this!” Nathan barked defiantly as he flipped his adversary the bird.

“Go with what?” Harold chuckled, and kept on scratching his crotch.

Nathan glanced down at his hand; too late again to remember that he was wearing mittens and Harold would have no idea what he was talking about. Why God? he pleaded to himself. Why do you bless me with this brilliant internal monologue and then shun me within this inept, clumsy body of a twelve-year-old pile of Play-Doh?

“What’s up with that?” Harold scoffed. “Go with…your arm? Oh, yeah, that’s funny. Like, my old out-of-touch grandpa kind of funny. Dumbass. Do yourself a favor and just go home, Nathan. Lick your wounds and stay with your own kind, okay?” He belched in Nathan’s face for maximum effect. 

As if finally awakened from some spell from an elegant Anne Rice witches’ tome, the other kids mumbled some sort of group agreement.

Nathan took a courageous step forward. “What’s the matter, Harold? Not up to a dissing

contest with Oscar Wilde? Do you even know who that is? No, I bet you don’t because you’re just a goddamn Neanderthal!” Nathan became even more emboldened by Harold’s apparent lack of retort, witty or otherwise. “What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue, jackass?”

Harold began gasping for air and wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. His face was flushed, and his breath was flowing out of his mouth like an overworked steam vent. He began to howl with laughter and held his stomach. He finally got it under control. “Whatever you say, man. Are you just going to let that dog piss on you like that? Good God, that’s funny!” He dropped the second snowball he had been holding to slam into Nathan’s oblivious face. “I’m not feeling this snowball fight anymore. It’s not even a challenge anymore. Peace out.”

He beat his chest twice, flashed a sideways peace sign, belched (kind of his trademark at

this point), turned to head towards the bus stop down the street, and everyone else followed suit.

The three-legged dog finished pissing on Nathan and hobbled away. Coughing-gagging-

laughing as it disappeared into a nearby row of bushes.

Well, of course, the dog was pissing on me! That’s why Harold was unaffected by my 

razor-sharp jabs and snappy comebacks, a voice in his head reasoned.

Oh, give it up, you moron, another voice scolded. The dog was pissing on you because 

you’re an overthinking loser who doesn’t interact well socially. Or on his feet in general. Face it. You’re a liability.

Am not!

Are too!

Fine. If that’s the way it has to be, then so be it, he surmised. Nathan was determined to show them all what he was made of. Well, not his entrails, obviously. This was not the time or place for some Clive Barker hellscape mid-story redirect.

He scanned the empty parking lot. There was an abundance of snow, a blustery, biting wind, and not much else, save for the literary-obsessive-shunning apartment buildings in the distance. No one would be willing to help him achieve greatness. He had to make his mark all by his lonesome. And he was lonely. And hungry. And he still reeked of three-legged judgmental dog piss.

“Three-legged judgmental dog piss!” he half-bellowed, half-cried to the empty frigid parking lot. “I shall overcome even this. For I am Nathan Moby Bedazzlenutt III! And I am…a social and literal climber…”

He gazed up into the sky and saw the Moon looking larger than life in the setting sunlight. And then it came to him. What better way to showcase his genius than to build the world’s most impressive igloo skyscraper right here in the parking lot? If there were no further interruptions, he reasoned, he could build it all the way to the Moon itself. Space was cold. The ice wouldn’t melt anytime soon.

But what if I run out of oxygen and pass out? he thought ruefully.

Deal with the what-ifs and the detrimental details later. Build and climb, Nathan. Build and climb! Another, more insistent voice pleaded. 

He knelt and started pushing the snow around into neat, tightly-packed piles and walls. Clearly, this would be an igloo tower built for literary obsessives who thought too much, had no friends, smelled like three-legged judgmental dog piss, and weren’t wearing pants. Clearly, he would need to devise some sort of pulley mechanism to lift the packing snow hundreds, no thousands, of feet into the sky. Clearly, he was going to have to get over his fear of heights. And logic.

He started reciting Oscar Wilde poems to himself and imagined how he would utterly destroy him in a dissing contest. The dog had returned and seemed eager to help. Nathan decided he could use the dog as a messenger for supplies and food. Whenever he asked him a question, the dog merely barked and panted happily. This left it up to him as to how the conversation veered. This warmed Nathan’s heart. The dog pissed on him several more times, but Nathan didn’t mind. It worked as an excellent sealant for building. 

“It’s coming along swimmingly, isn’t it, Homer-D’oh?” (An ancient Greek poet and a Simpsons reference he was extremely self-satisfied with) He wrapped his frozen snot-covered scarf tighter around his wind-burned face. 

Homer-D’oh barked from behind him in agreeing astonishment, hunger, confusion—who can really say with dogs? He then puked, ate it, and then proceeded to piss on the side of the igloo tower again out of sheer boredom.

The higher the igloo became, the colder the gusts of wind grew and the more painstakingly he had to work. Planes flew past and occasionally tried to convince him not to go any further. He was vaguely aware that his story had devolved/evolved into a Shel Silverstein-esque cautionary tale. 

“I bet they all think that I had some kind of meltdown today, Homer-D’oh,” he said as he sluggishly packed the snow with heavy hands. “You know, it’s ironic,” he muttered through trembling lips. “Only by failing so spectacularly in the snowball fight did I avail myself to my true destiny… No tower of Babel here… They’ll all understand… Not a meltdown, more like a melt up…” He laughed weakly at his weak, obvious attempt at a joke.

Homer-D’oh nudged Nathan with his snout as he had started to pass out from the cold

and lack of oxygen.

“I’m okay, boy. I’m still here,” he stated through chattering teeth. “I really want to give in to slumber… But now I can almost touch the sky…” He held out one stiff mitten-covered hand into a nearby cloud as it passed over his arm and continued to leisurely float on by.  

But how am I bringing all the snow this high into the air? His mind strained.

Don’t concern yourself with the details, Nathan, a soothing voice interjected. Build and climb, my dear. Build and climb. Let the clouds lift you ever higher…

The ethereal cloud kiss and irrational yet soothing ‘mother’ pep talk refocused him. Nathan was now fiercely determined. He continued to build the tower walls higher and higher into the night sky—to the very edge of space itself—to keep the stinging wind from piercing his frozen shorts and to protect both he and Homer-D’oh, his three-legged, constantly pissing canine companion, from the cruel outside world far, far below.