Junket……………. flash fiction

Time travel is possible. I know because it happened to me. The odd thing is I didn't climb into some fanciful contraption painstakingly sculpted from some hard to obtain metal, or stand on a fiendishly clever continuum slicing platform wringing my hands and laughing maniacally while my misshapen assistant pulled the lever to raise the lighting rod to the sky. I didn't do anything that a mad genius normally does to travel forward or backward in time.

I simply logged in to my email account. It opened, I read the first subject line and that's when I got sucked into a wormhole that landed me smack dab back into a place from my past. It was a place that I'd sworn never to return to, but, there I was, clad only in thin leopard print baby doll pajamas, back on a space ship orbiting Octothorpe Plasmatic, staring down into the lopsided eyes of Glycerin.

Glycerin, oh how I hated him. He had wooed me, called himself my patron, admired me for my art and arranged a spectacular inter-galactic tour of my show. About three weeks in, his admiration turned to lust and when I didn't acquiesce, he abandoned me. Left me on a Walmo forsaken asteroid with only a box of graham crackers and a harmonica to my name. And every damn fool knows that if you eat graham crackers and then play your harmonica it's goodbye harmonica. The bastard.

Well this time I wasn't going to let him get away with anything. He could tell the troopers his side of the story after I kicked three kinds of snot out of him and his bodyguards and went to the nearest Jada station to report my abduction. I took a breath to tell him to go to hell and was stopped cold by two little words.

"I'm sorry."

Glycerin had actually said he was sorry. I pinched myself to make sure I was awake and then twaddled my pinky in my ear. His big sad droopy jowls wobbled a bit and some orange tears ran out of his eyes. He leaned forward and put four of his tentacles on his desk:

"I really am sorry Jules, I should never have done what I did to you. Do you think you could find it in your heart to forgive me?"

Well, damn, this was a fine how do you do. I was all set to kick some ass and now I had all this adrenaline floating around in my system and nothing to spend it on. But wait a minute here, I stalked back and forth a couple of times in front of his desk and then snapped:

"You couldn't have sent me a card or something? You had to yank me out of my home and bring me here to you to tell me that you're sorry? Don't you see that what you just did is almost as bad as what you did the last time? Have you learned nothing about inter-personal relationships since we were together last?"

"As a matter of fact I've had some therapy. Dr. Gomdu helped me a lot toward finding out what causes me to treat other beings disrespectfully. And in our last session we were working together to help me to control the urges that cause me to demand instant gratification."

"And are you getting anywhere with this Dr. Gomdu?"

"I think we were making a lot of progress, yes."

"So where is this doctor now, I'd like to have a word with him."

"I'm sorry to say that I ate him."

"You ate him? YOU ATE HIM? You're telling me that you found a therapist and while you were working together YOU ATE HIM?"

"Yes, and I'm very sorry about it." He stood and signaled to his body guards:

"I'm even sorrier to say that I have room for dessert."

Luckily I still had enough adrenaline coursing through me to kick four kinds of snot out of Glycerin and his cohorts. Unfortunately, as it turned out after I wiped the floor with them and tossed them out of the air lock, I found out from the secretarial staff that Glycerin had eaten the man who had designed the time travel worm hole and no one knew how to get me back to Dominix within a hundred years of when I was snatched.

So now I'm heading up Glycerin's empire. All in all Glycerin needing to apologize hadn't been such a bad experience for me. If only I could get some mental windshield wipers to cleanse the image of Glycerin exploding as he hit open space from my mind. It was like watching a blender full of strawberries mixed with undercooked sausages rain on your windshield. Sometimes I still wake up screaming in the night.