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Having feelings for Janice is not enormously pleasant. Sam finds it distracting and embarrassing, and that’s just when he’s not even doing something embarrassing to try and get her attention. It’s gotten to the point now where he’s fearing other people are starting to twig, which would be fine were it not for the fact he’s doing a spectacularly bad job at actually wooing her.
Sam spends the vast majority of his day with the Muppets, and it usually feels like trying to herd felt cats. The only real respite he gets from this eternal frustration is when he goes to sleep, so he usually goes early. This is also, partially, because he doesn’t have much else to occupy him in the evenings.
If Sam does dream, and he rarely does, it’s normally the typical nonsense about being late for things and barbecues in places that don’t exist. Meaningless. Foolish. Pointless.
But Sam has been dreaming quite a lot recently. And he doesn’t like it one bit.
*
The first one is easy to brush off. Janice had bumped her hip up against him at the craft services table that morning and Sam had spent the better part of the day thinking about it and feeling like a pervert. It stands to reason his brain would try to flush out the lingering memory. Janice, in his dream, is just sort of there, talking about things Sam can’t remember when he wakes up.
And yes, it’s horrible, it’s very embarrassing, but it’s not like there’s anyone around who can see into his brain in the middle of the night, is there? Even if he sometimes worries, very irrationally, that everyone at work can.
*
A few weeks pass where nothing much happens. Sam spends the majority of his time being disgusted at the newly reignited displays of passion between Kermit and Miss Piggy, trying to find some way to make them leave off the PDA without being dealt a satin-gloved backhand for his troubles. The rest of the time he spends staring at the back of Janice’s head and trying to formulate ways to get her to look at him.
It strikes him, occasionally, that some might look on it as pathetic. His life, at present, is censoring and pining and doing his laundry on Thursdays. For a man his age—really, for a man any age, it’s not a good look. And it doesn’t feel very good, either. His life is boring, and not even as a result of decency. His life is boring and his morals are going to the dogs.
It’s because of the sheer boringness of it that Sam is surprised when he finds himself in his apartment’s laundry room. He’s vaguely aware of the fact he’s dreaming and is downtrodden that his life is so devoid of any nobility that he should dream about doing laundry, which consists solely of bed sheets and towels and his one winter scarf.
And then Sam glances over and sees, in his dream, Janice there, perched on top of a dryer and waving at him. What?
“Hi!” Janice chirps. “I, like, love detergent!”
Sam wakes up just as soon as she says this and stares at his ceiling in the dark, utterly baffled.
*
There’s a particularly flashy guest star and everyone dresses accordingly. Sam is entirely against this level of ostentation until he sees Janice wearing a spangly halter top. It’s not a pleasant experience at all, the repeated, visceral reminders of the apparent weakness of his once ironclad morals. Janice leaves him feeling quite defenceless. Not that it’s fair to blame her. It’s all his own issue.
That night is strange. Sam dreams about squirming, shimmering shapes he can’t remember when he wakes up. He recalls Janice and thinks she might have been playing guitar and flicking her hair underwater but can’t be sure. He just knows he’d dreamt about her and her sequins.
*
Yolanda passes around a birthday card for everyone to sign. It’s the kind of thing she does off her own steam when Kermit is too frazzled to remember every little detail, which Sam can respect, in a roundabout kind of way. He is also slightly scared of Yolanda because she knows everything about everyone and could probably ruin his life if she wanted to.
The card, as it turns out, is for Janice, and Sam is reminded of her age when he’s signing it. There isn’t actually a tremendously large gap between them, even if Janice’s appearance and mannerisms regularly make Sam feel like he should be sent to prison for finding her attractive. She certainly isn’t young enough to be his daughter, as the nagging voice in his head very regularly scolds him about—if his actual children were as old as Janice is, Sam might be dead by now.
It doesn’t really mean anything. Sam panics a bit over how to sign the card and puts Have a very happy birthday, ever yours, Sam, and immediately regrets it when he passes the card back to Yolanda and she makes a kind of You sick old freak face. But it doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. It’s just a card from everyone in the office and Janice probably won’t read what he’s written at all.
*
It’s been an embarrassing number of years since Sam was in high school so he’s very surprised to find himself there again, looking—not looking good, really, but at least looking better. Visibly younger. Maybe seventeen or so.
Not a lot makes sense, the layout of the rooms unfamiliar, not as Sam remembers them, the classes jumbling together and going on too long, too short.
In a way that makes sense at the time, though, Janice is there, and she’s got her hair in braids and barrettes the same shiny pink plastic as her bangle. Sam winds up doing her history homework because she smiles at him and asks him nicely and puts her hand on his shoulder, and of course he will. No problem. He can match her handwriting.
When Sam wakes up, there’s an unpleasant sensation in his stomach. He remembers doing Eunice’s algebra homework for her when they’d first met and he’d very badly wanted her to pay him any attention at all. It’s probably a scummy sort of betrayal, imagining a coworker in the position of your ex-wife. It’s also very depressing for Sam to realise that of the two women he’s ever had serious feelings for, his approaches have apparently been equally pathetic.
*
There’s a day where the Electric Mayhem seem unusually mopey, most notably Animal, who’s so demotivated he doesn’t try to bite the FedEx guy on the ass when he leaves. As it turns out, Janice is sick, some kind of faint-spell dizziness thing. Lips is at home with her so they’re down another member, and all the songs for the week have been edited accordingly.
It’s extremely unsettling. Sam should be enjoying the unusually somber attitude from the band, but it’s overshadowed by the not-rightness of it, and from knowing it’s because one of their members is unwell and unhappy. Sam doesn’t enormously understand the concept of a family outside your biological one, but that’s surely what the Mayhem are, and even if they are all freaks and weirdos and drug-abusing perverts who indulge in premarital sex, Sam can admire their care for one another. So long as it doesn’t get too European at work.
The atmosphere is largely unchanged. People come up to Dr. Teeth or Floyd and go Oh, I’m sorry, give her my best, and then they go back to work and mostly forget about it. Sam doesn’t, working himself into knots about the whole thing. He eventually plucks up the courage to approach Dr. Teeth about it and apparently does something terrible.
“Oh, she’ll be fine, baby.” Teeth puts a too-long arm around Sam and gives his shoulder a comforting rub. Sam scowls. European. “I’ll tell her you were askin’ about her.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
Sam says, sort of very much not wanting him to. It feels weird.
“Nah, man, she’d like it. Good to know all you mellow people care about her, dig it?”
Dr. Teeth has a strange way of speaking that often strikes Sam as lascivious. That’s not what his tone is, now, but Sam still doesn’t like it. He feels rather like he’s been exposed as something or other.
*
Eunice had had a fondness for period dramas that Sam had approved of because they’d mostly been safe, free of carnal passion and involving corseted women standing in the rain. They’d also made her happy, which he’d liked, because she had been his wife, at the end of the day.
He suspects that the memories of these shows might be influencing him when he goes to sleep. He dreams about Janice in bed, sick and shivering and weak, and thinks about putting his hand on her forehead and trying not to agitate her with his feathers.
It’s not a very nice dream but it also isn’t a nightmare. It’s mostly just Janice, thrashing and groaning, felt sort of scrubbed-at looking, too pale and chilly.
These dreams continue through the week and weekend, until Sam has convinced himself Janice is dead and he’s willed it so without meaning to.
*
Typically, in period dramas, Sam remembers the sick heroine being cradled and kissed the moment her fever broke, usually with violins swelling in the background. Janice comes into work looking her usual fine and fresh self on Monday and Sam obviously doesn’t do any kissing or cradling, but he could. The impulse is very strong.
She spends most of the morning walking about to speak to everyone individually. Sam assumes she’s just catching up with them after a week apart, since she seems to view all her coworkers as her best friends. And then she gets to Sam and he forgets how to talk, just a bit.
“Heya.” Janice smiles, flicking her hair. Sam wonders if he should stay sitting or stand up. What rules of etiquette reply, with a hippy who doesn’t care about any of them? “Did I miss anything, like, super crazy?”
Sam should make a very smooth joke here but he can’t think of one so he says no and wonders if Janice is wearing lipstick.
“I’ve been trying to catch up with everyone, y’know? Oh, and, like, give them their gifts, natch.”
“Gifts?”
It’s not any kind of holiday, so far as Sam is aware. Maybe some kind of tree-hugging thing?
“I always get rully bored when I’m sick.” Janice frowns, crossing her arms and pouting. “I can’t, like, do yoga or silks or play guitar or anything. It’s such a bummer. But Lips got me this, like, totally awesome kit so I could make bracelets for everyone!”
It dawns on Sam that almost everyone he can see is, in fact, wearing some variation of a beaded bracelet, all in different colours, some with charms or little letters. He’d thought it was some kind of weirdo fashion trend and brushed it off.
And Janice hasn’t made him a bracelet, obviously, from the way she’s talking. It’s probably the clearest indication of rejection Sam’s going to get without falling to Janice’s feet and pouring his heart out to her, and it’s not what he was expecting at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. He attempts to remain casual.
“I’m very glad you’re feeling better.”
“Don’t worry! Close your eyes and hold out your hand and, like, see what heaven will send you.”
Sam has never heard this expression before but he still obediently holds his hands out and closes his eyes, because Janice has asked him to and he’s pathetic.
Something very small lands in his palms and Janice goes Open!, giggling like a child, and Sam finds himself looking down at an extremely small keychain. There are little red, white and blue beads in alternating colours and a gold star at the bottom.
“I figured you weren’t a bracelet guy, y’know? ‘Cause, like, I made Scooter a thing for his zipper.”
Sam continues to stare at this keychain, taking in all its little intricacies and feeling a hundred different emotions about them all.
“You don’t have to, like, keep it or anything. It’s just silly.”
There are too many things Sam could say right now, many of them very stupid and dangerous. He chooses to say none of them, largely because none of them will organise themselves into coherent sentences in his brain. Janice has rather derailed him with this, and Sam can’t help but wonder what on earth she could do if she were trying.
“Thank you.” He manages, finally. He looks up at Janice and finds her still smiling placidly. “I will keep it.”
“Oh, yay!”
Janice clasps her hands together and turns in the opposite direction, doubtlessly going off to bestow her crafts on another Muppet. Sam fidgets with the keychain, feeling the little in-out-in ridges of the beads where they sit against each other.
*
Everything is awful. It’s moving, morphing, shifting, too bright and too loud, the whole world a shaking, shivering mess of unknown colours.
There’s a distant voice, a Sam Sam Sam, some gentle yet insistent pressure against his face. Sam groans. It feels like the walls are pulsing around him. His head might split open.
“Sam!”
The urgency of this voice manages to pierce through the horrible, dish-soap film covering every one of Sam’s senses. He opens his eyes, making vague sort of whimpering sounds, and finds Janice staring down at him. Her long hair is falling over his face and it feels rather like a tickly privacy curtain.
“Oh, thank God.”
She breathes, relaxing under him, and—hang on—
Sam attempts to sit up, only to immediately be stopped by the thumping technicolour of the room around him. He falls back and it dawns on him that his head is in Janice’s lap. Her legs are bare.
Bits and pieces come back to him gradually. He remembers coming into this den of iniquity to scold the band for giving Walter one of their so-called medicinal brownies, and then he remembers seeing them smoke, and his morals going totally to the dogs as he’d watched Janice’s lipstick smudge the joint held between her elegant fingers.
He remembers the Mayhem laughing, and the curious, almost playful look on Janice’s face, and the way they’d all offered to help Sam relax. Janice had explained about blowing smoke for newbies. She’d pulled Floyd close to her and demonstratively taken a long, slow drag from her joint before turning to blow it in Floyd’s face, her soft lips inches from him, tendrils of smoke curling around him like an embrace.
The terrible cruelty of it is that Sam remembers none of that actually happening to him. He remembers, instead, feeling very sick, and then an unknown period of time punctuated only by fear and nausea and terrifying things seen out of the corner of his eye.
In the present, he hears Floyd go “We cannot tell the frog, man.”, and “Bad bird! Bad bird!”. Mortification fills Sam’s body. He looks up and is surprised by the sight of Janice still leaning over him, one of her lovely little hands stroking lines down and over the curve of Sam’s beak.
“I think, like, edibles might be the way to go for you, y’know?”
The worst part of it all is that Sam would probably try it again. Just to make sure.
*
There’s nothing for it. This can stand no longer. Sam is a proud, decent, upstanding American Muppet, but he’s only a Muppet, at the end of the day, and this is unbearable. Every time Janice walks by him or plays her too-loud music up on stage or innocently presses the same elevator button as him, Sam finds his mind creating hundreds of different little splintered off scenarios, all about her sweet nature and her cord hair and her long lashes and low voice.
It’s becoming impossible to focus, to function properly, to do his duty and make sure the general population is kept safe from any prawn brand perversion. Sam can’t keep going like this, and as every effort has proved, he has no chance of ever swaying Janice’s heart. The only solution is to rid himself of this terrible affection once and for all. Rather like ripping ivy off a wall, Sam imagines. Difficult and exhausting, but not impossible.
Criticism seems a good road to start down. Turn Janice totally away so he has no hope of ever righting himself. Going cold turkey, as they say in that dreadful expression. Sam approaches Janice with the strongest resolve he can gather.
It’s always quite disarming, when she turns and looks at him, smiling serenely. Still, Sam has a job to do, and he has to do it for both of their sakes, no matter how tempting it is to watch her brush her bangs back from her eyelids.
“Hiya, Sam.”
She greets, warm and casual just like in his dreams. He clears his throat.
“Janice, it’s my duty to-to inform you that, per a note from the advertisers, the volume of—of your—I’m sorry, where are you going?”
Janice rarely dresses in a way one might consider normal, even for a Muppet. Even by her standards, this is an odd ensemble. A strange see-through skirt that wraps over a pair of exercise shorts. Cropped vest. A wrap cardigan with wide sleeves that bell out just at her elbow. She’s carrying an obscenely large bottle of water and wearing little flat shoes with flower buds on them.
“Oh, I’ve got, like, silks in ten, y’know?”
Is she speaking English?
“What?”
“I do aerial contortion!” Janice beams. “Wanna come with?”
“It’s the middle of a work day.”
“Oh, the guys know I’ll be gone.”
Sam assumes the guys here refers to the rest of the heathen band and not Kermit, the only guy to whom Janice actually has to answer in a professional context. And Sam himself, technically, but the less said about that the better.
“What on earth are serial silks, anyway?”
“Aerial.” Janice corrects. “You just, like, climb up rully high on these big silk rigs hooked up on the ceiling, and hang upside down until the weird buzzing sound in your head goes away!”
Concerning as that is, Sam finds himself quite distracted by one little part of that explanation.
“You—up high?”
She nods.
“Yeah. You go rull, rull high and then you can, like, do the splits and spin in the air and just hang up. It’s like floating! But with fabric!”
It takes a few seconds for Sam to realise he’s gawping at Janice. This was a terrible idea. He can think of no decent reason for excusing himself so he just leaves, horrendously mortified about the entire world.
*
The dream that night is extremely unpleasant.
*
These dreams continue. They are each as bad as the one preceding it, mortifying, humiliating things Sam can’t shake until well into the afternoon of the next day. It makes him feel uniformly guilty, especially whenever he finds himself sitting next to Janice in a meeting with her smiling and giggling and talking about riffs.
Because really, it’s disgusting, some of the things he dreams about. And it doesn’t feel right to keep Janice in the dark about them all, but it seems equally wrong to burden her with the weight of his guilt. Selfishly, the idea of actually confessing the contents of these dreams to her is also too embarrassing to stand.
Trapped in this unpleasant predicament, Sam considers his options. The idea of talking to anybody about it is frankly abhorrent. He could throw himself wholeheartedly into censoring everything and everybody in the office, which would be momentarily satisfying, but would likely come back to bite him later in the form of a revenge-seeking rat. It’s not as if he can just go up to Janice and ask her out, because that’s simply impossible, as he has daily proof.
So Sam takes a very American, if admittedly unhealthy approach, and goes to a bar after work.
*
This is a different haziness to the marijuana aftermath. Rather than sickening, this is nice, the whole world all soft-edged. Glowing.
The Electric Mayhem had been in the jungle with Sam a few moments ago, and now they’re all in the back of a van together, but it’s so nice, either way. Sam doesn’t know why he’s so hard on them all the time. They’re all so nice.
Janice is at Sam’s side, smelling of sweet smoke and clean citrus, and she looks so lovely, illuminated in patches by the passing streetlights. Surely this is an appropriate time to say something flattering, something charming, on this fine van with these fine American people, with all the lights glimmering and the world tilting around like they’re in a snow globe being shaken by a rough-handed child.
Sam thinks for a while, and thinks some more about what he should say to Janice in this perfect moment. And then he finds his mouth going on ahead of him. He can taste fruit and alcohol all around the back of his tongue.
“Janice.” He starts, keeping his voice purposefully calm and even. “I think you’re an—a very attractive woman.”
From all around Sam, there’s a cooing, hooting eruption that his sober mind might place as complete and utter indecency from a crowd of unruly, drug-abusing drunkards. Given that he himself is drunk, he cannot make sense of this at all and, instead, feels a feeling adjacent to embarrassment. He isn’t quite sure what he’s done that’s so awful, but he knows it’s something.
“Oh, wow,” Janice says, and she’s smiling, so everything is alright. “Thanks.”
The rest of the band keep giggling, loudest of all Animal, who is not only laughing but pointing at Sam like he’s never heard anything funnier in his life. Sam lets the liquid courage carry him forwards, because really, what else is he meant to do? What’s the point of any of it?
“I mean it. With my hand to God.”
Janice tilts her head as though examining Sam. He can feel her laughing very gently, quieter than her band mates. Her felt feels softer than felt ever should be. Maybe Sam’s imagining that. He’s never been this close to her for this long before.
“I believe you.”
“What else you like about her?”
Floyd asks,—that’s his name—from the front seat, and Sam answers because he really just should, shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he? That man was in the military, after all. A corporal or something.
“Her hands are…small.” Sam manages, while the band oohs like school children. “Music. Voice. She wears—skirts, a lot. She’s good…kind to me. Sweet. She sees good in people—persons.”
Behind him, the big pink beast makes a sort of hungry growling sound. The filter between Sam’s brain and his mouth has been completely dissolved and everything he says feels like it’s incredibly easy to admit.
“I like her—your stomach.”
To his great surprise, Janice barks a laugh, with her mouth wide and her shoulders jumping a little. It’s very interesting and very nice and Sam doesn’t know why he’s embarrassed. It’s a terrible, terrible shame that their mouths aren’t the right shape to kiss. Sam would like to kiss her so very much.
“Right on.”
The rolling of the world stops. Sam finds himself standing and then he’s on a sidewalk and then he’s on a porch and then he’s in a house, and this must be his house, and Janice mustn’t be real, and he must be dreaming again.
“I believe I am in love with you.”
He informs dream Janice, and dream Zoot drops a mug on the floor that shatters loudly.
*
The dreams are disjointed. Camera flashes. Laughing, talking. Janice in the jungle. The smell of patchouli oil. Cropped leopard skin. A tree top. A bathroom sink. Nothing.
*
Sam wakes up to the smell of pancakes and the quiet noise of feminine humming and rolls back onto his side, groaning to himself. His head is in agony, but at least the ambience around him is pleasant.
And then Sam realises, abruptly, that he isn’t in his own bed, and there would be nobody in his house to make pancakes and mumble the lyrics to Betty Everett’s In His Kiss, and that the pillow he’s trying to hide in smells of patchouli oil. He bolts upright. He instantly regrets the motion as his head pounds.
“Oh, God…”
He groans, covering his eyes with his wings. He manages to peek out to survey his surroundings and is met by a horrendous sight: A house not his own, and Janice in a robe, serenely eating her breakfast while she sits cross-legged on the floor across from where he’s roosted on the couch.
For one dreadful, terrible, awful moment, Sam thinks Oh God and What have I done and I was drunk and That must be illegal and I am disgusting, until he takes in the rest of the scene. The doctor on the other side of the open room, in the kitchen, flipping pancakes. The blue one is sitting next to Janice and drinking coffee with his sunglasses on. The rest of the band are present. It would seem nothing happened Sam would need to kill himself over.
But still—
“Mornin’, oh angel with the smiling face.” Floyd greets, in the tone of a man enjoying himself immensely. “Fancy meetin’ you here.”
Sam can think of no decent reply to this so he simply gapes. He manages to find his voice after a protracted period of this very rude staring.
“Why am I here?”
He manages. Floyd gives him a look that would suggest he’s being the stupidest creature alive. The animal openly laughs at him, his volume indicative of the fact he cares little for Sam’s splitting headache and is in fact trying to worsen it.
“Oh, you were, like, pretty cheery last night.” Janice explains, with what is clearly a polite Valley-girl-ism for wasted. “We just thought you’d be safest with company, y’know?”
“Stocious in the extreme!” Teeth confirms. Sam has never heard this word before. He assumes it also means humiliatingly plastered. “We would never forgive ourselves had something most heavy happened to you in your state of major unrighteousness.”
“God, my head hurts…”
The one Sam has never been able to understand covers his mouth, visibly shaking with the force of the laughter he’s holding in. The blue one next to him appears utterly unfazed.
“I’m not surprised, man.”
“Y’ha’ s’many ebty glass sta’up thought we habbad ta’you t’hobital.”
So, yes, Sam understood none of that. He feels dreadful in every sense.
“I can help with your head!” Janice chirps. “I have, like, healing hands!”
The look that Floyd gives her when she says this makes Sam feel like a sex offender.
“Uh, no. No, thank you. I—what—work! What time—“
“It’s only nine, baby. We got plenty of time. Liquid serendipity.”
“Work starts at nine!”
The band look at Sam with their various strange eyes, then at each other, and all burst out laughing.
*
All immorality has a natural consequence. In this instance, it’s showing up to work at 10:40 AM with the Electric Mayhem, stepping out of the smoky, shag-carpeted van hours after everyone else has already arrived. The sole comfort in any of this is that Kermit is apparently so flabbergasted by the sight he forgets to chastise Sam for his lateness.
It’s completely and utterly humiliating. Most of his coworkers don’t seem to care, or pretend not to notice, but there are a few choice exceptions. Kermit’s receptionist, for example, gives Sam a look of open and unashamed delight, the kind which seems to be extremely dangerous.
There are few notes waiting for Sam. Something about branding, the contents of a sketch from a few weeks prior. There’s nothing to tell him he’s been fired for his own perversity, but it’s likely on the horizon. Maybe that’s just him being a little paranoid. Floyd had said some ridiculous made up word like hangxiety in the van with great pleasure in his voice.
And this is the worst of it now, really, isn’t it? The dream is over. He’s not in the jungle, not anymore, he’s in his place of work where everyone knows he has no dignity or control or self-respect. The Mayhem have all the details, and their indiscretion is going to leave him ruined. Perhaps, if he apologises to them on bended knee—but the thought of grovelling before those weirdos—but he has to do something. If only for Janice, whose home he invaded in a state of complete and total debauchery. What must she think of him?
“Hey, Sam.”
Sam turns and is extraordinarily surprised to find that Janice has somehow materialised on his desk, perched on the edge of it and swinging her legs. He very nearly falls out of his chair. Janice giggles.
“Hello!”
He shouts, rather louder than he meant to. People are looking. This is terrible. Why is she here?
“So, what’s happening now?”
Sam looks at her for a moment, the casual stance she’s in, and tries to work out what on earth she’s talking about. Perhaps this is another dream, and she’s about to evaporate like that one where they’re in the mall. Sam frowns.
“We’re…we’re at work.”
“Well, yeah,” Janice sighs, amused. “But, like, y’know.”
She gestures vaguely between them.
“Janice, I’m dreadfully—truly sorry if I did anything inappropriate last night, or caused any offence—“
“Oh, no.” Janice waves this concern away. “You just, like, told me you’re in love with me. So, wanna get sushi?”
What.
Sam feels the whole world open up under him, everything dropping horrendously. This is awful. This is terrible. He—in a state of drunken debauchery—and she must think—and all the band—and everyone—
“Sam.” Janice waves her hand again, this time trying to get Sam’s attention, all her bracelets jangling. “C’mon out again. I said, you wanna get sushi?”
“I—I was drunk.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I—you—I-I could have been lying.”
Sam isn’t really sure why he’s doing this. None of this seems at all real and it feels somehow necessary to try and shoot himself in the foot, just to be entirely certain this isn’t some cruel and unusual trick played by the universe. Janice scoffs as though Sam has just said something ridiculous.
“I’d, like, know if you were lying.” She says cryptically. “I’d super know. You still haven’t answered!”
Janice’s tone, her general demeanour, is that of a woman mildly annoyed someone’s blocking her path in a grocery store, and not someone violently disgusted by the unwanted advances of a miserable old freak.
“I’ve never had sushi before.” Sam says, stupidly. What else can he say? This can’t be real. “I’ve tried bolognese.”
Janice looks at Sam for a moment, then starts to laugh, head tipped to the side and shoulders shaking. Sam can feel people staring at them and probably wondering what on earth she’s doing over with him and Sam doesn’t care about any of it, suddenly. Janice never stays so content, so long, in the dreams. Something terrible has always happened by now.
“Janice, are you—is this—“
“It’s kinda not really anything.” Janice shrugs. “I don’t really dig super strict labelling. Suppresses the spirit, y’know? But we could grab lunch and, like, tune the connection from there.”
Yes. Sam will take that, gladly, incredulously. He’ll take it even if it’s the most unclear thing he’s ever heard in his life. He finds himself nodding too quickly, stupid looking, everything he wants to say tangled up in his chest. Given how catastrophic his beak-flapping could have been last night, this is probably for the best.
“Cool. Well, just, like, come talk to me later and we can figure it out. I gotta go help Zoot with his camcorder.”
She elegantly slides off Sam’s desk and, waving brightly, disappears somewhere down the hall. Sam watches her go, then watches the spot in the hall where she was last visible, then turns and pinches his wing under his feathers very, very hard.
May God forever bless the Mai Tai.
*
That night, a rat loses forty dollars to his girlfriend. Janice sits at her kitchen counter and tells a gasping, giggling, disbelieving band everything, eventually spiralling into a debate about the exact makeup of a California roll. Sam goes to sleep happy and doesn’t dream of anything.
All, as they say, is well.