Skittle Chick

This story (including this statement) has been translated and interpreted from its original language into your local dialect and syntax.
Please note, some words may not be Translated Acurately, or at all due to the dissimilarities between alien cultures, customs, and complexities

Author: Tath

Date Published: May 22nd 2025

Flat…. or muted? Or actually, dead’s the best word to describe it. We once synthesized grains of sand in this very basement, tiny fractions of which could turn a person’s world inside out! And now it’s nothing more than grey paint on drywall, grey cement, and a set of grey wooden steps leading up to the main floor of an empty house whose walls are equally just as empty. All the magical vessels, the tools, the glass, the artwork…. all the everything. All gone. Like, it wasn’t enough that we had to leave and couldn’t start over. They had to try and erase any evidence that we’d ever existed. And that’s the only silver lining to this whole situation. Purely out of spite, after taking everything. They just crudely covered it all in grey paint and left it empty. A mausoleum of all our history, and memories. Gone in plain sight-but also. That means that they never opened the walls. And I should know, I have spent the last 6 years living in this dead end, watching, waiting for the right moment to go back. Besides some shitty graffiti done by local dead beats, the place had been virtually untouched.

Whack

Bits of grey fly everywhere, and I rhythmically tear into middle of the far wall with an old blue crowbar. (Poetically, it was the very same one I’d used to pry open the big boxes our first reactors came in). Tiny bits of yellow insulation followed, and after pulling out what seems like a small mountain of chunky wall stuff, I felt the bar hit something solid. Scrounging around in the open hole with my thickly gloved hands, not able to see much through the fogged respirator lens, my heart rate spiked, as if I’m standing on the top of a tower, ready to jump, knowing I have my parachute, sure, but unsure of what will happen next. My vision pulsing, my nose running, chest heaving, everything screaming all at once. They hadn’t fucking found it! But…. what if it isn’t……. what then….? No-this had to be it!

* Clink *

From the wreckage rolled a metal tube whose top was covered in wax with Steve’s little swirly eye seal impressed upon it. Grip loosening, the crowbar rattles against the cement. Crouching, my knees pop and I groan…. God…. when’d I get this old? But sunshine is crawling up from my heart, and out my eyes, who’s smiles simply cannot be contained. You my friend are coming with me, and safe is where you will be. No longer needing the gloves, I toss em’ on the ground, unzipped the hoodie, and stash the small vessel in my bra. Pushing to stand, I can feel the inanimate metal rod on the ground asking not to be forgotten in this sad room. So, I grabbed my friend who was there when I started my journey of chemical maestrosity, left the hoodie and gloves, and on my way we went. The tired stairs groaned with each step, the last music that room would ever hear.

It was a left towards the kitchen that opened to the backyard. The respirators elastic head strap pulled at my hair in that familiar way it always did, and each step under my heavy boots echoes through the house. Behind my eyes, pictures start to dance, filling the space around me. N.S sitting at our table with a bowl of apple cinnamon oatmeal, (the only food he would eat during the 2- or 3-day long sprints in the lab.) The white fridge with the rounded edges, and the sand-colored cabinets, and all of Doreen’s plants (they were N. S’s partner). This room, where we’d shared so many meals, stories, and experiences felt alive again. The music that filled the air from the old stereo in the farm daze whispered in my ears, standing the hair on the back of my neck at attention. The memories were opaque, and I waded through them to cross the grey room. The windows were boarded up, and the sliver of light that shown through didn’t have much to illuminate. Though the thought crossed my mind to pull them down, I didn’t. I don’t think its very kind to shine light on the husk of something that itself used to shine.

I turned back to the room, looked down the hallway to the front door, and for just a moment, I felt like I could cry. Their smiling faces, gilded in dusty yellow light, all 4 of them, just walking on into the house, laughing and being goofy. The image hung in the air before dissolving into nothing, and from a crevice deep in my gut, I was overcome with the thrill of searching for that lost chord. Being with friends, looking for the notes that so few -if any had ever heard. Just as I thought I could grasp it, the feeling slipped back into the dark crevice taking with it the wispy remembering’s. The rivers that once flowed in response to the loss of love, and light, and life, had all dried up. I reached behind me, the brass on the doorknob was cool to the touch, and sobering. The door squeaks open, the yellow grass crunches below me, and the rusted latch on the wire fence scrapes across the metal pole to whom it was attached. Looking back and forth down the empty alley, the gate closes behind me, and I jump into my black VW rabbit, (the kind with a retractable roof!). The little engine purrs and bubbles, and gravel crunched under the tires.

This neighborhood, like the town itself, is strung together by a very thin scraggly string. Whoever hasn’t left yet either plans on dying here or is waiting to catch the right wave and ride off into the sunset. But waiting to die, isn’t quite the same as living, and besides the odd clusters of weeds here or there, there wasn’t any life left in this place. The speakers always cut in and out when the car clunks over the city splitting train tracks. Turning left off Main Street, I slowed down just a little bit when the “Skittles and Pins” sign comes into view. Staving off the inevitable even for just one extra moment is one little way I claim the tiniest bit of control in my day. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. And then all too quickly, over the curb, into the unpaved parking lot, the car shudders to a stop, and I take a deep breath.

Just one last shift. One more day…... then I can leave….

My fingernails bit into my thighs, I grabbed my backpack and opened the door. Grasshoppers sang in the long grass behind the parking lot, I like their songs, like a cloud, they carry me through the front door, into the musty old bowling alley. Motion sensors flicker on chalky florescent lights revealing a room desperately in need of a coat of paint, a stained carpet browned from years of abuse, a bar whose wooden top had conversely lost all its stain, and a rack filled with bowling shoes that were either fraying or falling apart. In my opinion, the only redeemable part of this place is a juke box by the pool table that only works about half the time. The place is split in two, one side’s a bar and concession area, and the other half is an unassumingly decent set of bowling lanes, (all thanks to yours’s truly). I follow the carpeted upstairs down a ramp against the right wall next to the lanes, and through a door, behind which lives the pinsetter machines, a bunch of old junk, and 4 lockers, who also happen to be grey. Not the same grey, but flat and uninspiring none the less. Next to which a single light bulb hanging from the roof lights a dilapidated table whose cream top had been neglected to a smoker’s yellow.

I unlock the grey box of mundanity, from which I pull a set of scuffed runners, sit back into a small black folding chair previously pushed into the table, unlaced my boots, wiped away the dirt and bits of drywall, tucked the laces back into the shoe, and placed them neatly in the locker. Off came my tank top, and I removed the metal tube from its hiding place and sit back down in the chair. The metal is cool to the touch, and the teal seal sparks the past. These eyes used to be everywhere, a simple oval with some curled eyelashes and a spiral that swirled into the pupil. Steve would draw them anywhere he could find that would be just out of sight. You’d open a cupboard, and there was the eye on the inside wall. Scribbled onto the door jam, or the back of the wall, or somewhere that you wouldn’t see right away, but always in an opportune place. I once dropped a pen under the lab desk, and when I got down to grab it, I looked up at the bottom of the table, and there was Steve’s swirly eye. It honestly fells like a shame to destroy this seal. So instead, I grab my box cutter from my locker, place the blade on the edge and careful try to remove just the very top. After 6 years of waiting, the wax kind of crumbled, but slid off the top without too much effort thankfully. I put the wax in my locker, and carefully unscrewed the cap, tip it over, and pour out a small glass ampoule, within which free flowing off white/lavender crystals sparkle. Suddenly the glass feels heavy.

A memory flashes forward of N.S and me sitting at a white lab bench in front of a microbalance. We’d had a fritted filter with about 100x this amount of it in a vacuum oven over night. He unfurled the aluminum foil on top carefully, and held the glassware at eye level, the beige lab glasses and his shoulder length grey hair reflected and warped in the glass while he swirled the filter like fine wine. Setting it on the counter, he made pointed eye contact with me, “It’s a curious thing, thermodynamics. We want to dry this to a constant weight, right? An end goal that’s relative in its own precision depending on the instrumentation at our disposal. And theoretically, we could try and measure it so precisely and in such perfect conditions, that this mass of crystal would become relatively stable to many decimal points. And if we threw it all in some acid, the atoms could all still be accounted for, the energy in the bonds can be measured and accounted for. It all goes somewhere. And for me, that’s where this little containment unit throws the whole world into a loop.” He paused, moved the filter inside the balance chamber, closed the door, clicked the anti static button, marked down the number on the display, and exhaled slower then usual.

It feels like he’s in the room with me right now, I can see him turning back to me in his chair, crossing one leg over the other and taking his glasses off, held loosely in his gloved hands. The edge of his lips softened, and he continued, “The potential in these crystals isn’t just in their ability to produce cascades of chemical reactions and electrical effects inside the brain. When we do something to change or alter these crystals, we prevent the possibility of there consumption. And the loss of what would be produced experientially when someone consumes them isn’t acknowledged. If neither energy nor matter can be destroyed, only changed, then for me, the question arises. When someone’s usual consensus-based reality is fractured, reoriented, or displaced, how would you quantify or measure that expansion? Re-orientating someone’s world view can account for a change in their engagement with reality that simply isn’t consistent with the consumption and conversion of the energy in the bonds of that molecule. I think it’s short sighted to only look at these crystals as their mass and energy. I don’t think anything here is special, I think its all as basic as the laws of thermodynamics. And I think ingredients that facilitate the imbibition of universe stuff are more then just their physical stuff. And I wonder what that makes you and me?” and he raised his eyebrows, creased his lips, and shrugged.

The apparition evaporated, and I am left staring at these glimmering grains and all the potential they have within. Being that I am the only person who’s working here, they will be safer in my boot for the time being, so I roll the ampoule to the toe of the shoe and throw on a black Iron Maiden t-shirt with a picture of Eddie holding an axe. I wrap an apron around my waist and click the latch on the locker closed, the sound of which evokes gritty nostalgia. I hate graduation goggles. Finally, I clip on my name tag that reads Saz.

The normal daily stuff flew by. Checking and testing the pinsetter machines, cleaning the balls, stocking the bar, resetting the monitors and lane boards, etc. Right before opening I always poor Marlene's gin and tonic, this way, I get to skip my first daily interaction with the old hag. But she was punctual, which the more I’ve thought about it, the more I figure is probably her only redeemable trait. Once I was in a good mood, and I doubled her drink, which earned me an earful because ‘that’s not how’ she liked it. And with today being the last here, she gets equal parts gin and tonic in the dirtiest glass I can find to spit shine.

The clock rolled over, and I unlocked the front door. On cue, in walks Marlene like always. She puts a $10.00 bill on the counter, raps her knuckles, and gristles “Here honey, why don't you keep the change?” I nodded and waited for the yellow fog to dissipate before taking the cash. The drink costs $9.55, which with tax comes to a clean $9.99. I put it in the cash register and took my penny.

The day slugged along, and the same normal cast of characters waltzed through the doors, and like clockwork, they talked about the same thing as always. The price of cigarettes increasing, how there is no good men in this town, which would inevitably lead to a 10-minute diatribe after Marlene's first cigarette about how she used to be a young burlesque dancer, and all the boys wanted her. Chester always sits at the end of the bar wearing a jean jacket, a long grey scraggly beard, near toothless (save for the blackened ones) and his drink was whiskey. But sometimes I’d give him a free shot of vodka between frames just to try and tame his breath. Greg and Harley were more irritating than anything. They’re two old bikers who’d settled down together in the towns trailer park. They seemed to know how to use a toothbrush but hadn’t ever heard of deodorant. They played pool and bowled, not so much drinkers, but they certainly liked to call me sweetheart, something I will not miss.

After a thorough spraying, I turned to put away a set of shoes. The door chimed, and I looked up to the clock. It was only 3, which wasn’t usually when anyone came in here. I turned and was greeted by three very clean white t-shirt and jeans wearing country boys.

“Well, hello there beautiful. We’ll take 3 pairs of shoes and a lane, thanks.”

I swallowed, and cocked my head to them, “Sizes?”

He grabbed at a massive shiny belt buckle holding up acid washed jeans, and he smiled flashing clean white teeth, “Size 6, 9, and 11 please”.

“Sure thing,” I nodded and turned, “what brings ya through town?” I asked while I fumbled with the shoes.

God fucking dammit…. Nobody who’s ever come through here has had teeth that white.

“Oh, you know. We’re here to see a man about a horse. Figured we would play a few frames while we waited.”

Fuck…. fuck…. fuck…. FUCK!

Turning to drop their shoes on the counter, I said, “Sounds like a blast,” and I quickly raised my eyebrows, “How about you take the 2nd lane on the left over there? I’ll run into the back and reset the pin machine.”

He nodded to me and said it again, “Thanks Beautiful, but were in a bit of a rush. So, ya best hurry.” Whatever southern drawl he had been playing at sort of broke with that last sentence, feeling more like a threat then a suggestion, and for the second time today, the hair stands straight up on the back of my neck.

What’s the possibility that three good looking men, with clean clothes, and chicklet white teeth come into ‘Skittles n Pins’ for a nice game of bowling, out in the middle of but fuck nowhere, on today of all days? Probably pretty good right?? Yea…. that’s not what the faces of the regulars were saying either. This might have been the first time I’ve ever seen Chester open his eyes this wide.

I walked from behind the counter, down the walkway and through the door, turning briefly to see the three of them with their eyes trained on me. My heart is pounding out of my chest, and I really don’t have any other choice. But I can’t run out the back door now. I’m not leaving without my boots. So, I bolt to the locker, I hear the latch click open, and moments later I hear yelling and three-gun shots.

No…no…no!! FUCKK!&&$*$*$#))@!1!!!!!!!!

I grab the boots, reaching down to the toe, and the ampoule slips from my fingers back into the shoe. Two more gunshots ring out, and I jump down against the wall. Just barely hidden behind a pile of old gutter material, I’m suddenly grateful I never gotten around to it throwing out, and its just in time for the door to fly open, smack the wall, and half break it off the hinges.

“Hey there beautiful, it looked like ya might need a hand back here? Don’t be shy now, I’m happy to help.”

I could hear the fucking grin on his face. He was enjoying this. And I’d finally gotten a grip on the vial, but it was to late.

“There you are Gorgeous!”

He literally roared the words at me, grabs my face with one hand and smashes me in the nose with the gun in his other. Sharp intense pain radiates through my skull, and I can’t help but scream. With his full body weight, he presses my head into the concrete wall, straddles my waist and one arm pinning me to the ground. My throat catches on the steady stream of liquid coming from my nose, and now it was my turn to crack a smile, “Hhk—th'at... it..—b’g man??".

Through grit teeth, he seethed “You think your clever huh??? ‘Hiding’ here for 6 years? In plain sight? Like they forgot???” His empty eyes bore through me, “Six years is a long fucking time to sit on a farm and watch you!” Again, the cold steel of the pistol rapped against my face and my cheek bone crunches. “Well, we don’t forget, and everything that you are belongs to us! Now-why don’t you a be good girl and tell me where the fuck IT is!” Spit flew from his mouth, and the sweat beading on his forehead rolled over his brow and into his eye.

His grip loosened just a fraction, and I took my chance. With all my might, through pursed lips I spit the blood pooled in my mouth straight at his eyes, “This right!!?” I snarled, jerking my head loose. Reflexively, he reached to wipe his eyes. His weight lifted off my hips and I free my arm, swinging with the box cutter gripped tight in my left hand. The pistol in his right hand goes off, and the razor catches the right side of his face at the same time, just missing his eye, but tearing a good chunk out of his forehead. Summoning the strength of an angry banshee I pulled my legs in and kicked out, knocking this bloodied man back against the locker. Adrenaline yanks me to my feet, and I run, turning the corner for the back door. Each of my footsteps seem to feel heavier then the last. My hand is warm, and I must have dropped the cutter.

*Bang*

The concrete comes fast. But it doesn’t really hurt at this point, everything is so loud? You know?? But it’s also so quiet, and sort of soft….

Bang

The sudden feeling of expansion and heat bursting through my calf wakes me up. Besides the pain, the only thing I can feel is the glass ampoule in my fist. I try to crawl, but my legs aren’t working, and I feel his hand grab my shoulder only to spin me around to see his bloodied face. I got him. Real good. “I think th’—eyebr’w looks b-better th’ way.” My words slur.

I can see his lips moving, and hear his voice clearly, but it all seems far away.

“You know as well as I do, this doesn’t end here, right? So go ahead, don’t tell me where It is!”

“Oh…. - this?” I slap my palm to my wide-open mouth, letting it hang open just a moment, just long enough for him to see it sitting on my tongue.

“Are you fucking insan-!” He shouts, lunging for me. But it’s too late.

I shove my fist in his approaching face, one middle finger standing alone. My lips curl into a wicked cheshire smile, and I bite down hard, releasing an earth-shattering wave upon myself. Two birds one stone. Ha!

The vial breaks, the powder crunches against the glass and my teeth, and everything is turning blue. My awareness is already slipping. In my mouth, the powder bursts and begins to bubble, emitting bright light from my eyes and mouth. If we could crawl in there and see the fuck show of lights, it would be a feast for our eyes. But nobody will see it, the largest single sum of it that has ever been consumed at once. Fuck, he’s on me, and he’s trying to force open my mouth?? I think he’s trying to interrupt me?!?!?!

But I chew. And I swallow. And I feel it. I can feel IT.

“Do you have any idea how much worse this is going to make it for your friends???”

He sounds angry…... but? Those words. My friends are still alive… Me? Who’s my friends…...?

He throws me down into the ground, and I’m laying on my side now, I can see an old pin, dusty and alone, forgotten underneath the machines.

Bang

------------

The next day, 6 bodies were recovered from the bowling alley. Marlene had been found gripping a $10 bill as she tried to run. Chester's teeth had been knocked out and he was laying in a puddle on lane 3 with a pool cue in his hands. Everyone else had died trying to run. The whole thing was ‘investigated’ and determined to be a gambling debt collection that went wrong. And there weren't any witnesses to tell the police what happened. From that day forward, the lanes were abandoned. And like the rest of the town, forgotten.

But this dear reader is not where our story ends, but rather -where our story begins.

Six months later, the back door to the very same bowling alley opened for the last time. The sun was setting, any moisture in the air had already evaporated hours ago, and even the grasshoppers were too hot to sing. Nobody knows how or why, but out from the back door of ‘Skittles and Pins’ struts a curious looking creature. A bowling pin with glowing blue eyes, a beak, no arms and a pair of colourful furry thighs descending into two chicken legs. Its mouth fell wide open and from it a deep bass beat sounded, a jumping snare followed, and the air was filled with boots and cats.

Its mouth opened top to bottom, the entire length of its bowling pin body. And the surrounding Dandelions sprang to life, snapping to and fro like a crowd of ravers, a congregation who follow the great one wherever it roams. It’s said that from then on, the Skittle Chick marched onward toward unknown ends with unknown means. But anyone who meets the great Skittle Chick can reach into its mouth and receive a gift. Though a warning to those of malevolent intent, you shall be pulled within the Skittles mouth to endure 100 years of ruthless ecstasy. And those who return, are never the same.

-End Part 1-