Full Moon at the Target

Saturday night, dead of winter, and we’re driving home from dinner on curiously deserted streets. The moon is full tonight, bulging like an overinflated balloon. There’s mischief brewing under its dead crust, I can tell. The air is so cold it’s freezing around us, and we keep crashing through sections of frozen vapor that stretch across the highway like plate-glass windows. They shatter and tinkle and fall. Best to get home before something really bad happens.

But we have to stop at the Target first. There’s stuff to buy. Baby gifts, and Tostitos, and batteries. Target is a safe haven: bright and cheerful and full of nicely organized, reasonably-priced household items. Shouldn’t be a problem.

We go our separate ways, she arcing left toward the little clothes, me right toward the electronics. I watch a kid playing a generic xbox skateboard game, flinging his gaunt avatar off of improbably sculpted heights, making him twist around in mid-air and grab his board and summersault four times before he glides to a safe landing on the next ramp. As I watch, a second head grows out of the kid’s back. I can see his t-shirt bulging with it and then it tears through, and it’s looking at me, and it says: “You’re a little old to be watching me play video games, aren’t you Mister? What are you, forty?” That’s when I know the moonlight has drifted into Target, and it’s time to go. I turn around and make for the TVs. The kid’s voice behind me, two of his voices, in harmony: “Or fifty? Are you fifty?”

There’s a music video on all the TV sets, a wall of the same seventies-looking rocker people jamming on the beach. They’re long and thin, all of them, and their hair falls over their faces, probably hiding fame-unfriendly features. Still, I’ll bet they get the chicks. Why wouldn’t they? They’re long and thin and they rock out on beaches. I envy them, for a moment. The radio beside me squawks to life and starts singing along in a sort of Joe Pesci voice, and then cuts off and says: “Whatever happened to your rock star career, tough guy? Huh? I thought you were gonna jam for a living?” I shake my head. “So it was someone else?” it insists. I shrug. “Or is it you, when you were someone else?” The electric toothbrush beside me whirs to life and starts brushing the radio’s right speaker. Pesci-voice curses it, tells it you’ve got five seconds to lay off, motherfucker, or I’ll pull your motherfucking bristles out one by one and feed them to you, you got that tough guy?

I leave them to it. Time to collect my stuff and leave. I glance down the batteries aisle, but there’s a little civil war going on there, the nine-volts and AAs mounting sneak attacks against the C’s, cracking themselves open and spilling alkaline fluid onto their unsuspecting prey. The big cylinders writhe and scream and die, which sucks, because I needed C’s for my clock radio.

A voice comes on over the loudspeaker. “Furniture, you have a call on seven. Furniture on seven.” A moment later a teetering drawerless armoire hurries by, clomping along on wooden bun feet, cursing softly under its breath. “I told her never to call me here.”

The Tostitos are a bust too: all of the bags are full of tiny Nixon homunculi instead of chips, all of them flashing victory signs and jowling their innocence at one another. So, fuck, I guess it’s Pringles. But the Pringles cans have mouths, now, big gashy mouths in their centers with long sharp teeth. The one I reach for bites off my little finger and chews it down, curving into an evil grin as it crunches through cartilage and pinkybones. I lose a couple more fingers trying to get the first one back, then give up. So no Pringles either. Fuck.

Definitely time to go home. I collect my wife (who has selected a couple of pink five-armed baby t-shirts and one armadillo-fur jumpsuit), pay, and jump in the car and floor it. Not far to go, but the car starts changing into a unicycle halfway home, and I only just barely make it into the garage, peddling a wobbly line up the driveway with my wife in my arms.

We get inside and lock the doors and draw the curtains and check ourselves out. Except for my three missing fingers, we’re still all here, largely unchanged. Good. Lucky. We plop down on the couch and turn on the TV. It’s the Family Feud tonight. One hundred people surveyed: what’s the one thing you would most hate to find in your house when you come home?

Number one answer: Pringles with teeth.

I hate full moons.