The Multiverse
Sno-Cone and I were on our way to Craig’s funeral and I was trying to concentrate on my driving because I was still pretty lit from the bowl of New York Diesel we smoked back at his Aunt Cathy’s but I couldn’t because Sno-Cone wouldn’t shut the fuck up. He kept going on and on about the multiverse, how at this exact moment in time the two of us were doing slightly-different shit in a million alternate realities. For example, he said, throwing his Chick-fil-A bag out the window, I hit a kid square in the nuts with this in one of them. I asked him how he could possibly know something like that. I just thought of it, didn’t I? Then I said, Alright, Archi-Fucking-Medes, you’re telling me that if you can imagine it, it exists somewhere? What if my brain’s capable of some next-level shit that the multiverse hasn’t considered? Then he took a pull off his Coke and said, Your brain? Then I told Sno-Cone to fuck off, that I was currently thinking of an alternate reality in which I gave a fuck that his prick stepdad was dead. I reminded him that I could be installing that window unit back at our place or doing something else that’s useful besides carting his metaphysical ass around Tinley Park in search of a funeral home whose address he was too baked to remember. Sno-Cone just mumbled something like, That’s some cold shit, right there, and slouched in his seat. Take a right here.
We rode in silence as we passed the Mental Health Center on the corner of Harlem and 183rd and I wanted to make a joke about the crazies inside to cut the tension but then I remembered that Sno-Cone’s sister was a patient there after that time she tried to kill herself by drinking Windex. So, I just kept my mouth shut and turned on the oldies station and listened to a song about a creepy chick peeking out from under a stairway. I thought about how somewhere else in the multiverse I was listening to “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, or maybe driving a Prius instead of a Corolla. Then I thought about apologizing to Sno-Cone for telling him that Craig was a prick because even though it’s true, that everyone in Cook County knows just what a douche he was, that’s just not something you say to a guy on the way to his stepdad’s funeral. I immediately felt better about the whole thing because I knew that in that same reality Sno-Cone would accept my apology and things would be cool again and we’d just do something normal like go to Morgan’s for wings. I looked over at Sno-Cone, still sulking, and I smiled. I wanted to tell him not to worry, that I just made things right in the multiverse, but I didn’t. He’d find that out for himself, eventually.
Literary Tonic 