Yellow Pickle

by Blaise Marcoux

part 2 of 3

Mello hummed to himself as he spread mayonnaise over the rye. He wasn’t humming a specific tune or really any tune at all, but he thought whatever it was, it sounded pretty, and oh! What’s this? He should put that on there too!

“Nice brats, there, Mello,” commented Dillon as he stumbled in. “But then, you were never the father type. Come on. What happened to your sense of adventure?”

“Oh! We’re going on an adventure?” Mello whipped around.

“Careful with the knife!”

“Huh? Oh! Knife!” Mello tossed the utensil inside the sink.

Dillon sunk into a stool stashed in one of the kitchen corners. “A butcher knife... to spread mayonnaise,” he said with a shake of his head. “Mello, do you ever feel trapped here?”

“Oh! One time I trapped a cricket in a bottle and then I—”

“Of course you do. You feel imprisoned. You’ve just been waiting for a breakout. Counting the days for someone to come in and rescue you from your private hell.”

“Kept it in my room, but madre screamed whenever she came in and saw it, so I kept it in the garage—”

“I’ve got a motorboat around the back. In this storm I can’t be sure it’ll stay anchored forever. We don’t have long. I know how you’re going to decide, Mello. I’ll be waiting for you, entertaining the brats. Pack light. We’ll be running through some woods.”

“But one day he escaped, or maybe it was a she, and then I was sad, but then I found a golf ball and I drew eyes on it with a marker and then I called it Cricket—”

“I know you’ll make the right decision. I’ll be waiting.” Dillon got up and gazed off into the distance before walking out of the kitchen.

“And we had all sorts of adventures, and we fished but we never caught anything, and I took him to the fair, but we needed tickets, so we left, and then we went fishing at night, but we saw scary men throwing another man who had ropes wrapped around him into the lake, and then we left, and oh! You’re gone!”

This confused Mello.

He chewed on the slice covered with mayonnaise and horseradish. Dillon had said something, he always was saying something, and Mello could never understand what Dillon was saying. He was like Molly that way, because Molly talked too slow, and Dillon talked too slow, and Milla, Pongo, and Milo talked too slow, and they never really said anything, except stuff about motorboats and shutters and responsibility. They never talked about dragonflies, and that made Mello sad.

Madre always said that Mello had his head in the clouds, and Mello liked clouds. They were nice and fluffy and you could imagine all sorts of things were in them, like horses or reindeers or dragonflies, and they were always changing.

He liked the island, it was nice and it was always sunny. He liked Pongo and Milo and Milla even if they were too slow. He liked that one lady who had come in and taught him to change the triplets’ diapers and dress them, she was a nice lady, like Molly.

But Molly was dead. And that made Mello sad. That made Mello very sad. And then the kitchen wall blew up and Mello had to run away.

* * *

Dillon walked into the living room and realized the hell spawn were gone. Good. He tumbled into a couch and wished he could sleep. He’d taken too many caffeine pills. At the time he swallowed them down, he had wished he could take something harder than that, just as wished he could remember how to cuss, just as he wished he could remember how to do a lot of things. “All... I want... is... a cigarette,” he mumbled to himself.

“Smoking is bad,” the triplets chorused from behind him.

Dillon’s muscles tightened in agitation. “You three are as bad as the Censors.”

“What censors?” the shorter boy said, and Dillon could have sworn he’d heard the kid called Milo at some point. Probably while he was still half-conscious from the storm.

“You kids really don’t know anything, do you?”

“We know lots of things.” The girl, what was her name, Milla, yes, she was the one who had said that. And the third one was Pongo. Now he was getting the hang of it.

“Yeah? Why are you here, then?”

“Oh, you are the last one on earth to lecture us on metaphysics,” Milo snapped. Dillon wasn’t sure to like or loathe that one.

“No, idiot. Not here on Earth. On this island. Ever wonder about that?”

“No, he never does,” Pongo bitterly explained. Huh. Trouble among the natives. Dillon would have to make note of that for later.

“Do you even know who your father is?”

“His name is Mello,” one of them said. Dillon was having difficulty keeping track of who said what. Whatever. All the same to him.

“Yeah. Well, before you tykes were born, he was Mello Mango.”

“Still is.”

“Not getting the hint, are you, kids? He was free. He could make his own decisions. He didn’t have you ball-and-chains strapping him down.”

“Was he... well... different back then?” Pretty sure it was Pongo who’d put in that query.

Huh. Well... was Mello different back then?

FLASHBACK: And Dillon yelled some more uncomplimentary things at the police line, but he saw some of the protestors were backing off, backing away, no! They had to stay united, they had to stay a crowd, they had to stay a mob!

“Hey,” shouted Dillon at Mello, who was licking a mango ice cream cone on the corner, “you there! This is history! Hold this sign!”

“Oh! I’m not good at history, I don’t know what Waterpool is, or why it is important, or what you’re doing or...”

“Hold... the... sign!”

“Yay!” cheered Mello, waving the sign back and forth like a cheerleader. And that’s when the pepper spray mists fell upon them. END FLASHBACK

Dillon blinked. “Yeah. Yeah, he was really different. Before they broke him.”

Pongo looked triumphant. Milo looked confused. “‘They’? ‘Free’? What are you even talking about?”

“There were these protests. The government had bought up all the news agencies. All of them. They were forcing people to buy televisions. They were taking over everything. You see, they were going to make everything like 1984.” Pause. “Because, you know, 1984 is this book about—”

“We know what 1984 is about!”

Dillon cringed at the triplets speaking in unison. “Yeah, well, you kids have too much time on your hands. Anyway, they were actually putting cameras in houses, without the occupants knowing or agreeing to it or anything. And they would put these tapes on television. People were becoming addicted to other people’s lives. Privacy was no longer existent. And it was like the end of the Roman Empire. All breads and circuses and nobody knowing what the government was doing.”

“You’re very conspiratorial aren’t you?”

“Listen, you want to know how you got here or not? Me and Mello, we challenged the Man, we protested the Man, we stood up against him. But they captured us, wanted to make us an example. Thought it would be funny to imprison the protestors in reality TV shows. So you know what they did to me? Electric shock therapy. Electrocuted obscenities right out of me. You know, to keep their little programs clean. Hate to know what they did to Mello.” Probably nothing. Best not to let the kids know that.

“Imprisoned in a reality television show?”

“There are cameras everywhere in here. Videotaping your every move. They videotaped me for years. For fifteen years, I’ve been grilling pancakes. For fifteen years, I’ve been making crème brulèe. All my needs are met, sure. They have to. Feed the prisoner. Healthcare for the prisoner. But I was a prisoner. With no privacy to boot. Slave to the public’s eye. But I escaped. Yes, I found a way to escape.”

“How?”

“Oh, yeah, tell you all my secrets. Like you’ll hold up under torture.”

“Oh for you, I’d keep any secret.” Dillon was pretty sure that had been a sarcastic Milo.

“Me and Mello, we’re going to escape. I hacked into the island’s dish network. The cameras are in blackout now. Think. For the first time in your life, a million eyes aren’t staring down your back.”

“Well, it’s nice knowing that we weren’t alone.”

“And now, you kids, you’re going to escape. You’re going to finally be free.”

Milla held her arms behind her back, striking a militant pose. “We’re quite fine here with our books and lecture tapes, thank you very much.”

“But you don’t know what you’ve been missing. You don’t know the wonders of the outside.”

“Apparently tyrannical governments and crazy protestors. No thank you.”

Dillon violently began fishing around in his trench coat. The triplets tensed, expecting the man to pull out a magnum. But instead, Dillon drew out a simple cubic object with a screen in the middle of its plastic surface.

“What’s that?” asked Pongo.

“Splatterfest IV.”

“Sounds very banal,” Milla critiqued.

“I’ll leave that for you to decide.” He handed it to Milo. “Go on. Play it. It won’t kill you.”

“Said the snake to mankind,” muttered Milo. But he unpaused the game and began to push buttons.

“Oh,” gawked Pongo.

“Wow,” gawked Milla.

They stood over Milo’s shoulders and watched him play.

Mesmerizing minutes passed. They didn’t even realize that Dillon had left the room.

And then the explosions started.

* * *

The charges went off slightly later than Censor Ten would’ve liked, and worst yet, the fireball had not been as impressive as it could have been. He checked the camera on the side of his rifle, looking through the viewfinder. No, this was completely unusable footage. They would never be able to put it on primetime.

“All right, spread out, keep your eyes wide open. The fugitive may be armed and dangerous!”

Censor Five glared at Censor Ten. “No he won’t.”

Censor Ten glared back, then stepped through the burning timbers. “Hey, Five, did you forget about audio or something?”

“Audio’s mucked up,” called out one of the censors from the back of the squad.

Ten grimaced. “Don’t tell me we’re having technical difficulties already.”

“We can’t just stop the mission to fix our equipment!” argued Censor Seven.

“Hey, you want this on mute?” Ten began to dial up Tech support, wincing as a piece of burning ceiling plaster plopped on his helmet. “Without good footage, the mission might as well be a failure. Period.”

“Not like we’re in a crossfire or anything,” muttered Five.

Seven gritted his teeth. “Uh, excuse me, Five? Are we not in the spirit of things here? Are we out of character here? Just flinging appearances out the window?”

“Listen!” snapped Five. “I remember a time when soldiers actually fought instead of this play-acting we do now! I mean, this is ridiculous!”

“Audio’s back on,” grunted Ten, “so shut up!” He aimed his rifle at the door, waiting. Their orders were to wait for resistance, brief firefight, then standstill. But there was no resistance. No crazy guy barreling out and firing at the troops. The minutes were passing. First the charges, now this. Was everything going to be out of synch from here on out?

“There’s not going to be resistance,” droned Five. “They’re gone, gone, gone.”

“Great!” yelped Seven. “So now what!”

Ten paused before speaking. Then, “We shoot up the couches. We shoot up the counters. Make it look good. Then we go searching. See if they’re not just hiding somewhere.” He cocked his gun, started the camera rolling, and blew a dozen rounds into the surrounding furniture.

Perfect visuals. Things were finally starting to turn out well.

* * *

Proceed to part 3...