Dollar Menu Time Travel

       A while back our friend Mark over at The Rambling Person asked for suggestions for a short story to write, and being the jackasses we are, we came up with a premise so ridiculous that Mark dared us to write it instead. Not one to back down from a challenge, we accepted. Our suggestion:

 

And thus, we give you Dollar Menu Time Travel:

          

            There once was a nice young hippie fellow named Jeff. Aside from his occasional dalliance with mind-altering substances, Jeff was a fairly level-headed guy. He lived in Boulder, Colorado with his soul partner Delilah, and played his bongo drums for money as a professional street musician. Delilah would dance along too, interpreting with her boisterous gyrations his rhythmic hammering of the drums.

Jeff was actually a fairly terrible drummer.

But, then again, Delilah was deaf. So the show still always wound up being pretty entertaining.

One day, while Jeff pounded the skins on a sidewalk corner and Delilah did her best interpretation of a spastic epileptic, a passerby tossed a small package into the milk jug which was currently doubling as the ‘tip jar.’ Since there weren’t any bills in there to cushion the fall, it landed with a plop.

Jeff stopped playing and plucked the package out while his ladyfriend continued to wiggle around in her many flowery skirts.

“Hey, cool,” he proclaimed, tugging at her skirt. “Look at what the Universe just gave to us, Delilah. It’s a taco.”

No sooner had he peeled back the paper wrapper than was there a terrible shriek. The taco leaped to its feet (yes, feet!) and clutched the wrapper like a woman who’d just spotted a peeping tom in the window. “The nerve of you, sir! I’ll have you know, just because my meat is hanging out, this isn’t a free show.” The taco quickly folded the square of paper into a little pair of shorts.

Jeff furrowed his brow, stroked his scraggly beard. Had he not just smoked an entire half pound of skanky ditchweed, he probably would have wondered how it was possible that he’d just been chastised by a walking, talking taco. However, his lone current thought was much simpler.

“Lookit those tiny little pants! Look at that, Delilah. Have you ever seen pants so small?”

Delilah twirled and swirled onward.

The taco crossed its arms (yes, arms!) and scowled. “You were going to…to eat me, weren’t you? You monster. I’ve got a date tonight.” The taco rubbed its lettuce, considering the foolish hippie. “I know just what to do with you.” He snapped his crispy little fingers and all of a sudden the trio was sitting in the middle of a cobblestone road in 16^th century London.

“Welcome to London, you ravenous jerk!” the taco said.

“Wow,” Jeff said, amazed. “London? I’ve never been to New England before.”

“No, you fool. This is London in the year of 1563. There is no New England, yet!”

Jeff stared at the taco blankly as a man in a top hat and coattails skirted them with a hankie over his mouth.

The taco’s tomatoes reddened. “We are in the past, you dimwit! As in, no fast food, no television, no automobiles.”

“Yes!” Jeff shouted, as he dodged a horse-drawn carriage. “A city with no ozone-killing cars! Man, New England is awesome.” He turned to step right in a pile of horseshit. He looked down at his foot, sniffed it, and grinned. “Hey, cool. There’s all sorts of fertilizer here too.”

Delilah continued to pirouette. She’d already long-since figured out that Jeff was no longer playing music, but didn’t really much care, as dancing was her life.

“No!” the taco screamed, now irate. “This is not New England! And you are not supposed to be enjoying it! This country is being ravaged by an outbreak of the plague, for God’s sake. And what are you doing? You’re sniffing shit, that’s what you’re doing.”

Jeff put down his moccasin and stared at the pissed off taco for a long moment. “Hey, Delilah. Check it out. A taco!”

“You, you unhand me you vile beast!” But the taco’s cries were muffled as its crunchy skull (yes, a taco skull!) was mashed up between Jeff’s teeth and swallowed.

“Mmm…that’s a mighty fine taco, baby.” He offered half of the remaining taco corpse to Delilah with a grin. “Here, have some.”

Delilah stopped moving for the first time that hour to inspect the snack. She leaned down to sniff at it and frowned at Jeff, waggling a finger. She pointed to the taco meat, which was green and rancid. Unfortunately, Jeff had been too high to realize that his time-traveling taco was unfit for human consumption. The meat, unbeknownst to Jeff, was also plague-ridden rat meat. Which was kind of a bummer, because Jeff’s stomach was starting to feel a little queasy.

He ran off to find something to barf in while Delilah shrugged, spun on her toes, and began to dance once again. This time, using a mix between Salsa and ghetto booty shaking, she used her rhythm to interpret what an utter fucking fool her now dying boyfriend was.

A gentleman with a cane strolled past and dropped a penny in the tip jar. And that man... was Leonardo da Vinci.

Cheers,

-Brandon (and Bryan)

Beer: Breckenridge Ballpark Brown

Music: Darrick Thompson