Excerpt: Stuttering Like a Kaleidoscope

Honestly, I believe the cherry lights of Brooklyn can intoxicate me effectively enough without any other artificial aid. A lemon tonic plus those cherry lights and the vanilla air—they prompt a laugh that uncontrollably chortles from me, a mere vessel of merriment and wonder caught up in a fruit swirl of culture and oblivion.
Did I know what I was getting into by coming here that day I bought the bus ticket? The day Reeda held up that apple in the college farmer’s market, held it between her hands—the shining poison temptation—and watched the glimmer reflect off the stem and onto my lips before she posed the question I couldn’t refuse: “New York City—interested?”
The Big Apple.
The skin of that apple tasted delicious…was it rotten inside? Or was it all right…was I just allergic? Was I just hallucinating now, not because of the apple at all, but because of my associations with the apple, my mental set and expectations, the drugs programmed in me already?
Dirt, seed, growth, pick, eat. I grabbed New York City with greedy, eager fingers and licked it with the same passion. Passion fruit gum; Wrigley’s, my all time favorite.
Oh dear. Perhaps Reeda slipped something in my drink.
But no, she wouldn’t do that. It must be the city then. The city must be pulling this ridiculousness out of me; it must be feeding it. Intoxicating. The city and me and Reeda, and Tommy somewhere else out here in the waffle darkness—you know how authors always use that cliché “syrupy darkness”? Waffley. Its ridges are the roads, and the pools oil puddles on the street, reflecting the cherry lights. Yes, they’re cherry waffles.
And there’s the fork in the road. Don’t forget to grab it. Mind your manners.