At 4:00, The Quiches Burn

So this morning was hell.

7:30 - I get ungainly yanked from bed to take my sister Michelle to the medical clinic she goes to daily. Grand. Barely able to keep awake, I bull through the drive to the clinic and promptly fall asleep as she goes in. Oh, and just to set the tone, because I rarely feel like getting dressed for this chore, I just throw on my bathrobe. I figure, why not? I never leave the car during this and it covers all it needs to cover.

8:10 - I wake up for the drive back, she reminds me that she has to go to the doctor's office at 9:15 and there isn't the time to drive back and put on a decent set of clothing. Which means I cannot accompany her indoors, because, y'know...bathrobe. But we have some time to kill, so we drive out to the lake and BS for a while. She smokes. Well, considering her other exploits, smoking's pretty much the least of all evils. She lets me nap a little while longer.

8:45 - We're heading for the doctor's office. She says she knows exactly where it is, that I shouldn't worry because her sense of direction is keen and unerring.

9:00 - "I'm pretty sure it's this way..." she says. My confidence drops.

9:07 - "Uh, maybe it's...that way?" My confidence plummets.

9:12 - We luck out and make the correct turn. She leaves. I stay in the car, park in a relatively shady spot, and fall asleep again. (I stayed up way too late last night.)

9:35 - Sweet Christmas, it's hot. I can't believe it. It's not even that late in the day yet, how can it possibly be this hot? I turn on the air conditioning for a brief few seconds and wipe the sweat from my brow.

9:47 - So hot...starting to hallucinate. Gotta keep it together. She can't be in there for much longer, anyway, it's just a routine thing. Did she say that? Did I just invent the memory on the spot so's I would feel better about this whole thing? Trying to find out is a fool's errand.

9:54 - Hooooooottttttt. Feel like I'm melting. I vaguely recall some remarks Michelle made about "a big Lucas-shaped puddle" being all that would be left of me. I am starting to believe her words. Fired up the air conditioner again, for longer this time.

10:06 - Can fingernails melt? I'm pretty sure they shouldn't, so this is starting to worry me. I now see, when I direct my failing vision outside the window, an angry sun a la Super Mario Bros. 3 aggressively beaming down at me with all the force it can muster. I'm more or less certain that this isn't a good thing. Trying to sleep. Failing.

10:17 - Ungh...the heat is oppressing me like a South American dictator. Think my eyebrows might have caught fire. The mirror shows me naught but a pack of lies, so no good there.

10:22 - I now know what heroin addicts mean when they say "chasing the dragon." At first, a little blast of air conditioning was good to sustain me for a while, but I'm needing more and more just to keep me below the temperature of spontaneous combustion. This is an unsustainable way to go on. Once I use up all the cold air, the frost elemental under the hood will be angry and freeze the blood in my veins in his terrible wrath. Is that how AC works? At least I'll be cool.

10:29 - Did I ever have a sister? What was the reason of my coming here? Due to the gradual evaporation of all liquids in my body, my brain is working at less than peak efficiency. Her egress from the office seems to be nothing but one of the many hallucinations I am currently experiencing, like the one about the little imps bathing me in napalm. I thank them for the cool liquid treat, it's a shower compared to Florida sunshine.

10:31 - What's going on? I don't understand...where am I? Is this a car?

10:35 - I forgot one crucial thing when parking this car: as time goes by, shadows move. I am fully exposed.

10:38 - Death. Death. Death. All has become ruin. All has become chaos. I have descended into hell.

10:46 - *gurgle*
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10:58 - Sweet relief! Michelle finally reappears. "You look hot," she says, therefore winning the Lucas Award for the Single Most Obvious Statement Ever Said. The awards ceremony begins and ends with a sizzling glare and a smack in the back of the head, from me.

10:59 - Nursing my various wounds suffered from her retaliatory assault, we scoot home. I thank all powers that will listen that I'll finally be able to get inside and cool off.

11:00 - She informs me that we need to stop by Publix (grocery store) before we get home. I now, officially, hate everything.

11:07 - "Get on I-95 to get home," Michelle tells me. "It's faster." So I do.

11:07:32 - "Ah, crap, you should have gone south, not north," she tells me, exactly .00001 seconds after it's too late to change my course. Thanks, Michelle. So we are diverted.

11:41 - After driving up and down I-95 for some time, culminating in a heated debate over the merits of driving on a smaller road or a larger one under construction, we arrive at the grocery store. "I'll just be a second," she says, ducking out. "I only need three things."

11:51 - It does not take this long to get three things. And I can't call her because she doesn't have a cell phone, not to mention I left my cell phone at home, in the pocket of my pants, which I'm not wearing, as I'm wearing my bathrobe, so I can't enter the Goddamned store to retrieve her because I can't leave the car because I'm not dressed properly because RARGH ARGH HATRED OF ALL THINGS

11:58 - As it transpires, she was in the store for so long because of a squabble over the price of a package of baby carrots. They claimed $2.79, the price shown was $1.29, it was a misprint, and they ended up giving them to her for free. Jubilant at her acquisition, she (deliberately?) fails to notice my bad mood. And by "bad mood," I mean "smoldering like cracks in the earth, ready to erupt into a raging torrent of absolute destruction and insanity at the slightest provocation."

12:00 - We arrive home. I am defused.