Prose: Excerpt, "Castle Fantasia"

As I drew near the castle I adjusted my technicolour dreamcoat, grown faded since the advent of newer processing technologies. My every movement was dictated by the H.P Lovecraft story I was reading, which I had applied to the Guinness Book to have declared the best story of all time. I had yet to determine whether Lovecraft had based the book on a sample of my brain, or that I was so infatuated with the master’s voice that I had consented to follow it to my doom. I had recently been fired, and my girlfriend had left me, and I had developed a resentment of everything non-fictional about my life. My thoughts ran to the exotic because my waking life was so mind-numbing. I parked in the castle carport, drew a hook with a magic marker and hung my hat on it. On crossing the threshold of the castle, I was eviscerated by a secretary who, upon taking possession of my insides, slung them around her neck to protect her from the winter chill, for it was forecast to be the first day of winter that evening, and the rest of that day. I was then rudely informed that anyone superficial enough to be empty inside was not welcome in the castle, so I cooled my heels outside and waited for the clouds to part. I smoked a roll of cowhide stuffed with bacon rind I had procured from an exotic smoked meats distributor in the last town I passed. I smoked it purely in memory of my wife, who was a vegetarian at the time, and Jewish. A group of youths strolled by on their way to a party and called out that they could smell bacon; I told them their joke didn’t work when it was literal, but they had left school before they discovered the difference between the figurative and the literal. A somber duet between viola and cello accompanied my lonely wait by the door. I played percussion with my feet in a different time-signature to try and put them off as I thought about H.P. Lovecraft and the sound of his name.