Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife to Be!

The Store 24 will be abandoned when you stumble in, drunk, at 3:00 AM, but then it always seems abandoned. The Store 24 kind of exists outside of time and space that way, a swirling nebula of twenty-four hour convenience, forever bereft of customers with the same microwave burritos and potato chip bags existing in quantum synchronicity throughout the Store 24 multiverse.

Normally this unique physical state of existence causes customers to instinctively shy away from eating Store 24’s dangerously ill-kept foods. But you’ll be drunk and hungry and warm food will sound too good to pass up so you’ll order, through a series of gestures, a heat lamp hot dog from Store 24 and eat it in four large bites.

You’ll walk out feeling alright, the time from within the store temporarily clinging to you as you re-enter the real world. But it won’t last long. Time, as these things go, never lasts long and you won’t be more than a block or two before the hot dog hits you in full force.

First the nausea will come. It will not come in waves, it will not come slowly. It will strike like a wave, turning your bowels to jelly and leaving you mired in an empty, ready to pop feeling. You’ll all but have to turtle walk back home to keep from shitting yourself, limping and dragging one foot behind you from a feeling that, if you were to make a full stride you might suddenly give in and shit yourself.

When you reach your apartment your roommate will already be asleep, but the sounds you make in the bathroom will wake him up ere long. Moaning, vomiting and the explosive sounds of liquefied feces being propelled from your asshole will all mix together and bring his light tapping to the door, his voice full of concern.

When you finally tell him what you’ve done he’ll nod and calmly drive you to the hospital. He’ll have to pull over every few miles to let you throw up again but the roads will be quiet and you’ll get there in one piece, more or less. The E.R. will have a short waiting list but you’ll be in a bed within an hour and a young nurse will be negotiating an I.V. into the back of your hand to feed fluids that your body would otherwise reject.

“Time gets us all,” she’ll say, drawing your eyes to her face. She’ll be the single prettiest girl you’ll have ever seen. We’d go into greater detail but we don’t want to ruin the surprise. Suffice it to say you wouldn’t believe us if we told you. And as she holds you while you violently heave your dry stomach into a bedpan you’ll feel as if you’ve finally found your true home, voiding your bowels wrapped in her arms

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife to Be!