missing socks

Some times when you’re sleeping and the world seems kind of awake and kind of asleep, little gremlins creep out of your head and skitter about your room until you are fully awake again. I know…it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. How come no one ever sees these gremlins? How come it’s always gremlins and never giraffes or four door sedans? Well the answer to that is simple, because if someone saw them then they would have to kill them and that would just make things complicated (oh, and if they were giraffes or automobiles, would they really want to stick around your boring room all night until you woke up?) Ok…so they wouldn’t necessarily kill them, cause I saw one of my own gremlins once and he was actually kind of cool. His name was Limelicker and some times, in the middle of a sentence, he would look at me and then slowly retrieve a lime from the back pocket of his ratty little pants and proceed to lick it. I know…it’s hard to believe.

You’re probably past that “what the fuck is this guy talking about?” stage now if you’re still reading and are beginning to wonder how it is that I could have seen one of my own gremlins if they disappear once their host wakes up. It’s simple really, Limelicker had gotten stuck in the mirror on my closet door. Gremlins and mirrors don’t get along very well (See: The Reflection Wars, volumes 1-29). It all went down kind of fast, I remember waking up to growling and a weird licking sound and then everything was quiet. Have you ever thought that, just once, it would be nice to just be crazy? I mean at least then you can hear things in the night and know that, well, hey, it’s just your Crazy. Well I’m not crazy, so I looked around with a sigh and found a small fur ball with ratty pants squirming around in the reflection provided by my mirror. Not wanting to be rude, I figured I should probably try to help him out of the mirror until whatever had been slipped into my drink last night wore off.

Limelicker’s legs had still been sticking out of the mirror and so I took hold of his feet and gave them a solid tug, but no dice. The little guy squirmed more after I had grabbed him. As it turns out, mirrors work like quicksand, and the little guy was entirely gobbled up into the odd paradox world of mirrors, where he can still see me in the reflection of his mirror, and I can still see him in the reflection of mine. Some times…just some times…I wonder where it is that he got all those damn limes, but never more than the first time I saw him take one from his back pocket and begin to lick it all over. So Limelicker was standing in my mirror, licking a lime as gremlins named Limelicker are akin to do, and staring at me with a funny look.

As I’m sure most of you haven’t seen a gremlin, let me describe them to you, or at least, let me describe Limelicker as he’s the only on I have ever seen. First off, the most notable, is the fact that he doesn’t really have legs, just these funny looking little stubs jutting out of the inch long pant legs of his ratty pants. After that I realized that his eyes were huge, probably bigger than golf balls, it might have just been that they were too big for his tiny body, but either way they looked massive. His ears jutted from somewhere behind those giant orbs and they fanned out to about two inches each. Limelicker’s body was all fur, brown fur, the color of chocolate that has been in the sun for too long. He had tiny little arms with tiny little fingers jutting out of the ends – only three – and no hands to speak of. This final fact made it very interesting to watch him hold onto the lime and try to lick it all at once. Oh yes…did I mention his mouth was massive?

So here we are, this little creature and me, staring each other in the eyes. He’s licking a lime; I’m itching at my crotch and wondering when it was that they spiked my punch. I didn’t have punch last night, but I’m sure I had something that could have been spiked. Have you ever had your punch spiked? It’s not as hilarious as everyone may think, it’s actually kind of boring and there is a lot more peeing on yourself than most would expect. Limelicker growls after he is finished licking his lime and puts the citrus (or whatever the hell it is) back in his back pocket and begins hammering against the mirror from his side. By now I’m intrigued as hell as to what this thing is supposed to be and then I get it. Hanging from the back of the little guy’s ratty pants is a long white sock with a hole in it, the same exact sock I was unable to find two days ago. These things are the bastards that take all of our socks!

Well now I am thoroughly pissed, cause that was my favorite sock, so I begin to pound on the mirror too, shouting about how I want my damn sock back and if I don’t have it back in my drawer within the next three seconds I’m gonna break the mirror and use the pieces to cut the little bastard. At my shouting, Limelicker begins to shout too, but in some growly…gurgly…weird language thing. We’re both banging on the mirror, trying to get at each other when suddenly I swing a little too hard and knock a large crack into my damn closet door. When the gremlin sees that there is a crack in the mirror, he crawls up it (don’t ask me how, maybe their fingers are sticky?) and starts squeezing through it. I’m starting to get thoroughly confused and grossed out by the time the little bugger’s head pokes through a crack about a centimeter thin.

It takes Limelicker about sixteen seconds of twisting, churning, and shouting to get himself halfway out of the mirror. He’s taking swipes at me like crazy and I’m starting to think that he actually looks kind of funny sticking out of my closet door, so I grab the end of it and begin to slide it open and closed, irritating the hell out of the lil’ fella’. Unfortunately my shaking causes Limelicker to fall out of the mirror entirely and roll around in anger on my floor, trying to get himself up onto his stubby leg things. Before I can drop kick him, he bares his many razorblade looking teeth and attempts to jump at me, only now I am fully awake and he is no longer in my mirror, so it’s time for him to go away. Instead of getting a slam to my solar plexus by a creepy midget fur ball, I am covered with green dust that floats up into the air and slowly dissipates. So here I am, standing in my room, staring at the emptiness of my room and wondering what the fuck I just saw.

Two days later, my mom told me that I had to pay to have my mirror repaired, because I’m the one who broke it. Well, I start to think “Hey, if Limelicker can do it, so can I” and I try to crawl through the crack in my mirror the next time I’m alone in my room. Turns out that it worked and now I’m stuck in that good ol’ paradox that is mirror world. My mom got the damn thing repaired the day after and it wasn’t long before I was sitting in front of that same mirror and watching Limelicker running around my room and making faces at me. Yep, I’m trapped in a fucking mirror world with a gremlin making faces at me, but just wait till he finds out that one of his limes feel out of his ratty pocket and I am no holding it ransom.