Jamal and the Whisper Fountain

"You want fries with that?"

Jamal turned to the man seated next to him, his hands in his lap, calmly stroking a box of Topps 88's.  His sad mountainous face was dusted in a light Cheeto glaze and he smelled of showerless days and sleepless Seattles.  The bus was double plus crowded, and the usual amount of crazies were dangling from the up-top hand rails like city-born jellies, waiting to crystalize in transit to the mall or the cell phone store.

"No thanks, I'm straight,"  Jamal responded politely.  It obviously hadn't occurred to the gentleman offering potato shards, but he was in fact on a bus and probably incapable of making or selling fry daddies or any of the other things he had offered to the people on the bus.

"Well, this is my stop," Jamal said, standing up to leave.

"You goin' to Whisper Fountain?" asked the Cheeto muncher, with a bit of Lance Bass in his throat.

Jamal debated answering him, but decided that his words would be meaningless and therefore should be saved for more deserving and more real human examples.  He quietly left, while the strange and stinky bus orphan continued to rattle off word mixers and verb particulates about the profound and apparently inescapable Whisper Mountain.

After stepping off the bus and into a small puddle of what might have been a street bird, Jamal decided he needed a new pair of foot leathers and possibly a mouth splash or too.  He headed towards the mall, knowing that they were the only ones in town known for their rapid yet tastefully pleasant mouth splashing and foot leathering.  He clutched his dollar sack excitedly and pranced the fuck on.

At the mall, babes and ugly ducks were wondering about, drooling over the newest hotnesses.  Children were everywhere, and Jamal was way not pleased.  Waves of sticky carmel hands and taffy legs shoved past him, each one followed by a galloping log-pile of shitty parent or barely legal guardian.  He ducked into the nearest mall alley to find some respite.

"Man, I don't even know what respite means -" his words stopped.  There, in the darkest of mall ally corner hideouts, was a disturbingly quiet and anguished looking fountain.  Suddenly all was silent.  Stillness and anti-calamity became Jamal's new brain.

The water, splooshing out from the scratchy tin urethra nozzles, was without sound.  The tinkles and splashes and other wet audio were no where.  Jamal's ears waited impatiently, getting hungrier and hungrier for noise burgers.  Nothing.  Nope.

Jamal started to panic.  Now, in the coldest time of mall seasons, mall winter, he sat alone in a withered and eerily silent alley.

A figure approached him, but then he realized he was just tripping the fuck out, and started trying to scream.  Nothing came out.  He had no more word powers.  His brain wasn't even making a sound.  He even tried to let out a warm ass warbler, but it turned out to be a hollow wind of blankness.  His panic was potent and edible by now, and his wishes of mouth delights and foot treats seemed further away than his biological parents.  His sadness hit him like a third grader, punching his stomach then kicking him in the dick.  With cleats.

Jamal's brain suddenly and all kinds of at once knew where he was, and with one final energy blaster he let out a faint and breathy "whisper fountain..."



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Jamal opened his eyes, alert and refreshed from his dream-coated whisper nap and brushed the crumbs from his lap.  His eyes were sticky and sleep tossled, his hair a nest for creatures that deal in dreams.  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, finally releasing a slow and sweat-soaked dustfart into the lower stratus of his surroundings.

He turned to the gentleman sitting next to him and asked, "you want fries with that?"