Chapter 12: Waking Up (Again)

We got there eventually

Sep 05, 2023

Esmerelda nervously followed the sound of her mother’s voice to the kitchen, where she found Delores sitting at the table across from a man with kind eyes, a rugged beard, shaggy hair, and tattoos peeking out from beneath the cuffs of his rumpled flannel shirt. A man she had never expected to see again.

“I know you and everybody else told me that I needed to let this go, but I couldn’t,” said Delores. “I finally found someone who agrees with me that your grandmother’s death was suspicious, and thinks your dad going crazy and falling out of a helicopter might be connected.”

The stranger stood up, held out his hand, and offered a wry, knowing smile.

“The name’s Clams. Bill Clams. Lake Nipples Bugle. It’s nice to see you again, Esmerelda Poppingcorn.”

And now… back to our story!

“Esmerelda?”…

She heard the words like whispers on the wind — soft and gentle like the breeze of a summer’s eve, or a refreshing douche of the same name.

“Esmerelda, please wake up…”

Her eyelashes began to flutter faintly; a reflexive reaction she tried to shut down, but couldn’t. Her body wanted to rejoin reality, but her brain could only remember the gorgeous, bearded face of Bill Clams standing in her mother’s kitchen. The feelings of shock, embarrassment and unbridled horniness were enough to send her brain into overdrive until it popped and fizzled.

“Esmerelda, open your eyes…”

Her eyes parted slightly; a thick layer of eye crusties shattering like a slab of concrete beneath a nonsexual jackhammer. A blinding white light flooded her resplendent retinas. She was ready to go with god.

“That’s it baby… open those slits wider…”

The blurriness of heaven sharpened into view. The sky was a stippled chalky white; the scent of synthetic citrus and bleach filled the air. She was dressed in a flowy blue sheath, much like the Virgin Mary herself, while a choir of angels sang a chorus of “beep… beep… beep…”

This wasn’t heaven. This was Mac Muffins Memorial Hospital.

“You’re awake! My sweet baby, you’re awake!”

Delores Poppingcorn stood over her daughter’s body, a stream of tears splashing on her little girl’s face like salty rain. Esmerelda wearily propped herself up on her shaky elbows as the world around her came into focus. There were needles in her arms and tubes taped to her chest, and she was now sporting a full, fluffy bush. Turning to the window she could see the tops of the nut trees that dotted the hospital lawn, and beyond the vast expanse of Lake Nipples, full of little men in canoes and thousands of migratory birds.

“What’s going on?” she muttered. “The lake is too cold in February for recreational boating…”

“Oh, it’s not February anymore,” Delores said. “It’s September. You’ve been in a coma for 18 months.”

Esmerelda’s blood ran colder than Dippin’ Dots.

“Wha… what do you mean I’ve been in a coma for 18 months?”

“It was the strangest thing. I was just about to tell you the exciting new intel I got about your grandmother’s mysterious death, but the moment you met my ruggedly handsome investigativer partner Bill Clams, you collapsed. We tried waking you up, but after a few hours of slapping and dousing you with ice water we brought you here.”

“And it’s a good thing they did,” said a deep, gravelly voice from the doorway. “Had they waited another three or four hours, you’d probably be dead.”

Esmerelda was still gripped with terror, confusion, hunger, and a thousand other conflicting feelings, but seeing Dr. Branford Muffins walk into her room gave her a temporary sense of ease. Not only was he the chief of medicine at the hospital his great-great grandfather founded, but he was also the mentor — and now, father-in-law — of her best friend. Surely, nothing bad or remotely suspicious happened to her while she was under his devoted care.

“What happened to me? What did I miss?”

“We think the shock of your father’s death caused a part of your brain to explode, but there’s no need to worry. It’s grown back now,” said Dr. Bran.

“And you didn’t miss much while you were asleep,” added Delores. “In fact, almost absolutely nothing has changed since you collapsed, outside of OSHA firing you for missing 18 months of work.”

Esmerelda’s heart sank like a chicken full of gravel that had been tossed into the sea. Before she returned to Lake Nipples, nothing mattered more to her than her high-flying career as one of the top five OSHA inspectors in the country. If not for that, who was she, and what would she become? Just another thirtysomething woman living in her great-great-grandparents’ house helping her mother solve a series of seemingly unrelated murders and delving into Lake Nipple’s mysterious past while grappling with an insatiable hunger for hot, studly peen?

Peen, she quizzically thought to herself, her brain starting to bring her hazy memories into focus. Oh my god, I was supposed to meet Randall.

“Where’s my phone?!” Esmerelda screamed, leaping out of bed and frantically scouring the room.

“It’s right here,” said Delores, reaching beneath the bed to grab the plastic sack of her daughter’s personal effects. “I put it on silent so it wouldn’t annoy the nurses. You have 8,789 unread text messages.”

Her body started shaking uncontrollably as a staccato squeaking noise began escaping from her knotted throat. She’d missed their date. She’d missed a lot of things. And she had no idea where to start catching up.

“I know you have no idea where to start catching up,” said Delores, “so let’s get you dressed and back to the house so we can pick up exactly where we left off as if nothing unusual happened at all.”

Esmerelda allowed her mother to wrap an arm around her waist; her gait still wobbly, the scars on her soul beginning to burn. She loved her mother, but to say their relationship was fraught was to put it kindly. Delores’ obsession with her own mother’s death had made her a terrible one; her short fuse and emotional absence turning her daughter’s heart into a meat locker of mommy issues. A new break in the case could break their tenuous bond for good, regardless of the fact that Esmerelda had scarfed a doughnut off Bill Clams’ big ol’ dick.

Will Delores blow her dead mother’s cold case wide open? Will Esmerelda forgive OSHA for its betrayal? Is Randall still down to bone? Find out next week in another titilating trip to the shores of Lake Nipples.