BY ZEBULON CORK
Ronnie DeCracko was enjoying a nice, light brunch when he heard a knock at the door.
Frowning, Ronnie got up from his delicious brunch, took one last long whiff of his beautiful bacon, his sweet, sweet cantaloupe, his light, fluffy pancakes and his Venus flytrap smoothie, and walked over to the door.
When he opened it, he became even more confused: standing on the other side of his front door was a delivery guy, decked in the UPS service’s finest company uniform, a uniform that had surely just been ironed that very morning.
“What the…?” Ronnie said, his eyebrows descending, his pencil moustache quivering, “what is the meaning of this?”
“You’re Ronnie DeCracko?” the delivery guy said, looking down at his clipboard.
“Yes,” Ronnie said, “but if you’d just let me speak, I’d tell you that I don’t recall ordering anything—”
“Oh, but you did,” the delivery guy said, and when he said this he began to chuckle, softly at first but slowly crescendoing until he was down on his hands and knees, pounding the sidewalk, laughing so hard he could barely breathe.
“Uh…sir?” Ronnie said, standing over the delivery guy, growing more and more concerned as he watched the UPS guy laugh harder and harder, until the guy was literally convulsing on the ground in front of him, his muscles spasming, his throat clenching in an everlasting, drawn-out laugh.
Soon, the guy’s face turned red as a tomato. Then, his eyes bulged, nearly popping out of their sockets, and he clutched at his throat, desperately trying to find some way to breathe as he laughed.
But he couldn’t. Soon, the delivery guy was dead.
No sooner had the delivery guy died than another delivery guy had hopped out of the UPS van that was pulled over to Ronnie’s side of the street.
“Oh, great,” the other guy, who looked a lot like if Matthew McConaughey and Shrek had a secret love child, said, “Tony’s dead! This is going to be a nightmare down at HR!”
Ronnie just stood on his doorstep, feeling more and more awkward as the other delivery guy came up Ronnie’s sidewalk, then took the now-dead Tony by the hand and began dragging him back toward the UPS truck.
“Uh…” Ronnie said, “if I may ask…why was Tony even here to begin with?”
The other guy caught Ronnie’s eye, gaped for a moment…then began to laugh himself. He got that same deep chuckle, a little laugh that began deep in the belly, but then began to spread and spread as whatever it was these delivery guys found so funny grew more and more intensely hilarious…
All of a sudden, the other delivery guy slapped himself.
“No,” he said, “I won’t let what happened to Tony happen to me. I won’t let the hilarity of the situation overcome me.”
“The hilarity of what situation?” Ronnie said, growing more and more irritated, “What are you talking about?”
The other delivery guy shook his head. “Your order! Your order! Your ludicrous, ridiculous order! The order you placed just three days past at ilovecoleslaw.com!”
Ronnie was gobsmacked. “What?!” he said, “I never made an order at ilovecoleslaw.com!”
“Oh, but I’m afraid you did,” the other guy said, still dragging Tony’s lifeless corpse down Ronnie’s sidewalk, “and any minute now the truck’s going to pull in and…yep, here it comes!”
Before Ronnie could react, a semi truck rolled down their street, and then parked itself across Ronnie’s beautiful, painstakingly-manicured lawn, leaving deep tire tracks across its formerly-glorious surface.
“Hey!” Ronnie said, running up to the cab of the truck now, “Hey! What in the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
The truck driver, a fat, greasy man in a cap and overalls, just stared at Ronnie. When Ronnie saw those eyes…saw those terrible, horrible orbs that sat in that trucker’s head…he stopped cold.
Those eyes had no pupils. They had no irises. They were just whites. Nothing but blank whiteness resided in that trucker’s eyes.
And then, the eyes began to glow.
“Special delivery for Ronnie DeCracko!” the trucker boomed in his voice of thunder, “74,000 bags of Saudi Arabia’s finest coleslaw!”
Ronnie sputtered and blathered as the back of the truck’s trailer suddenly clanged open, and a legion of men in black ski masks began to come out, massive bags of coleslaw thrown over their shoulders. They came out of the truck, their piercing white eyes glowing just like the truck driver’s were, and began advancing on Ronnie.
“Where do you want the coleslaw, bub?” one of them asked.
“I…I…I never ordered any coleslaw!” Ronnie said, “there must be some mistake!”
“No mistake!” the truck driver boomed, “You, Ronnie DeCracko, ordered 74,000 bags of the finest coleslaw Saudi Arabia can offer…and now you’re going to take the coleslaw into your home and you’re going to enjoy it!!!”
Ronnie tried to put his foot down – tried to send these demented delivery guys home – but it was no use. He stood firm at the door, but the delivery guys walked right through Ronnie, phasing through him just like those two dudes from the second Matrix movie.
The coleslaw they carried, however, was all too solid, and once they were inside they began opening up the bags and dumping sliced lettuce, cabbage and carrots all over Ronnie’s house.
“What the…?” Ronnie sputtered again, “no! No! You can’t do that! I don’t want this coleslaw I never ordered just dumped all over my house!”
But there was nothing he could do. Whether it had actually been him or not, the order had been placed, and now there was nothing that could stop it.
Masked delivery guy after masked delivery guy came in and dumped bag after bag of coleslaw onto Ronnie’s living room floor…and then, when they were done in the living room, they began to dump it in the kitchen, in the basement, in the bathroom…
Beyond terrified, beyond enraged, Ronnie ran out to confront the truck driver…but when he tried to cross the threshold of his front door, tried to leave and go out into the big wide world once more…
He couldn’t.
An invisible force field kept him trapped inside his house.
Trapped with the coleslaw.
The delivery guys, who were still streaming into the house and dumping the coleslaw, just phased through the already-accumulating piles of coleslaw like they were nothing. But Ronnie couldn’t. He was trapped. Trapped like a mouse in a mousetrap. Trapped like a Republican husband having been dragged by his wife and daughter to the Democratic National Convention.
Trapped forever.
“50 bags down,” Ronnie heard the truck driver boom from outside, “only 73,950 to go!” And then the driver laughed, and that booming, echoing laugh was the last thing Ronnie heard as he dropped to his knees, buries his head in his hands and began the slow, agonizing descent into madness.
THE END
