by John Cosper

Wally couldn't believe his eyes. The place was dimly lit and full of smoke, but the sight before him was unmistakable. There, at a tiny table beneath a lamp, sat his beloved Judith with an alligator.

Wally hated alligators. Ever since childhood, he had been picked on and teased by the neighborhood alligators, the price he paid for being the child of humans who had fought hard to make something of themselves. His father's business, building high speed park benches, had afforded him the luxury of a swamp home on an extravagant neighborhood, the only humans in a subdivision full of reptiles. Wally was sent to the best school, Booger Academy, but he was forever an outcast. Wally was an average student with no artistic talents who was just too slow to play sports, even Backgammon.

Wally ordered a tall glass of syrup as he contemplated his next move. How could Judith, of all people, leave him for an alligator? It wasn't as if she were leaving Wally for her own kind. She was a tree sloth! And yet now he watched in agony as her furry hands - the hands that had caressed him on so many lonely nights - were dropping chocolate covered kidney stones into the mouth of an alligator.

Wally couldn't take it any more. He walked out of the diner and down the avenue, past a muskrat polka band playing a dirge for the astronauts that had recently died in their dangerous expedition to the Sun, towards the place he swore he would never go: Bastian's All-Night Bazooka Store on Handley Street.

"Psst." Wally turned, looking for the voice that had just made the universal, covert, "come hither" sound. He saw a tall, gangly man step out of the dark shadows, a man so skinny he could have easily hidden behind one of the lampposts that lined this darkened street. "Wally Portnoy?" the tall man said.

"Yes, it is I," said Wally. "Who asks me this?"

"You don't know me," said the tall man. "I am a surrealist, and I have come to deliver you."

"Deliver me?" said Wally.

"My dear boy," said the surrealist, "This is going to be hard for you to accept. But perhaps something sweet will make the medicine go down."

With deft sleight of hand, the surrealist produced an onion, seemingly out of thin air. He handed it to Wally, who cracked its skin and drank of its sweet, succulent juices. "This has always been my favorite candy," he said.

"I know," said the surrealist. "And it has always given me joy to see thou enjoy it so."

"Who are you?" Wally asked again.

"I am your maker," said the tall man. "I created you one night at my typewriter."

"What is," said Wally, "A typewriter?"

"Well, in my world we call it a typewriter. Here in your world it is called a nicolerichie."

"Ah," said Wally. "Your world is full of strange words."

"No, truly," said the surrealist, "It is your world that is rich in oddities. But having grown up in such a world, things that I would deem odd, you deem normal."

"You speak in great riddles," said Wally. "Do you know any that have a chicken?"

"Wally, there is little time to waste," said the surrealist. "Soon your beloved Judith will be by with the alligator, and you will be driven into a rage."

Wally's face turned puce with conceit. "How do you know this?"

"I created you," said the surrealist. "And the world around you. But once begun, your life took a course that is fated to end…" The surrealist trailed off before concluding. "Well, it ends rather nastily."

"Does the alligator's blood spill?"

"Yes," said the surrealist. "But so does yours. Blue and pensive as the desert sands."

Wally looked at his hands, imagining the blue liquid pulsing through his veins gushing forth like a sandstorm. "But I do not wish to die. Only to see him die."

"And thus have I come to deliver thee," said the surrealist. "I know the alligator doth prick your broken lungs madly, but you must not obliterate him."

Wally thought about this a moment, watching a turle fly by. Down the street he saw an alligator stroll by with his date, a sloth, at his side. Was it his Judith and her beau? He could not tell. Perchance, this was the fate he had been spared, the murder of innocents.

"No, Wally," said the surrealist. "You must not obliterate him." It was as if the thin man could read his mind.

"What do you want then?" said Wally. "Am I to go on suffering?"

"You need not suffer," said the surrealist. "I will heal you. But you must ask to be mended."

"Ask whom?" said Wally.

"Me," said the surrealist.

"And just who are you?"

The surrealist smiled. "I am he apart from which you are nothing."

A black cat croaked as it hopped across the street. The muskrat polka band down the road could be heard singing a catchy tune about the Great Pizza War. All this passed by the broken-lunged human, standing before a soft spoken, ridiculously tall stranger who had offered him an inexplicable, yet irresistible offer.

Wally looked over at the All-Night Bazooka Store. A Tyson 187 was on clearance. It would be enough. But was it enough for Wally?