Anna Kolczynska

2:22

You have been driving around aimlessly for what feels like hours. 

“I have shit to do tomorrow,” you told your mother over the phone the night prior.

“Then get up early and get it done before the storm,” she said. 

How pointless, you thought, for there were always storms. 

Yet, you listened to her and now you’re passing from city, to town, to orange grove, to swamp, back to town in every direction possible, all in hopes of getting those mindless errands fulfilled. Today, having driven around in giant squares and circles, you have seen it all—so many billboards for the damn tourist attractions that you’re internally questioning pretty much everything about monopolies and capitalism, and so much of the same geography and landscape that you’re beginning to forget the reasons you went for this drive in the first place. 

Central Florida has a few hills, and your Subaru just conquered the steepest of them. Your mother used to tell you on long drives that these were the beginnings of the Appalachian Mountains. Your father would argue with her that they were the end of them. 

From your spot in the back seat, you never bothered getting involved, nor did you mention that the Appalachians technically start-slash-end in Georgia, according to most everyone. 

Despite being in a populated area, your radio continues to fade in and out, like it did in the more rural areas of your journey. Soon, the interruptions of the crappy Top 40 music become more frequent as you pass the tiny white church with the red door and enter another stretch of undeveloped land and cross over a shimmering, eerily still lake. 

There are lots of lakes here, many of them named after dead old women. 

More abandoned churches, small ranch homes, and tents selling farm fresh produce are your only views along the way, and you begin to embrace the sameness—not unlike you did when you first moved to this sweltering state. 

Driving for God knows how much longer, you thirst and make a last minute decision to turn left at the first sight of buildings after undeveloped land had sprawled along your window.

At the near end of a strip mall stands a solitary building. It is painted a faded indigo, decorated with turrets more suited for a cheap excuse for an amusement park than a random town’s random store. 

You remember these gift shops well, despite never having stepped foot in one. The weird, but nice, but quiet boy who sat next to you in Algebra II talked about them whenever he decided to speak. He told you his dad owned them all—an inheritance he’d gained, though he never told you when, or how, or why. You always wondered how far back these shabby stores went and how far into the future they’d last. 

When you step out, it’s drizzling, the raindrops sticking to your eyeglass lenses. 

Seabreeze collision, probably—an almost daily summer occurrence in which storms off the Gulf and storms off the Atlantic embrace violently somewhere over the center of the state’s peninsula, leading to an onslaught of severe thunderstorm warnings. 

Looking towards the horizon in some direction that you can’t quite gather in your post-drive weariness—but you suppose is slightly north—you see the orange glow of the theme park lights permeating the dark clouds. There they are. The clouds seem to be gathering, and growing darker with each fleeting moment, so you enter the gift shop. 

The store is practically empty—no one to browse its dusty, unending aisles of knock-off Orange Bird merchandise—save for a small family of tourists speaking in hushed voices, an obviously (and ironically) lost tour guide in a green soccer jersey with the flag of Brazil sticking out of his backpack as a marker, and a group of local pre-teens mucking about with nothing else better to do. 

(When you were a pre-teen with nothing else better to do, you mucked about on the streets, sucking on candy cigars with your friends around a rusty green utility box, or you waltzed dangerously close to the retention pond on the outskirts of the far-end of the neighborhood, where no one else dared to roam. Then came the incident with the boy from the magnet school down the road, and no one mucked or waltzed about again, let alone said his name.) 

“Storm’s getting bad,” the manager semi-shouts to those roaming his territory. “I think it’s best we all lock up and stay here til that there funnel cloud passes over.” 

You look out across the street at the dark sky beyond the colorfully-painted abandoned condos on their rotting stilts and trees decorated with Spanish Moss that line the small lake also named after another dead old woman. On the horizon, the clouds have gathered themselves into the shape of a thin, wiry thing reminiscent of the limbs of the daddy-long-legs that perpetually lives in your parents’ mailbox. 

The television atop the shelf behind the counter continues to blare a red alert to take shelter immediately, but you know this place and days like these. It’s nothing you can’t handle. 

“I’m just here for a Tahitian Treat,” you say, throwing down a bill, “and then I’m hitting the road.” 

“I don’t think so,” grumbles a voice behind you. The manager has inexplicably moved from behind the counter to the front doors in the blink of an eye, placing a large piece of plywood between the door handles before locking the doors and jiggling the deadbolt shut. 

“Alright, everyone, get to the back. It’s the safest,” he barks. 

People—even the kids—listen to his commanding tone without question and abandon their various activities. As the crowd shuffles into the stockroom, you look over your shoulder and notice the dark funnel cloud has widened by a magnitude, now making a touchdown and veering onto a path on which the gift shop is dead center. 

You know you’re dead meat when you hear the train coming, your Uncle Tom explained wisely as you hid in the bathroom from hurricane winds the summer before fourth grade. 

You tried to shake it off. You’d heard plenty of train whistles and engines since then and survived—a few of them from storms, and fewer from actual commuter rail cars. Most of the ones you heard, however, echoed across silent swamps at midnight or among the dewy green of golf courses at sunrise and had no discernible source. A ghost train, Tom had called them. The whistle that wants to warn you. 

Memories of your long-gone uncle are the last thoughts to cross your mind before you hear the loud noise erupt from the spinning clouds now quickly approaching. Covering your ears instinctively, you stumble into the dim room—you’re the last one in—and bump into a box as someone slams the door behind you. You quickly scout out a spot away from anything precarious or tall, then crouch down with the others, just waiting, hands splayed out atop your head to protect your skull from whatever debris may rain down. 

The sounds of this train howl like no other ghost train you’ve heard before, and just as the building begins to creak and your ears start to pop, you take one final breath and close your eyes. 

Maybe Tom was right. Maybe you’ll finally get to tell him that.

Instead, you notice yourself inhaling sharply and coming to again. When you open your eyes, things have settled. A needling feeling deep in your gut tells you that something very bad has happened to you and that a very long time has passed, but when you check yourself for injuries, there are none. When you look at the cracked clock on the concrete wall of the shabby stockroom, it has only been two minutes and twenty-two seconds since the gates of hell opened up in the sky above Magic Castle. 

Someone opens the door back into the storefront, and things look exactly the same as they did two minutes and twenty-two seconds ago. You push past the tourists and even the kids—all of whom appear too unbothered—to get a glimpse at the outside world through the just-as-dirty but undamaged floor-to-ceiling windows. 

There are cars on the highway, driving as carelessly as ever. The mourning doves and egrets mingle in and around the mossy trees. The sky is a crisp, clear blue without any sort of cloud in sight. 

Just across the highway, and around the bend from the condos, cars wrap around in the Chick-Fil-A drive-through. The line is probably a quarter mile long, as if it’s lunch hour on an average Wednesday and not mere minutes after a terrifying early morning thunderstorm. Conversations carry on again. The television plays a cheery slapstick cartoon that cuts to a theme park commercial. 

You need to get out. 

You return to your Subaru, which is covered in lovebugs—some creeping up the windshield in a singular fashion, others bonded together and making the climb as a pair. They seem to have come out of nowhere. 

As you open the driver’s side door and settle into your seat, you push down the uneasiness in your stomach as best you can, gulping, breathing in the damp, lukewarm air. As you pull out of the gift shop parking lot, kids emerge with Orange Bird figures and the manager waves gleefully through the window. 

Turning away from town and veering onto the old highway, you don’t look back—you can’t—instead focusing on the steady stream of vehicles ahead and the endless orange trees dotting the distance. 

You realize too late that you forgot your Tahitian Treat.

Anna Kolczynska is a poet and writer from the East Coast of the United States. She has always been told she has too busy a mind, but has channeled that energy into eccentric poems and stories about moments and feelings that matter. Her previous publishing credits include Roi Fainéant Press, Exist Otherwise, and Messy Misfits Club.

Anna Kolczynska

2:22

You have been driving around aimlessly for what feels like hours. 

“I have shit to do tomorrow,” you told your mother over the phone the night prior.

“Then get up early and get it done before the storm,” she said. 

How pointless, you thought, for there were always storms. 

Yet, you listened to her and now you’re passing from city, to town, to orange grove, to swamp, back to town in every direction possible, all in hopes of getting those mindless errands fulfilled. Today, having driven around in giant squares and circles, you have seen it all—so many billboards for the damn tourist attractions that you’re internally questioning pretty much everything about monopolies and capitalism, and so much of the same geography and landscape that you’re beginning to forget the reasons you went for this drive in the first place. 

Central Florida has a few hills, and your Subaru just conquered the steepest of them. Your mother used to tell you on long drives that these were the beginnings of the Appalachian Mountains. Your father would argue with her that they were the end of them. 

From your spot in the back seat, you never bothered getting involved, nor did you mention that the Appalachians technically start-slash-end in Georgia, according to most everyone. 

Despite being in a populated area, your radio continues to fade in and out, like it did in the more rural areas of your journey. Soon, the interruptions of the crappy Top 40 music become more frequent as you pass the tiny white church with the red door and enter another stretch of undeveloped land and cross over a shimmering, eerily still lake. 

There are lots of lakes here, many of them named after dead old women. 

More abandoned churches, small ranch homes, and tents selling farm fresh produce are your only views along the way, and you begin to embrace the sameness—not unlike you did when you first moved to this sweltering state. 

Driving for God knows how much longer, you thirst and make a last minute decision to turn left at the first sight of buildings after undeveloped land had sprawled along your window.

At the near end of a strip mall stands a solitary building. It is painted a faded indigo, decorated with turrets more suited for a cheap excuse for an amusement park than a random town’s random store. 

You remember these gift shops well, despite never having stepped foot in one. The weird, but nice, but quiet boy who sat next to you in Algebra II talked about them whenever he decided to speak. He told you his dad owned them all—an inheritance he’d gained, though he never told you when, or how, or why. You always wondered how far back these shabby stores went and how far into the future they’d last. 

When you step out, it’s drizzling, the raindrops sticking to your eyeglass lenses. 

Seabreeze collision, probably—an almost daily summer occurrence in which storms off the Gulf and storms off the Atlantic embrace violently somewhere over the center of the state’s peninsula, leading to an onslaught of severe thunderstorm warnings. 

Looking towards the horizon in some direction that you can’t quite gather in your post-drive weariness—but you suppose is slightly north—you see the orange glow of the theme park lights permeating the dark clouds. There they are. The clouds seem to be gathering, and growing darker with each fleeting moment, so you enter the gift shop. 

The store is practically empty—no one to browse its dusty, unending aisles of knock-off Orange Bird merchandise—save for a small family of tourists speaking in hushed voices, an obviously (and ironically) lost tour guide in a green soccer jersey with the flag of Brazil sticking out of his backpack as a marker, and a group of local pre-teens mucking about with nothing else better to do. 

(When you were a pre-teen with nothing else better to do, you mucked about on the streets, sucking on candy cigars with your friends around a rusty green utility box, or you waltzed dangerously close to the retention pond on the outskirts of the far-end of the neighborhood, where no one else dared to roam. Then came the incident with the boy from the magnet school down the road, and no one mucked or waltzed about again, let alone said his name.) 

“Storm’s getting bad,” the manager semi-shouts to those roaming his territory. “I think it’s best we all lock up and stay here til that there funnel cloud passes over.” 

You look out across the street at the dark sky beyond the colorfully-painted abandoned condos on their rotting stilts and trees decorated with Spanish Moss that line the small lake also named after another dead old woman. On the horizon, the clouds have gathered themselves into the shape of a thin, wiry thing reminiscent of the limbs of the daddy-long-legs that perpetually lives in your parents’ mailbox. 

The television atop the shelf behind the counter continues to blare a red alert to take shelter immediately, but you know this place and days like these. It’s nothing you can’t handle. 

“I’m just here for a Tahitian Treat,” you say, throwing down a bill, “and then I’m hitting the road.” 

“I don’t think so,” grumbles a voice behind you. The manager has inexplicably moved from behind the counter to the front doors in the blink of an eye, placing a large piece of plywood between the door handles before locking the doors and jiggling the deadbolt shut. 

“Alright, everyone, get to the back. It’s the safest,” he barks. 

People—even the kids—listen to his commanding tone without question and abandon their various activities. As the crowd shuffles into the stockroom, you look over your shoulder and notice the dark funnel cloud has widened by a magnitude, now making a touchdown and veering onto a path on which the gift shop is dead center. 

You know you’re dead meat when you hear the train coming, your Uncle Tom explained wisely as you hid in the bathroom from hurricane winds the summer before fourth grade. 

You tried to shake it off. You’d heard plenty of train whistles and engines since then and survived—a few of them from storms, and fewer from actual commuter rail cars. Most of the ones you heard, however, echoed across silent swamps at midnight or among the dewy green of golf courses at sunrise and had no discernible source. A ghost train, Tom had called them. The whistle that wants to warn you. 

Memories of your long-gone uncle are the last thoughts to cross your mind before you hear the loud noise erupt from the spinning clouds now quickly approaching. Covering your ears instinctively, you stumble into the dim room—you’re the last one in—and bump into a box as someone slams the door behind you. You quickly scout out a spot away from anything precarious or tall, then crouch down with the others, just waiting, hands splayed out atop your head to protect your skull from whatever debris may rain down. 

The sounds of this train howl like no other ghost train you’ve heard before, and just as the building begins to creak and your ears start to pop, you take one final breath and close your eyes. 

Maybe Tom was right. Maybe you’ll finally get to tell him that.

Instead, you notice yourself inhaling sharply and coming to again. When you open your eyes, things have settled. A needling feeling deep in your gut tells you that something very bad has happened to you and that a very long time has passed, but when you check yourself for injuries, there are none. When you look at the cracked clock on the concrete wall of the shabby stockroom, it has only been two minutes and twenty-two seconds since the gates of hell opened up in the sky above Magic Castle. 

Someone opens the door back into the storefront, and things look exactly the same as they did two minutes and twenty-two seconds ago. You push past the tourists and even the kids—all of whom appear too unbothered—to get a glimpse at the outside world through the just-as-dirty but undamaged floor-to-ceiling windows. 

There are cars on the highway, driving as carelessly as ever. The mourning doves and egrets mingle in and around the mossy trees. The sky is a crisp, clear blue without any sort of cloud in sight. 

Just across the highway, and around the bend from the condos, cars wrap around in the Chick-Fil-A drive-through. The line is probably a quarter mile long, as if it’s lunch hour on an average Wednesday and not mere minutes after a terrifying early morning thunderstorm. Conversations carry on again. The television plays a cheery slapstick cartoon that cuts to a theme park commercial. 

You need to get out. 

You return to your Subaru, which is covered in lovebugs—some creeping up the windshield in a singular fashion, others bonded together and making the climb as a pair. They seem to have come out of nowhere. 

As you open the driver’s side door and settle into your seat, you push down the uneasiness in your stomach as best you can, gulping, breathing in the damp, lukewarm air. As you pull out of the gift shop parking lot, kids emerge with Orange Bird figures and the manager waves gleefully through the window. 

Turning away from town and veering onto the old highway, you don’t look back—you can’t—instead focusing on the steady stream of vehicles ahead and the endless orange trees dotting the distance. 

You realize too late that you forgot your Tahitian Treat.

Anna Kolczynska is a poet and writer from the East Coast of the United States. She has always been told she has too busy a mind, but has channeled that energy into eccentric poems and stories about moments and feelings that matter. Her previous publishing credits include Roi Fainéant Press, Exist Otherwise, and Messy Misfits Club.

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