The Popper

It was an early, tired morning when the Popper finally looked fate in the eye and dared to defy it.

Popper took a deep breath, straightened up and knocked on the door.  There was a long silence and then faint foot steps.

He could hear the sexy click of heels on the hardwood floor behind the door. His heart raced as he knew she drew closer. He kept his hands in his pockets, tracing his wedding band with his left thumb.

The door swung open. Plain Jane stepped gingerly out of the door frame, looking confused and darting here eyes everywhere but at the Popper himself. "Hello?" she said, "is anyone there?"

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Oops, looks like Aayesha had too many windows open... ;)

Plain Jane, or PJ as she was often called, turned on her heel, mumbling about "those damn kids next door," and went inside to fix herself a cup of tea. She promised herself she would think no more on it, and put herself to work focusing exclusively on the magazine she had bought from the store earlier that day, mindlessly fiddling with the small pendant on her necklace. 

...suddenly she felt dizzy, the room began to spin, everything swirled around her and the ceiling inverted and before she knew it she was no longer standing in the room at all, she was someplace else entirely and the Popper was standing there with her, stone-faced, or perhaps just stoned. She stood there in this forest, this dense, arboreal forest, holding the pendant in hr hand. The Pendant. It must have been the pendant. She had found it in a shop on Portebello road and the old woman who sold it to her said it had some kind of charm on it but of course she just laughed it off. Now it seemed true, but could it be true? Was she dreaming? Was she tripping? Was this real. There in front of them was a hookah-smoking-caterpillar, who sat atop a rather large toadstool looking rather content with himself and oblivious to the world around him. He took a puff of his pipe and gazed over at her. At first he barely acknowledged them both but then something caught his eye and he coughed up a lungful of smoke (do caterpillars even have lungs?) (yes! Caterpillars have evolved lungs for hemocyte gas exchange!) Anyway, he coughed and spat and he looked at her bug-eyed, I mean caterpillar-eyed and he said, "My pendant! My Aunt Rose's pendant!"

[Mom] "That's what they used to tell me..."
[Me - narrator] "Here it is... " (I look out the window and see the leaves blowing in the wind. It is twilight in Mass and the sky is tremendous. It looks exactly like a Maxfield Parrish painting... a dog barks)
[Mom] "Please use this money wisely..."
[narrator] "And that's where she lost me... all I can think about now is trust..."

The next day...

[Narrator] "The interview is today at 3"
[Mom] "How's your hair?" :)

And so the TV flickered in and out of the dialogue between a mother and her daughter. The TV was situated right by the large caterpillar, a heaping bowl of greasy popcorn on top of it.

Coughing, the caterpillar reached over for a handful of popcorn, but before shoving the buttery mess into his mouth, he paused. He eyed the pendant around Plain Jane's neck; suddenly his eyes burned red and he started flinging handfuls of popcorn at Plain Jane, yelling, "Thief! Murderer! You killed my Aunt Rose and stole her pendant! Thief! Murderer!" 

The Popper was not amused. He hated having to play Guardian Angel *all* the time - for once he was hoping to be treated just like another human being. Alas. He figured this little trip to another dimension was over, snapped his fingers, and returned both he and Plain Jane back to her apartment. He sighed and walked back home, resigned to his fate.