Outside his cold, damp closet, Anon sprung out with his generic, yet dry-cleaned, formal black tuxedo with a dapper white bow to spicen up his life for once (because Anon likes to be more than just generic). With his feet forgotten to be covered, Anon walked to his front door, opened it, and skipped outside his plain old home. It was his box: a giant, non-cardboard white box with a roof that contrasted it so well. It was like his face. No, his face wasn’t a good contrast, but rather, it was green. A nice, great hue of green. However, the black question mark that he always saw in the mirror always overlapped his green face. He couldn’t see well with the question mark plastered on his face; it blocked some of his vision, and it made his nose very itchy. Fortunately, man had created a high quality cream that would reduce his unbearable itch, yet, with the cream plastered on his face like he layered himself with a whole bottle of sunscreen, he couldn’t help but feel… sticky.
Despite his stickiness, he frolicked down the path towards the street, where his plain old car was parked just right. Yes, rightly, with his tires pointed in the wrong direction. He sighed. His vision did it again. He didn’t blame himself for his question mark, but rather he blamed the question mark itself. It was a demon that decided to make his life so much harder. Forget taxes, question marks: they are Satan’s little helpers.
Twiddling his itty bitty toes, Anon stepped onto the street, walked towards the driver side of his generic car, and before he opened his car door with his magnificent, yet ordinary car key, he looked both ways to make sure he didn’t get his green self or his car door knocked straight into oblivion. He’d rather be a walking green hue than a splattered green pancake.
After opening the car door, and putting his car key into the ignition, he quietly pondered about his green self for about five long seconds. He needed to think about what he was going to do with himself for the day. His job was merely existing for an ad company that really liked his green skin. They promoted him often, putting him as a tagline for their latest green apparel. No, they weren’t called “Green”, that was too generic for Anon. They even said to him that they didn’t like generic ideas. So they named it Green Day, which was definitely not a band at the time. Thankful that his company didn’t get a copyright strike, he had journeyed forth, and most of the time it was in his car.
However, today was different. He didn’t need to journey to the company’s headquarters. It wasn’t green enough. So, he decided that he needed to go jogging in a suit. So, as he turned the key, he looked forth, and with one of his non-covered feet, he slowly eased his way into traffic. Slowly.
Surely enough, he gained a lane. Gained it so hard. The guy to his left, who was whiter than Casper the Friendly Ghost gave him a hearty thumbs up for his marvelous effort. Anon returned the gesture, but half-way through giving the guy a thumbs up, he forgot that he didn’t like being pretentious, so he also added a fair wink, because that’s what being pretentious isn’t. They don’t wink at people, they flash their bling that may be full of gold (or fool's gold if they are faking) and possibly other expensive metals and doohickeys to show their status. Winking was not an option in a pretentious person’s case.
As him and Casper drove in their separate cars, Anon remembered that night previous, where he dreamt a dream about a pony. Yes, a pony. No, it didn’t have a long face nor a face of God, instead, it had a face like him: a black question mark covering part of his eyeball, a naturally beautiful green hue for fur, and, unfortunately, a mane that looked like a whole series of unfortunate events hit it. Those unfortunate events were unknown to Anon, but he did not care (shrugging like someone noticed him), the world could’ve made that pony an oxen and he would’ve felt the same way.
So he drove like a mad man with the will to escape those unfortunate events. Unfortunately, a cop down the road did not like his agenda.
An agenda that did not have sirens.
Anon turned around and saw those flashing red and blue lights. He saw them well. He was very angry to the point of wanting to shove that pony he dreamed of into a ravine where random species would tickle him to the point of death. What a sorry way to die, Anon thought, gripping his wheel tightly while pulling off a stellar right turn onto a busy six-lane freeway. He didn’t like random species nor sirens with the intention to throw him into a cold, damp prison that was not his closet. He wanted to be free, like the freeway, only not concrete nor generic.
So he drove off the freeway--wait, what?
“HOLY SHIT THAT WASN’T THE RAMP TO ROUTE 80!” Anon shouted, while screaming like a woman who just had her midlife crisis and her period at the same time. He thought he knew what a ramp was, but instead, he collided with a random barrier that he misinterpreted as an off-ramp due to his damn question mark. If only he knew that his life may end due to not understanding the point of ‘staying on the road’.
With his eyes wide open, Anon watched himself descend onto another concrete slab, before--
That’s all he saw. The rest of the world looked like his closet without a light on: black.
Anon felt like shit. No, wait, that’s too vulgar. Retry again.
Anon felt like he was put into a blender and cut into several tiny pieces.
Much better.
He had just endured the crash of his life, or so he thought, touching the cloud that he was floating on--wait, cloud?
Anon suddenly shrieked like a school girl. He did not realize that he could lay his green self on clouds. All he remembered was being in a car, missing the exit that did not exist (at least, in reality), and careening straight into a slab of certain death. He must’ve died because there was no way he could be sitting on a cloud right now.
And he was right. He was so right.
The cloud was actually a white slab too. For some reason, it was puffy like a cloud and felt like a cloud, that is, if Anon knew how a cloud felt because certainly being pinned on a bed with his possible mate he had imagined in his fantasies towering over him was just like it, but unlike any cloud he thought of, it was solid. It didn’t put him straight to the Earth, nor did it decide to fling his life into dismay.
Charming, he thought, before discarding that word for a better one because he wasn’t pretentious. He touched the cloud again.
“Amazing,” Anon muttered. He stepped off the cloud and landed on a green pasture where--
“WHAT THE HECK?” shouted something behind him.
Anon’s reaction was so bad that it looked like someone turned him absolutely Frozen. He stood there with an expression of wrinkled surprise, that is, his question mark turned into an exclamation point. His vision was free momentarily; seeing the world in twenty-twenty looked like high definition porn to him, but that was not the main point. The point was that he was being watched and heard by someone he did not know.
That alone almost made him shart a million brown bricks.
Turning rather slowly to the voice’s location, Anon thought about the owner. Was he or she nice? Were they not going to eat him? Was the world going to turn inside out and swallow him whole? What was going to happen? And yet, a weird thought also joined the collective, one that decided to make him turn faster. That thought… was weird. It was so weird, that he decided to share it to the voice.
“Are you going to bang me fast or slow?” Anon asked as he laid his eyes on…
...a large grey diamond dog with a questionable, yet fierce gaze on its face. The dog growled viciously at him as it stared directly at his eyes.
Anon decided that it was time to eat. Reason: he forgot to eat breakfast and he liked the taste of dog.
“Breakfast served to me fresh?” Anon said with a twinkle in his eyes. He gazed at the dog and showed his pearly whites. “I like the taste of dogs…”
In seconds, that dog’s face turned into a sudden expression of fear. It was, as if, the dog said “Oh shit, I’m boned” and began to remember the bone he buried twenty feet from his location. Instead of gathering himself to the bone to at least have one great last memory of it, he stood still, frozen, like Anon did but without the question mark turning into an exclamation point. It bothered Anon because that dog did not understand the great truth of proper grammar. Anon did not like failed grammar nor bad storytelling, so Anon pounced on him, pinning the poor dog to the plentiful green grass beneath their feet and paws. The dog groaned, and within seconds, that question mark decided to become a period.
Anon really wanted to punch that period into an exclamation point. So Anon did what Anon really wanted; he needed food. So, the dog was the perfect applicant. He slowly took a bite of the dog’s ear.
It moaned. Loudly.
That shocked Anon right out of his appetite.
“What the…” Anon attempted to say with the ear still in his teeth’s grasp. “Did you just moan?”
The dog nodded anxiously and barked. “Again!”
Suddenly, Anon felt violated.
Unpinning the dog, he stood to full height and stared down at his once-to-be prey. “You were getting off to my appetite?”
The dog raised his brow. “You’re not into that sort of thing, pony?”
Anon was flabbergasted. The damn dog called him a pony. Is this dog two-faced, Anon questioned, his mark on his face returning to the question mark again, which made his vision worse. He sighed. “No, and I am Anon. I am not a pony.”
The dog tilted his head. “Not. A. Pony?” The dog’s eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. “Not a pony!”
Anon watched the dog’s tail wag at one-hundred and fifty-five miles an hour. If that dog took flight with just his tail, Anon would’ve been amazed. He would’ve been more amazed than that cloud that he laid on, but there was no use calling everything amazing now. He either was dead, dreaming but alive in some sort of coma, or downright dreaming back at his house where he did nothing for the entire day. Figures, he thought, just as productive as sitting in a room where all the latest cameras flashed like a firework display at his direction. Ads.
Anon sighed. “Why are you excited by me not being a pony?”
The dog barked again, before he spoke, “Because ponies are lame. They don’t like gems!” The dog growled. “The only one that did. She was... “
Anon saw the dog shiver. “What was she?”
The dog looked at Anon with the eyes of death. “The worst. Pony. Ever. Created.”
Suddenly, fireworks exploded in the distance. The dog jumped and took cover behind Anon while Anon stared at them. He marveled at their bright colors. He liked them a lot. “Where are those coming from?” Anon asked to nobody in particular.
That nobody in particular decided to be the dog, who barked politely, “Where those ponies live!”
Anon eyed the dog. “No way!” he said, shocked. Suddenly, he saw the world again. It was like nature was having a model session and he was the only guy there to sate its eyeballing desire. Focusing on everything that was green, he continued, “It must be great living there.”
The dog growled. “What do you mean, great?”
“If they shoot off fireworks like that, I might as well join them.” Another firework went off, shaking the Earth beneath them. “Holy shit, that sounded like a bomb.”
The dog quaked by his feet. “I don’t like bombs!”
Anon attempted to his move his legs in an attempt to get the dog off his uncovered feet. “You’re scared of fireworks?”
The dog whimpered. “All of us do! We. Hate. Fireworks!”
Those periods are what Anon hated most, but he couldn’t help but feel sorry for the pup. In fact…
“Why don’t we go investigate them?”
The dog suddenly took flight. “Are you kidding, Anon?” the dog asked, his period morphing into a giant question mark that even covered his ears. “That’s. Not. Good! Ponies. They. Don’t like us!”
Anon wanted to tear his ears off because of the dog’s poor grammar. “Have you ever asked them?”
The dog… suddenly hit the ground again. “No.”
Anon picked the dog up and smiled, while his mark decided to turn into a kawaii emoji (Anon hated this mark too). “Then let’s go find out!” Anon said, before walking steadfast on the conveniently placed path towards the firework display. Fido, as Anon thought, naming his pet with glee spread on his face, would like this idea. Even if he questioned it, Anon would know where Anon was currently at, and most of all…
“Say, do you know a good joint I could get some meat at?”
The dog stopped squirming and growled. “If you let me down, I’ll show you.”
Anon laughed. “Not until we figure this out.” Fido growled. “Oh stop it, Fido, we’ll all be free as soon as we get some answers.” Anon gently rubbed Fido’s ear. “If you behave, I’ll bite your ear again, and you’ll see if the ponies (or whatever they are) hate you.”
Fido yipped and groaned. “All right. Anon wins. We’ll.... behave.”
Anon smiled and patted Fido on his head. “Good boy, Fido!”
Fido growled. “My name is Fred!”
Anon patted Fido’s head once again. “Nonsense, no one names their dog Fred!” Anon said with a grin. “That’s so generic!”
