The Bowling Alley

My Wife and daughter and I went down to the local bowling alley one night.  It was an absolute madhouse, very crowded.  At one point we left our lane for a minute to get something to eat, and we came back to find that someone else has taken our place while we were gone.  We had to move to another lane.  The only one available was the very last one down at the end along the wall which was painted with a black & white silhouette of a guy bowling against a background of light blue stripes.

There was a group of rowdy kids bowling on the next lane over.  They were a little too close for comfort.  They were horsing around, constantly crossing the line and getting in our way.  They were throwing the bowling balls so wildly and carelessly that I was afraid one of them was going to get loose and knock someone upside the head.  When it was my turn to bowl, a couple of them came over to me.  They wanted me to use their bowling ball.  It was a skull suspended in a transparent crystal that was cut into a rough cube shape.  I told them that a ball that shape wouldn't roll down the lane, but they insisted that it just had to be broken in.  The more it got used, the corners and flat edges would eventually get rounded into a nice smooth sphere.

I wasn't buying it.  I decided to go look for my own ball.  This search somehow led me out to the parking-lot.  It seemed that one of the bowling alley's regulars had died, and he had left his truck parked out in the lot with everything he owned in it.  His bowling buddies were picking through the stuff and dividing it up amongst themselves.  As I walked up, I noticed a bowling ball half-buried beneath some clothes in a cardboard box.  I asked if I could have it, and no one seemed to have any objections.  I pulled it out to have a look at it.  It was cream colored and decorated with the characters from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.  Hobbes was on one side; Calvin was on the other with his hand held out, perfectly matching the finger holes on the ball.  It looked pretty awesome.

So I headed back to our lane against the wall, but I when I got there my wife was all worked up.  She said that we had to leave right that minute.  I turned back and looked at the lane as she grabbed my arm and started pulling me to the door.  The boards were all broken up, and down at the end by the pins there was nothing but a pile of brick and dust.  I kept trying to ask my wife what happened, but she was in too big a hurry.  Once we were out into the parking-lot she relaxed and started laughing about what had happened, but she still wouldn't stop to explain and she still insisted that we needed to get out of there.

So she pulled me along by one hand as we hunted for our car, and I clutched my new bowling ball in the other hand.  I was trying to show it to her, but she wouldn't slow down to look at it.  She just kept laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along...and then I woke up, and I swear as sure as I live and breathe, that I was holding onto the top of my head with my thumb and my two forefingers.  Yeah, it took me a minute to figure it out too.