Oddball Trailer Park
A short story by Cardcaptor Mars

Weirdness isn’t exactly ephemeral here. And by ‘here’, I mean the trailer park that lies dead smack in the middle of Iowa.  People make all kinds of redneck jokes about trailer parks, which makes me wonder how they’d react to mine.  My little moving home town has more insane asylum-bound members than rednecks.

I don’t see a lot of the stuff my they do in the daytime (I’m a high school janitor, and believe me, those kids are bizarre in themselves), but at night it’s pretty much a Dinner Theatre every friggin’ day.  For instance, take the kid who lives in the trailer two blocks down.  I remember my wife and me enjoying a dinner on a warm summer evening when said kid comes speeding down the street wearing halibut for skates.  I’m not kidding.  Halibut skates.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Anyway, my wife gets up and calls out to the kid.  He stops without sliding or anything.  It wasn’t until then I realized the fish skates he wore had these bone-like things for wheels.

“Why do you have halibut on your feet?” my wife asked him.

“Oh, these?” the kid answered as if wearing fish on his feet were perfectly normal.  “These are my new skates.”

“Oh my!  Where did you get them?”

“Where you always find fish, ma’am.”

“The lake?”

“Sure, if you wanna go ten miles for them.  I got mine at the market.”

“I see, but how do you skate in them?”

“Just take out all the insides.  No, wait, everything except the bones.  You’re not going to get anywhere without the bones.  Anyway, cut four gashes on one of the sides for the wheels.  The wheels themselves can be anything; I used regular ones for mine.  Attach the sides of the wheels to the holes with duct tape, but be sure not to do so in a way that will make the wheels stick.  These things make very good skates, but you can only use them for about a day.  They’ll stink like shit if you go any longer than that.”

And with that, he and his homemade skates were off.  I looked at my wife from the porch.  We silently agreed never to eat any more halibut.

Another time a whole bunch of my neighbor’s family members (herself included) wandered into the pond at the park and banged on lit Tiki torches with buttery spoons.  They started chanting what sounded like an African song, but later I found out it was Norwegian.  She told me all of this about a week after the incident.  I guess she was so late in telling everyone what happened because they had spent the rest of that week in the pond digging for lost spoons, torches and costumes.

**********************************

Well, guess what we have now?  FBI agents.  FBI-friggin’-agents.  I’m not sure what they’re here for, but to be honest, it’s getting kind of freaky.  After I got back from school I worked up the nerve to ask them what the problem was.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where a meth lab is hidden here, would you?” one of them asks.  Wow, something normal for a change.

“Nothing I’ve heard about,” I reply, shaking my head.  The agent leans closer to my face.

“Sir, are you--”

“Agent Hobokson!”

Another policeman runs up to us from down the street.  He nods to me in a friendly matter and turns to the agent to continue his report.

“We found something at the trailer about a block from here.  I think you need to take a look at this.”

“Thank you.  Thanks for your help, sir.” He follows the officer down the block, with me hot on his tail.  Usually I wouldn’t follow policemen if it wasn’t my business, but I couldn’t miss something like this!  I follow the officers to the house the one mentioned.  I recognize the exterior, but I didn’t know the guy who lives there.  I can’t believe my luck, an actual criminal in my neighborhood!  Stuff normal people go through!  It doesn’t get much better than this.

“I don’t have anything illegal!” the guy living in the house was hollering.  “Haven’t you people heard of freedom from unnecessary housing?!”

“We’re not going to stay very long,” the officer next to him says.  “Besides, I don’t think you’ll be arrested for anything.”

One of the officers hands Agent Hobokson a bag of white powder.  He was about to hand it to another officer (a CSI person I suppose) when the same officer who assured my neighbor he wasn’t going to be arrested runs up to him and whispers something in his ear.  The agent looks at him and raises an eyebrow, which the officer returns with a nod.  Hobokson opens the bag and takes a bit of the white stuff with his fingers.  He sticks his tongue out and licks a bit of it.  He takes his time in tasting it, then looks up to smile at my neighbor.

“Sugar, huh?”

“That’s what I tried to tell you people!  Geez!”  Throwing his arms at the FBI, he goes back inside with a grumble and slams the door.

“Sorry,” Agent Hobokson chuckled.  “Come on everyone.  I think we’re done for the day.”

He spots me and gives me a small salute.  I return his gesture and start to head home.  Sugar?  Sugar?!  I should have known.  I shake my head in disappointment and stop in the middle of the street.  Now that fall has arrived, the sun is starting to set earlier.  Right now, it’s barely a flake over the trees.  I stare at it for God knows how long.  I start to wonder how people outside of this trailer park would react if they saw everyone.  What would they say if they got even a little glimpse at how my neighbors act in their everyday lives?  Would they think it’s strange and call the funny farms on us?  Or would they, too, think we were normal?

The police cars pass by me without brushing me at all.  It’s as if I was a ghost and they didn’t even know I was there.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  Either way, I don’t think it would have been too surprising.