Dandelion Wine

1
It was Thanksgiving and my dad had invited a ton of people to our house, friends and lots of distant relatives I'd never met. A queue began to form outside the doorway as people were waiting to enter and it snaked around the house. Eventually so much time passed that people sat down at tables in the line and were bringing their food outside to eat. Later on in the night I sat down next to my dad and expressed how ridiculous I thought it was to have invited so many people and how irritated I was. There was a plastic jug of pumpkin egg nog on his table which advertised it contained MSG. I began complaining that it was probably because he bought it at some cheap corporate supermarket.

Later that night when most people had left I found my cousins. Dad and Uncle Tony were stacking leftovers in his van to take home. I went inside and saw Tori and Lexy cleaning up around the place which had become like a hotel lobby. Objects were appearing where Lexy was mopping and I knew she was altering physical reality but at first I thought the objects were just 2D pictures and it was like an optical illusion. I went up to her and touched a giant cucumber she'd just placed on the floor and I realized the objects were tangible. She and Tori were smiling wryly and they wouldn't tell me how they did it. Stasia came over and they all looked at each other knowingly and she said, "You want to know how?" So I followed her outside.

It was daytime again and Stasia and I were far away from the house. She ran off the road down through a field of clover toward the edge of a forest. Through some trees was a small house and an abandoned-looking ice cream truck with twigs and branches poking into the windows. Along the side of the truck mixed in among pictures of ice cream were odd drawings, including one of a clown. I started to walk toward the house but Stasia didn't follow, and when I looked back a man was inside the truck talking and laughing with her. He drove away but a copy of the truck stayed behind and Stasia told me to get behind the wheel. I told her I didn't know how to drive.

Suddenly we were in the house and I was playing some driving game on a small TV on the coffee table in front of us. The house too seemed abandoned in that it was missing doors and glass from the windows, but it didn't seem unoccupied. There was graffiti on the wall and colorful toyish objects all over the place. Some of the objects were suspended in space or seemed plastic and virtual. I suddenly realized, comparing the graphics in the video game to the objects around me, that the house was like a physical collection of virtual data.

I started asking my cousin all kinds of questions and she spoke about "polypolyvore" or "polyvore-d." It was a plant or a drug you could eat to immerse yourself fully into the reality of the house. I knew I was only seeing fractions of everything that was there. I was incredibly excited and in awe of this discovery. I felt my whole life had changed. Stasia then said something about getting stoned at a stag party there once and I felt frustrated that she didn't appreciate everything the drug or the house had to offer.