Neurotic

“Hello!” she screamed, startling people from their various perches and places around the fountain in the center of the town square. One man was so alarmed that he fell ass-over-elbows into the water behind him. Danielle was giggling and prancing around the area much like one of the lost boys. One would assume she was only twelve, but she was really in her early thirties.

“Oh boy!” Dani, as she preferred to be called, looked wide-eyed at the person in the fountain. She had an enormous ear-to-ear smile perfectly plastered on her face. “Swim time!” She bellowed and proceeded to jump into the fountain herself. She ran around the poor man drenching him even more than his initial fall into the fountain.

“Danielle!” He yelled as he lifted his soaked body out of the water, “what are you doing?”

“My name is DANI!” She screamed back in protest, “Dani, Dani, Dani…” stomping her feet in the water each time she said her name. “Why can no one remember this? Do I need a name tag? Yes! That’s it. I need a name tag that reads Dani, in big sparkly letters, then everyone will know.” She continued on this train of thought out loud, but no one was listening anymore.

“Everyone already knows you Dani,” the man in the fountain responded, exacerbated and giving extra emphasis to her shortened name as he said it. “Why are you here at the fountain?”

“Oh, that’s simple,” she said back as she tapped her index finger to her nose. She continued in this gesture for a minute, not offering any more dialog.

“Dani!” The man screamed.

“Hah, had an itch and now I got it. You ever wonder where unicorns go when they fly off into the sky?”

The man stood aghast, watching Danielle, now spinning in pirouettes not paying attention to anything in particular. He began to rub his forehead as the inevitable headache was forming near his temples. “First off, unicorns don’t exist. Secondly, if they did exist, they wouldn’t have wings to fly with. That was Pegasus from Greek mythology.”

“Oh yeah? What would you know?”

“I’m a professor at the local university! Of course I would know…”

“What if your Pegasus and a unicorn had a baby, then it would be a flying baby unicorn, duh!” She interjected before he could finish. “Aaaaaaaannnnndddd… if monkeys could do arithmetic they would know that one plus one plus one plus one minus two is, how you know where to go when the sun goes down,” she finished the statement right behind his ear.

The man whipped around to explain how completely nonsensical all this was, but as he came to rest in her direction, she was already far away skipping down the street singing slightly out of tune and startling birds perched on the electrical wires nearby. The man soothingly rubbed his temples. “One day I’ll educate her… one day.”

-V-