Seeing Green, a short story.

Photo by Amit Lahav on Unsplash

For starters, the costume was absurd. It was simply absurd, and Cyrus didn’t even care about what Hannity had said. That is, he didn’t care about the cross-dressing aspect of it, or even whether or not certain pundits might or might not find it “sexy.” All he knew was that he had shown up to the K-Mart as promised at 8 am, ready to stand behind a folding table and hand out sample packs of M&Ms, and instead Laura had introduced him to this surly kid named Maxim and handed him a cardboard box stuffed with a lumpy mush of green polyester.

Too stunned to complain, Cyrus had slipped into the bulky costume, pushing his hands and feet through spandex rings terminating at artificially angular sneakers and gloves, while Maxim had somewhat clumsily secured the battery and turned on the fan.  While the world’s tiniest tornado buffeted Cyrus’ thinning hair, Laura had zipped up the costume from behind and concealed the zipper beneath velcro straps, while Cyrus felt himself slowly ballooning. Less than a minute later, he was no longer a tired-eyed 40-something man with a weak jaw, but Ms. Green herself, a lime-green disk, five feet in diameter, all the rough edges smoothed out, her drawn-on skeptical smile at odds with her come-hither lashes and svelte brows. Cyrus could see, thank God. He had a perspective of several degrees straight ahead, though he had no peripheral vision at all, and anyway, everything was slightly blurred through the corrugated mesh of Ms. Green’s eyes. Meanwhile, the fan’s motor was so loud that Cyrus could barely tell that Laura was talking.  He strained hard to hear.