Princess Time Slut Visits Costco

Short fiction: A short story wherein our heroine discovers a phone

Princess Time Slut had to travel to the future 432 times before she was declared Queen of America. But she didn’t want to be a queen, so she told the media that she insisted on remaining a princess.

“Queens,” she told CNN, “get old. I shall not. You’ll see.” Everyone called her the Queen of America anyway.

Each time she visited the future, she gleaned important information, making adjustments to her life and other lives in her present time as needed until she was able to achieve dominion over all fifty states and territories, especially Canada, which she enjoyed for the soft orange glow of its beautiful spring wildfires. She was a little sad when the wildfire glows dimmed after she corrected the mistakes of her imbecilic predecessors.

Her first visit to the future occurred when she was nine. She and her friend Ramsey Totter were chasing her escaped pet hedgehog Myrtle through a drainage pipe on the edge of a cornfield near her house just outside Cadillac, Michigan.

She found herself trapped inside a vortex amidst all kinds of animated spirals, precisely the type you would expect to find yourself in if you were time-traveling inside a drainpipe. Princess Time Slut, who went by the name Pinky at the time, may have been only nine years old, but she was smart enough to know that the vortex she was in was taking her somewhere.

She wasn’t sure where. “Ramsey?” she called out. Ramsey wasn’t there. “Ramsey!” she tried again. After a few seconds of vortexing without an answer from Ramsey, she said, “shit,” even though she wasn’t supposed to say words like that yet.

Her mom said “shit” all the time, but it was usually immediately after some mumbled, angry words with her dad, who slurred most of his words, even in the morning.

After the vortex settled down, she found herself still in the pipe. “Ramsey?” she tried again. No answer. She began to crawl out but tore her jeans on a thin rebar, which hadn’t been there, she was sure, when she and Ramsey had crawled in. She noticed it after hearing her jeans rip at the knee. The rebar protruded through a rusty hole in the bottom of the pipe as if taunting her.

When she crawled out of the drainpipe, the cornfield was gone, replaced by a Costco. She seemed to be in a patch of grass next to a parking lot. She immediately knew she had time traveled, because what else could it be, but she didn’t know what a Costco was. She could tell it was a big store, so she ran toward the entrance to see if she could find some help.

Pinky (let’s just call her Pinky for now) was blocked at the store’s entrance by a stern matronly woman with bleached, mottled skin. Pinky had been told by her mother that she was a little of everything, so her skin looked different than almost everyone else in Cadillac. And quite a bit better, Pinky thought.

Her mother had said, “A true American. You have lots of Chippewa blood, a little Tejano, and a delicious smattering of Fulani. Then your dad added his Scottish blood, but nobody is perfect, sweetie, and that’s really my fault.” She never explained how, but Pinky figured it out later.

The stern woman at the store’s entrance demanded a card: “Where’s your card?” Just like that. But reasonably politely. Pinky smiled at that. It just so happened that she had stuffed a pack of playing cards into the back pocket of her jeans before she and Ramsey ran off to look for Myrtle because they liked to sit in the cornfield and play rummy.

Poking her tongue through the corner of her mouth, she pulled the pack out of her pocket with more trouble than she would have liked. She wondered which card the lady wanted, but since she wanted to guess, she didn’t ask. The lady looked like a two-of-clubs type of woman, so Pinky flipped through the cards until she found it.

When Pinky stretched her hand out with the two-of-clubs, the woman laughed with a big smile filled with two broken front teeth and a lot of other little grey ones. It made Pinky think of some of the bad horror movies Dad liked to watch late at night with that young waitress whenever Mom was working overseas for that NGO thing, whatever that was. Doctors without Borders or some such.

“Well, sweetie,” said the motley, heavy woman, who was dressed in dark blue polyester pants and a tight button-down print shirt covered with tiny red crucifixes. “I suppose your parents must be inside, right?”

Pinky nodded happily.

“You just go on in then. If you can’t find them, go to the front desk and the nice people there will call out for them, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Pinky, with her extended hand still holding the card.

“Oh, no, you just keep that, darlin’,” said the woman.

That was weird, but okay. So Pinky nodded again and walked inside to a clamoring, busy collection of people and noise. It was a cacophony! She had learned that word at school just that day.

There were more people than she had ever seen in one place, except for the time her dad took her to a Michigan football game and drove his old Ford pickup into a squad car on the way home, and then disappeared for a couple of years.

The sounds of the place were sensational. There was buzzing and beeping and clinging and clanging everywhere. It seemed like a little busy downtown inside a gymnasium as big as a football stadium. It was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen.

People were pushing huge shopping carts full of big boxes, small boxes, long boxes, short boxes, big plants, and even small trees. In front of her was a veritable city of shiny gadgets making all kinds of noises.

Huge flat TVs rose on long, white shelves. Their screens were so rich in color that she knew she could never watch her dad’s Sony Trinitron ever again, even though it was the best TV ever. Mom had called Dad “a worthless dipshit” when he bought it, but he still seemed to cherish it.

An elderly man was standing in front of a podium, tending a ceramic soup pot over what looked like a tiny stove burner on the podium’s flat top. Why is he cooking something in a store? Pinky wondered. The smell was wondrous. She dodged a few dozen people and their stuffed shopping carts to approach the man.

“Mister,” she asked him. “What year is it?”

“Oh my,” wheezed the elderly gentleman. “Aren’t you a silly thing? Here, try some gumbo.” He pointed to two perfect rows of thin white paper cups that reminded Pinky of the paper muffin cups her grandma sometimes filled with blueberry muffin mix. But these were smaller.

The cups were steaming, which she found odd. She had never heard of hot gum before, but she did love Big Chew bubblegum. Since this was the future, she thought it would be fun to try the strange concoction.

Her dad had once said, when he took her to the smelly place with all the naked dancing ladies, that life is an adventure, which she always took to heart. During this hot bubblegum adventure, she knew, she would not be thrown out like she had been with her dad at the smelly dancing place. There were lots of kids here, so she knew nobody would yell out, “No kids, creep!”

She snatched a little cup as if the elderly man had stolen it from her, then dropped its contents into her mouth, but it was like soup. She couldn’t find the center where the gum should be no matter how hard she searched with her tongue.

“This isn’t gum,” she complained to the man, who laughed.

“No, child, it’s gumBO.”

“Well, why’s it called gumbo if there’s no gum in it?” Pinky was a very logical girl.

The man scowled, which surprised her because he seemed nice. And he had given her gumbo, whatever that was. “Where are your parents?” he asked crossly.

Pinky shrugged and dashed off to the next attraction, which was the area with all the bright loud gadgets and big TVs.

She noticed a pretty woman showing a piece of plastic not much bigger than Pinky’s playing cards to a customer. Pinky cheerfully skipped her way to the woman, dodging two young men pushing a silver casket on a long flat wheeled cart.

That stopped her.

“Oh no!” she said to the men. “Who died?”

The men both laughed as they continued on their way. Behind the two men was another man with a set of golf clubs in his cart. He looked irritated at the men pushing the dead person. She was confused, but not enough to stress over it. This was a big place. Like a city. People were bound to die here.

She continued on to the pretty lady who had been showing the piece of plastic to the customer, but the customer was gone. Pinky approached cautiously because the piece of plastic seemed to have a little TV inside it, which was, of course, quite impossible.

“Can I see?” she asked the pretty lady.

“Well, honey, it’s just a phone. I’m sure your parents have something like it.”

“A phone?” She tried to inch up for a closer view. The woman was clutching the plastic like it was the most important thing on earth. Pinky shook her head and admonished the woman. “There’s no cord or nothin’.”

“No, of course not,” the woman said with a smile. Her smile was perfect, like the prettiest actress, with a set of teeth so white that Pinky wanted to take a picture of them and show them to her friends.

“I wish I could take a picture of your pretty smile,” said Pinky.

“Well you can with your phone if you like,” said the woman.

That made Pinky giggle. What a silly woman.

“You have a pretty smile, too,” said the nice lady. “Do you mind if I snap a picture of you?”

Pinky shrugged, not seeing any cameras nearby. “Sure.”

The lady raised her piece of plastic into the air and seemed to be pointing it at Pinky, who quickly wondered if the nice pretty lady was insane. Maybe it was some weird game of the future, like charades, where she was pretending the piece of plastic was a phone.

But then a startling thing happened. A wonderful, startling, amazing thing. The lady flipped the piece of plastic over in her hand and showed it to Pinky, and there was Pinky, with her mountain of dark, tightly curled hair and the smile that Ramsey always said reminded him of the inside of a Creamsicle. She never knew if that was supposed to be a compliment. She certainly did not have an orange face.

“Wow,” said Pinky, “What is this thing?”

The nice lady didn’t respond beyond a quizzical look.

After an awkward silence, the woman asked, “Oh, is there something in the photo background you don’t like?” The lady did something with her fingers on the device and showed Pinky the picture again. The background of customers and shopping carts full of toys, food, produce, and, in one cart, an electric piano, was replaced by a white background.

“Oh, no,” said Pinky, “I liked that stuff in the background.” The woman did something else with her fingers and showed the result to Pinky. The background was in the photo again.

Pinky wanted to explore more of this city/store, but she realized she only had a moment to think about how to implement a marvelous idea that popped into her head. Happy that she was near the entrance where the mottled lady still seemed to be collecting playing cards, she snatched the plastic device from the pretty lady’s hands and bounded toward the doors.

“Hey!” she thought she heard the lady yell, but it was hard to know because Pinky was scooting past a loud television set that was displaying a cartoon of a guy who looked like a sponge. She wanted to stop and watch, but a few people were pointing at her. So she kept moving.

She darted around a slow-moving lady who had piles of groceries in her cart, then nearly ran over a little kid pulling on the woman’s sleeve and crying about something.

There was a line of people at the door slowed down by an inspector of some sort, so she shot past them all and the inspector into the parking lot.

She shoved the device hard into her other back pocket, the one without the playing cards, because people running on TV shows always drop the thing that they are holding, which causes at least twenty more minutes of angst for the hero.

And she did consider herself a hero, even though her mom would be mad at her for swiping the lady’s toy. But this was important. It would change everything, she knew, although she didn’t quite yet know how.

She looked behind her, but nobody from the city/store was chasing her. She smiled as she approached the drainpipe. Of course, what were the chances of the time travel thingy that was inside it firing up again when she crawled back into the drainpipe? And taking her back to her own time?

But Pinky was not an oddsmaker. She was just a kid with a hunch, so she bent down to crawl through the drainpipe again.

But there was something blocking the entry. Not something. A hedgehog. Wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. “Whatever you do, don’t lose the phone!” said the hedgehog in a voice that sounded like a tape running at high speed. “And don’t tell anybody about it!” Then it disappeared into a million dark particles.

“Huh,” said Pinky to herself. “Cool. But I don’t have my own phone. Okay, whatever.” She crawled through the drainpipe, expecting nothing, but expecting everything, all at once.¹

She grabbed the rebar on another hunch, and the vortex returned.

“Pinky?” she heard the echo of Ramsey say as the vortex subsided. “You okay?”

Pinky, of course, didn’t know at that moment that Ramsey would, in future years, be known as Ramsey the Exalted Eunuch, at her behest. For now, he was just her friend Ramsey.

And so began the journey of Princess Time Slut toward her long reign as Queen of America. She retained the device “given” to her by the nice lady from the future. What she did with it is another tale.

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Notes:

Thanks for reading!

I posted this short story to the Ruminato Substack when I was setting it up Ruminato, so it didn’t get sent to subscribers. Apologies if you’ve seen it before. I adore Princess Time Slut, so if you’ve seen her before, check her out again. She’s awesome. Astute readers will recognize the hedgehog at the top of the page. He’s the fella you see at the end of most of my articles reminding you to restack my posts. :-)

This story has a strange background. Princess Time Slut is a character who gets redshirted (Star Trek style, not college sports style) in my novel, Psalm of Vampires. She kept tapping me on the shoulder, so I wrote this story about her, even though this is really a completely different character. Maybe. I think. I dunno, actually.

1. Easter egg hunting by any chance?