The Legend of Levi Gottman part II
Levi woke up one morning when he was about seventeen years old, to find his hair was fifteen inches longer than it was the night before. He still hadn’t connected the dots yet, as to why things seemed to randomly change all the time. He had fallen asleep with gum in his mouth the night before and choked to death around 3am.
He had a date with Anna that night, and didn’t want to look so scruffy. He went straight to the bathroom and brushed his teeth, shaved, and then cut his hair back to it’s normal style.
When he went downstairs for breakfast, he noticed his mom had a crew cut and his dad now had a braid that reached past his ass. “what happened to you, scrub-head?” his dad quipped as soon as he walked in. “Are you tuning into some kind of hippy now?”. Levi was caught completely off guard, and stammered, grasping for a response. “I didn’t uh…your hair is uhh…I never”. “well, that’s a reassuring answer” his dad interrupted. “I think it looks cute honey” his mom said in his defense '“I’m just surprised Anna was okay with you cutting off all your hair” she added. “she doesn’t know yet. I cut it for our date tonight” Levi said as his dad tried not to spit up his coffee. “Are you trying to get her to break up with you?” his dad finally coughed out. “oh honey, don’t listen to your father, Anna’s crazy about you, and if she does break up with you she doesn’t deserve to be with you” his mom chimed in as his dad handed him a wad of cash. ” Here” he said “Go get some hair extensions scrub-head, you look like a girl.”.
Levi’s parents continued to harass him about his hair all the way through breakfast. At one point Levi choked on a piece of waffle before coughing it back up. When it hit the plate he looked up and saw a giant painting of a matador hanging on the wall that had never been there before.
After breakfast, Levi left to meet up with Dan. They started cutting grass together three years ago, and were now maintaining up to twenty three yards a week. they had three on the schedule for today, and the first one was was about an hour away. Levi would die several thousand times on the way to that first yard of the day.
By this time Levi was starting to associate these random and unexplainable changes around him with the “close calls” he was experiencing. He had it mostly backwards though. He thought that these changes were causing his close calls, but today would be the day that it was just too obvious for him to not realize what was really happening.
Levi and Dan were working on the last yard of the day. They were about half done when Levi noticed Dan was about to walk over a snake in the grass. Levi ran over to warn him, but when he opened his mouth a honey bee flew in. The bee stung him in the back of the throat causing it to immediately swell shut. After about a minute of struggling for air, Levi thought he saw the snake morph into a puppy before his eyes right before blacking out.
When Levi woke back up, Suzanne the lady who owned the lawn they were cutting was holding a plastic tube against his arm. Levi jumped to his feet, his heart pounding out of his chest, and spit a lifeless bee out onto the ground. “Your throat was swollen so I gave you an adrenaline shot” he heard Suzanne call out. Dan looked like he just saw a ghost and was cursing Levi out for “scaring him like that”. The puppy started pawing at Levi excitedly. Levi looked down at the puppy and remembered seeing it morph from a snake.
He kicked it.
It was an uncontrollable reflex that he felt bad for immediately. He felt especially bad when Suzanne shot him a nasty look and ran off after the puppy crying “OH NO! MR.NIBBLES! COME BACK!”
It was later that night when he was thinking about the snake-dog again that Levi realized that he definitely saw the morph happen after his vision began to fade. He thought back and all the changes seemed to happen after some life threatening incident or near miss. His head was whirling and a pit formed in his gut. “I can’t die” he said quietly to himself. Saying it out loud made Levi feel powerful and silly at the same time. What made him feel sick was that he still didn’t know why he couldn’t die, how long this “power” would last, or why these events were sometimes accompanied by seemingly random changes in his surroundings.