Hazy Daze

There was a new sign out in front of the chocolate shop. That shouldn't have been a big deal, but Emma hadn't realized until she saw the hand-painted sandwich board on the sidewalk just how accustomed she'd become to the blessedly routine life in Hansondale. Whole months had gone by without a single change to the Main Street storefronts (well, the only street, really--everything off of Main was just houses) and Emma had grown accustomed to making the same stops in the same order every week when she went into down for supplies, and seeing the same people in the same places doing the same things. It was... comforting. Soothing. Emma was surprised to find out that she liked it that way.

Not that the sign was exactly ominous. On the contrary, it was a little silly; Maisie King had done a good job with it, but seeing the shakily hand-lettered 'HAZY DAZE!!' written over a wobbly black-and-white spiral made Emma snicker a little even before she got to the bottom and saw, 'You Won't Be Able To Resist These Bargains!' Emma didn't really understand why Maisie thought she needed hypnosis to sell her handmade chocolates, but she could talk about it with the older woman over a few coconut creams.

Emma started to go inside, but stopped dead when she saw a badly-printed sign on the door that said, 'HAZEE DAZE!!' over a painfully obvious clip-art spiral. Below the squiggly, eye-bruising logo, Emma saw more squiggly, eye-bruising text. 'July 15-21!! Mesmerizing deals!! You won't be able to stop yourself!!', the sign said, in a font that managed to somehow look too big and too small at the same time.

Emma winced, trying to unpick the different text effects that went into the mess and failing. It wasn't that Emma needed more work--she got enough business from her online clients to keep her graphic design company busy almost every day of the week. But she had a certain amount of professional pride, and seeing someone abuse Photoshop that badly made her twitch just a little bit. She pushed the door open and went inside, quietly resolving to maybe talk to Maisie about at least putting the same number of Es and Ys on each version of the sign.

Thankfully, the interior of Maisie's 'Maison du Chocolaterie' hadn't changed much. Apart from a stack of 'HAZEY DAYZ!!' pamphlets on the counter, it still looked just as comfortable and familiar as ever, with the chocolates arranged behind the counter in a pattern Emma knew by stomach as well as by heart. "Morning!" Maisie said from behind the counter, gesturing over to the pile of leaflets. "Getting excited for Hazy Daze yet?" She grinned with a twinkle in her storm-gray eyes that belied her crow's feet and graying hair. Maisie might be getting into her fifties, but Emma hoped she had half that energy in twenty years' time.

Even so, she couldn't help rolling her eyes a little bit at the older woman's transparent hucksterism. "What even is Hazy Daze?" she asked, smiling to soften the impact of her words. "Like, it's a sale, I get that, but..." She realized too late that she'd walked right into Maisie's trap, as the older woman triumphantly snatched up a brochure and thrust it at her with the speed of a pouncing mountain lion.

"Not just a sale, the sale!" Maisie crowed, as Emma reluctantly accepted the proffered leaflet. "Every store in town joins in for Hazy Daze, all the way up and down Main! There's tables on the sidewalk with extra-special deals, free goodies just for stopping by, and all sorts of surprises you won't even believe!" She winked. "Between you and me, it's mostly for the tourists, but I bet you'll get a kick out of it too."

Emma flushed a little, more than a tiny bit gratified that Maisie wasn't lumping her in with all the campers and fishermen who drove through Hansondale on their way from the Twin Cities to Big Sandy Lake. She'd somehow thought it would take longer to be accepted--she'd only bought her little cottage ten months ago, but it seemed like surviving a Minnesota winter qualified her as an authentic local. (And deservedly so. Emma had slept under so many layers of blankets she thought they'd need a Saint Bernard to find her come spring.)

"Now you just take that and read up on all my bargains," Maisie continued, seemingly oblivious to Emma's blushes, "and don't forget to grab everyone else's pamphlets too. Hazy Daze starts early, and the best deals get snapped up quick--you'll want to know where to go to get what you really want! Speaking of... I've got your usual assortment wrapped up and ready for you. Did you want a couple of extra coconut creams for the walk home?"

Emma's eyes sparkled with conspiratorial excitement as she said, "You know me too well, Miss Maisie."

When she got home, Emma was almost surprised to notice that she still had the pamphlet--she had only taken it to be polite, and it had slipped her mind almost as soon as she stuffed it into the bag with her purchases. Dutifully, she opened it up to at least take a look and see what magnificent bargains Maisie was cooking up, but the text was so misaligned that her eyes crossed trying to read it. She didn't know whether it was a printer's error, or whether Maisie had done more experimenting with font effects to try to make every single word 'pop', but every word looked squiggly and out-of-focus and overlaid onto itself in at least three other colors.

She held the leaflet at arm's length and unfocused her eyes a little, hoping that maybe she could get the text to resolve the way that she used to do with the Magic Eye pictures at the mall as a kid, but... nope. Squiggles. Squiggles that could have meant anything, from 'you are a happy shopper' to 'yeah, have a horny shower'. Emma wondered if Maisie had spent money on these, or if she'd just printed them herself. She hoped it was the latter--if someone had charged Maisie for these incomprehensible messes, they should pay back every cent and a little bit extra. Emma would be ashamed to have her name on something like this.

Then again, if she did, probably nobody would ever be able to read it. She crumpled up the pamphlet and threw it in the trash.

It must have bugged her more than she realized, though, because she had the most bizarre dreams about it that night. She dreamed that Maisie came over to her house and woke her up, saying, "I need you to redo the leaflets for Hazy Daze, sweetie. It's got to be done now, before the tourists start coming again." And bleary-eyed, Emma stumbled out of her bed and staggered over to her computer without even putting on any clothes, pulling up a new file in Photoshop and getting to work.

But Maisie had all these weird, impossible demands, pointing to the screen and telling her things like, "The spiral has to spin, Emmy. Can you make it spin for me?" And Emma tried to explain to her that the spiral couldn't spin, because they were making a printed document that would wind up as ink on paper and ink couldn't move like that, but Maisie just said, "Oh, sure you can! It's Alt-F20," and leaned in to press a button on the keyboard. And suddenly the spiral was spinning, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger until it seemed to be larger than the entire screen.

And then Maisie was dictating the text of the brochure to her, saying things like, "It has to say, 'You'll love our great bargains', and then inside that, put, 'You won't even notice succumbing to our control'," and somehow Emma was typing and then retyping so that both sets of words appeared on the same line, jumbled and twisted and warped together into a single sentence. And Emma kept shaking her head, trying to tell Maisie that it was going to come out hideous again just like the original, but Maisie just smiled and said, "It has to look like the original, honey. I want the original. I just want you to do it."

And Emma shook her head slowly from side to side, trying to deny it, but the spiral was so big now that it felt like it was engulfing her whole world, and all she could hear was Maisie's voice, booming and distorted, telling her that the new pamphlet was just perfect. Emma wouldn't even notice the difference. She wouldn't notice anything. "This dream is just your brain recalibrating, darling. You saw too much, too fast, and your mind is overflowing with it all. Don't worry. When you wake up, you won't even notice that you've changed. It'll all seem so silly to you..."

And Emma scrambled away from the computer, still naked, and dove into the trash looking for the leaflet. It seemed like she was never going to find it at first, there were so many discarded and crumpled ideas for logos and broadsheets and new marketing campaigns in there, but she finally managed to pull it out and take a look at it. And in the dream, she could read every single word perfectly. Her eyes widened in shock and horror, scanning down each and every line individually, somehow understanding each and every word without knowing at all what she was actually reading. The way you sometimes did in dreams. She knew what it said, but she didn't know what she knew. She just knew that it was... monstrous.

But strangely hot. Emma realized that she was playing with her pussy, her fingers sinking into her slick folds without any appreciable resistance until she was panting with arousal. She was clutching the pamphlet, staring at it and masturbating intensely, and somehow that seemed to make perfect sense to her. It was the only reasonable thing to do. She had to keep reading, and she had to keep plunging her dripping fingers deep into her wet, hungry cunt. Was Maisie watching? She felt a sudden, intense wave of embarrassment that entwined with her arousal and wouldn't let go.

Then, suddenly and without explanation, the spiral was back. It looked so much bigger than before, and Emma suddenly realized she must have forgotten to turn off the monitor and it had gotten out of control while she was distracted by her helpless masturbation. The spinning disc surrounded her like she was inside it, so that it was just her and the leaflet and the endless pulsing swirl that drew her into inescapable bliss, and she somehow knew that she would never find her way out of it again. She was trapped here, forever, and as soon as she came the spiral was going to slip inside her through her pussy and hollow out her brain forever. But... but she couldn't stop. She didn't want to stop. She wanted to cum, she wanted so badly to cum and let the spiral into her cunt and into her mind and... and...

And all around her, she could hear Maisie's voice, slowed down into a garbled moan, telling her, "Don't worry, sweetie, this is all just a dream. Just a dream. Just. A. Dream. Jusssst... a... dreeeeeeaaaaaaaaammmm..."

Emma woke up flushed and shaking, pulling her hand away from between her thighs. She looked around wildly, convinced she was going to see Maisie in the room with her... but of course it was just a dream. Just like she dreamed it was. Maisie wasn't going to come over in the middle of the night to make her do naked graphic design, the pamphlet didn't have secret CIA mind control texts hidden in it, and... and... she tried to sum up all of the other impossible nonsense, and failed. It was just a stupid, silly dream. Time to forget it and go back to sleep. Time to... forget... Emma's eyes slipped shut again. She began to snore softly. When she woke up in the morning, she'd forgotten the dream even happened.

She didn't notice the pamphlet sitting on her bedside table.

*****

Emma opened the door with her elbow, dropping her packages almost as soon as she got through the door. She looked down to realize she was holding yet another 'HAZEE DAYS!!' pamphlet, this one from Mark Pritchard down at the hardware store, and tossed it onto the small drift of similar leaflets on her coffee table. God, it was bad enough that every single store in town seemed determined to give her their individual take on tomorrow's sale, but couldn't they at least get organized on spelling? There was 'HAZE DAZE', 'HAZEY DAZE', 'HAZEE DAAZ', one particularly frustrating effort that said 'HZAY DAZE'... Emma almost felt like she wanted to claw at the paper to rearrange the letters.

And somehow, even though none of them were uniform, they all had the same terrible problems with the interior text. Emma started to lay them out side by side on the table, unfolding each leaflet in turn now that she finally had the complete set. Mark wasn't a regular stop of hers the same way that some of the others were, but today she'd finally gone in to buy a new shelf for the pantry and sure enough, he was right there with a brochure for her. "I was wondering when I was going to see you, Emma!" he said, giving her a beaming smile and handing her a pamphlet that she took automatically. "You sure you don't want to wait on that shelving kit? I've got some big bargains in store for you! Just look around and imagine the amazing deals!"

Emma pretty much had to imagine the amazing deals, because even after three weeks, she still had no idea what anyone was actually selling during Hazy Daze. Every time she asked, Mark and Maisie and Tom and Lena and Sven and Gerald and Kari and Ingrid and Larry and the other Gerald who had the souvenir shop all said the same thing. "It's all right there in the brochure!" Well, now Emma had each and every brochure in town. And she couldn't read a goddamned one of them.

It was all just... squiggles. Black text with blue text just a little bit lower and red text just a little bit higher and green text just a little bit to the left and yellow text just a little bit to the right, making the whole thing into an unreadable blob. But not the same unreadable blob. She scanned each one, arranging them carefully in a little grid, making note of every little difference and quirk and oddity. She could even remember who gave her what--the upper left one, with the solid wall of text and not a single paragraph break to be found, that was Lena's. The lower one second from right, with the comically tiny and blurry pictures, that belonged to Sven's jewelry store.

Not that you could tell that from the pictures--they were so close and so out-of-focus that they just looked like giant rainbow sparkles. But Emma remembered Sven foisting it on her when she was window-shopping last week, saying, "You just look in there and see if there's anything you like, okay?" in that thick Minnewegian accent of his, the one that made Frances McDormand sound like Joe Pesci. They were all so nice, that was the worst part. She couldn't tell them how awful these looked when they were so proud of their work, could she?

Emma leaned back on the couch, kicking off her shoes and gazing in rapt horror at the nightmarish vista of sins against graphic design arrayed in front of her. She knew it was their work--Maisie had joked about it, during a busy Sunday when the store was full of tourists stocking up on their way home. "I'm almost out of pamphlets!" she called out, her eyes gleaming with mischief as she handed over another one from an increasingly short stack. "They're flying off the shelves--maybe I should retire and become a graphic designer!" Emma's smile had been... maybe a touch thinner than she wanted, but Minnesota nice had once again prevailed.

But if each one was different, why did they all have the same garbled text? Emma leaned forward, wriggling out of her shorts and squinting at the tableau. Maybe they sent their work off to the same print shop? But no, that couldn't be it. Emma knew every printer in a seventy-mile radius, she'd used every last one of them on one occasion or another. None of them were sloppy enough to let something like this out the door. It had to be something they were printing off themselves. Maybe one of them did all of the printing, and they had a setting wrong on their device? It made as much sense as anything.

Emma rearranged the leaflets a little, swapping Kari and Ingrid's around and noting with amusement that it looked like the text ran right off the corner of one pamphlet onto the next. Like you could read the whole thing as one big long novel, a saga of incomprehensible gibberish that played out in chapters from store to store. Was it a joke, maybe? Like that Saint Urho's Day parade they had every year in Grand Rapids? It didn't seem particularly funny to Emma, but then again she always had a hard time with 'A Prairie Home Companion', too.

Her fingers slid down into the waistband of her panties, rubbing absently along her tingling labia as she tried to decipher the context of the whole strange event. They had to know their pamphlets looked like this. Yes, Maisie was getting into her fifties, and Tom was getting on in years no matter how often he dyed his hair jet black and flirted with every woman who walked in. But Mark was younger than she was, and none of them were old enough to have eye problems. The second any of them looked at these brochures, they'd have to spot the obvious issues there. What kind of person couldn't spot the obvious when it was right there in front of them?

Emma shuddered, kicking her damp panties off to give her probing fingers better access to her clit and pulling up her t-shirt so she could play with her nipples.

It just seemed so impossibly silly, that was all. It was so absurd to see all these leaflets laid out in front of her, side by side and all at once like this, and picture every store owner in town beaming proudly at their work when you couldn't even read a word of it. Even when Emma's eyes crossed, momentarily unfocusing with pleasure, she could only see a blur of colors on the table in front of her. It wasn't like the Magic Eye pictures, where you'd stare and stare and stare until suddenly you saw an image of a kneeling woman, her jaw hanging slack and vacant and her hand buried in her cunt, moaning and writhing and begging for more...

Emma slid down off the couch and onto her knees, legs spread wide, eyes glazed and staring sightlessly at the squiggles of text. She let out a tiny, choked whimper of arousal and added a third finger to her constant thrusts. It. It had to be something. Something silly. It was all just so silly, that was all. She didn't need to worry about it because it was all so... so fucking... her mind circled around and around, trying desperately to find another word to describe the bizarre situation, but her subconscious just kept supplying the word 'silly' until she gave up and accepted it.

It was silly. And as soon as she came, Emma put it right out of her mind again.

*****

She woke up the next morning, conscious of the July heat despite her air conditioning. It felt like it was going to be a good old-fashioned scorcher, the kind of day that was too hot for even shorts and a t-shirt. Emma got out of bed and made herself breakfast without even bothering to put on clothes, then took a shower in lukewarm water. It didn't seem to help. By the time she finished toweling off, she felt sweaty all over again.

She padded back toward her bedroom in her bare feet, but somehow they seemed to carry her right past the doorway and on down the stairs. Emma had a momentary wobble of confusion in her brain, but then she remembered--she was planning to walk into town a little early today, to see for herself what those Hazy Daze bargains were really like. And if it was already this warm, it must be later than she realized, so she really needed to get going if she wanted to get to the sale. That meant she didn't have time to stop and get dressed. She slipped on a pair of flip-flops at the door and walked out into the summer heat.

The walk passed quickly, and before she knew it Emma was rounding the corner onto Main Street. The momentary flutter of quiet panic silenced itself almost instantly when she saw that she wasn't the only one who had decided to forego clothing today; just about everyone in town was wandering up and down the street naked, browsing the sidewalk tables with a slightly muzzy expression on her face. Here and there a tourist goggled in confusion at the crowd, but never for long--one of the locals would come up to them with a pamphlet and talk to them quietly for a few moments, and they would take off their clothes and join the celebration.