Slushie

It’s impossibly hot outside and the heat shows no signs of abating. Mercilessly, the temperature keeps crawling, degree by degree in the wrong direction. Dripping with unstoppable sweat, you press on, each step more difficult than the last.

Your only desire is cold. Anything cold. An hour earlier, encouraged by memories of the ‘Taste the Rockies’ Coors Light commercial, you downed a cold one but to no avail. The second your damp hand grasped that silver bullet, the mountains were no longer blue and the beer lost the necessary bite. Even the brief satisfaction of the lukewarm cure-all was tempered by the deliriousness that followed.

Now even further dehydrated, with any energy you have in a perpetual state of escape, you try and press on in search of your old would-be-nemesis, the slushie. Every bitter snow fall, beautiful though the snow-covered world it always left was, it always brought with it that shoe-wetting slush. Living in that dreary slushie world had been your nightmare but no longer.

At this instant, nothing sounds more appealing than a gooey slushie of any variety, snow-laden or man-made. Since only one kind can be attained on this impossibly hot July afternoon, your increasingly incoherent mind has only the power to focus one thing, one end game, a summertime slushie. Like Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, you have one mission and nothing else matters.

After an endless sea of Boston city blocks, you round a corner and finally you arrive at your Mecca, 7-freaking-ELEVEN. Suddenly full of energy, and with your five dollar bill crumpled in your disgustingly sweaty palm, you blast through the front door, grab the biggest cup in range and fill it to the brim with the red, berry-smelling nectar. Forgetting in the moment to pay at the counter, you take a Jabba sized gulp and embrace a cold pain that is your freezing pain and man oh man if it doesn’t hurt so0000 good. Forget the Rockies, you’ve just tasted heaven!