Choose Your Own Adventure - Part 3. $5 Reward

The mist covers you and you look to your right at the carrot who was calling out to you earlier.

“Hey man, hey. Come on! Come on back. Don’t overthink this,” the carrot says, though you’re not quite sure how. “Come back to us. Your family.”

So you do. You find you can quite easily slide your little carrot body around and you nudge and roll your way back to the ones like you.

“That’ll do. Easy does it. Glad to have you back,” the other carrot says as you nudge right besides it. “I missed you. I love you.”

The other carrot kisses your forehead in the way that carrots kiss each other’s foreheads.

“And the kids, too.”

“Pa-pa! Pa-pa!” a bag of baby carrots shout from a moist plastic bag just below you.

You have a life here, it turns out. You return to it. Cold rain in the mornings and early evening. Nursery rhymes at night and then when the babies are asleep, carrot love-making, surrounded by other vegetables, but it’s not weird because this is just how things are done among carrots.

These are the good days.

They go on for as long as you can imagine. They may never end. You sometimes think of your old dreams - moldy cheese? A full studio of cameras and a nearly busted table? People with ‘arms’ and ‘legs’? Right. Dreams, that’s all they are.

You don’t worry about those things anymore, because these are the great days. The salad days, some might say.

And then, if you don’t mind the pun, the first course is over. Because of salad. That’s the pun. Do you get it? Is that clear that it’s a pun, on salad days and then courses of a meal, of which salad is the first? Does that work, do we like that? Well if you have edits, fine. Send them in. Okay. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

You know the first course is over when The Hand arrives. Your partner assures you it won’t be you, not this time, and then just like that, you’re grabbed. He screams. You’ve never heard him scream. The babies are next. They don’t even know to cry, but they follow his lead.

It almost feels like good luck when The Hand grabs you. The cart is disorienting, wobbling in the base of it and shaking on one squeaky wheel, the linoleum floor reflecting up at you, blinding. You try not to be scared, but it doesn’t help. Beeping. Then, darkness.

You wake up on hard plastic. The Hand holds a knife.

You remember.

CARROT-E (pronounced like “Karate”)

Only the word. You stare at The Hand. You feel hatred for the first time ever as a carrot.

There is only darkness, and then you are awake again.

In a fever, you hurry to make sense of the situation. The man is lying on the ground, moaning. Blood bubbles into his mouth like what happens in movies. You scan the small kitchen. There’s an open window, cracked into the nighttime chill. There’s a carpeted staircase leading upstairs on the other side of the room.

What will you do?