What Could I Do?

Not much.

So I got in.

His car smelled -- if it was his car -- like puke. The wheels made a hideous sound as he pulled away from the curb. As if there were no tires.

("Tyres," they call them.)

So later that day, lying on my back in a ditch somewhere in the heather, I started to think about -- naturally enough -- my first experience with projectile vomiting. Lying there quietly, I was just watching the sky. The clouds, really, and I suddenly remembered seeing my brother.

Well, I hadn't seen him, really, just his effect.

You see, growing up, our dining room looked into the living room through an archway. And if you continued through the living room -- to the left of this archway -- you'd eventually reach the hall off of which the bathroom lived. The hall floor was bare wood, the living room was carpeted in a dark marigold.

I was sitting at the dining room table and my brother was returning from the bathroom, and he hadn't yet made it to the point at which he would be visible under the archway.

Hearing a rasping spurt, I turned around and saw a yawning arc of purple (mmm, what...paste?) stretch through the air from one side of the archway two-thirds of the distance across the space, drifting gently in slow motion, and land like a heavy ribbon of violet cream across the length of the orange carpet.