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It wasn’t supposed to be this successful…

The Duck Song: A multibillionaire company originally formed from the premise of a simple lemonade stand. It now stands as the omnipresent global empire for both wealth and complete control. Its customers, once a purchase has been made, will provide a complete vulnerability of everything within their life to the company. There used to be a way to prevent this, a way to stop the tyranny of The Duck Song from dismantling the very roots of civilization, but I was too late to stop it from happening.

 I once ran a lemonade stand. It was during my early twenties, I had just retrieved my high school diploma after being held back a couple of years due to immature delinquency but I was too tired of education to pursue any form of learning higher than high school. My parents were both concerned and disappointed with my rejection of a job. They always wanted me to become some sort of innovative and world-changing scientist or engineer or even anything in between the absolute minimum 9-5 job to pursuing the average liberal arts major. I should’ve just listened to them. To this day, I still cannot trace the memory or reasoning of my decision to thrash my parents’ wishes into the garbage, but I do remember them finally having enough of me. And given enough time without personal change, they threw me out of the house. I was still in a state of REM sleep, wearing clothing that wasn’t even suitable for the outside temperatures. I think I could’ve sued them for attempted murder. 

It wasn’t the most promising of starts outside the comfort of my parent’s house, but I made do with a few pieces of scrap cardboard and tape left on the side of alleys, most of which were the accumulation of excess materials from elementary and middle school students who had just completed their science fair projects. I thought selling off the cardboard would garner enough cash to start a humble business so I could finally live within a residency of my own, but I was far from correct. Soon enough, a whole year passed, my mountain of cardboard pieces continue to grow and I the profit I made from selling them was enough to get me a whole composition notebook. And though my net worth had increased, thirty-five cents was a far cry from buying a house. 

But I didn’t give up. Sparked by a new idea, I burst out of the homeless shelter, throwing out all the little unwritable pieces of cardboard into the local river and only keeping my prized collection: six perfectly large cardboard rectangles. Dragging my unkempt body across the cobblestone sidewalk, I eagerly made my way back into the front porch of my parents’ house, slamming the newly painted door with my two frostbitten fists. Perhaps I had impacted the frame too hard as my dad flung open the door with great force, mom was clutching the wrinkled windbreaker he was wearing. I found myself at the mercy of an M16, its barrel directly pointed at my neck with a margin of error that ranged from my diaphragm to the clouded sky above me. My dad had lost aim along with a few motor functions and a few senses as a long consequence of the wars he had participated in. 

My dad demanded my intentions. 

Perhaps he didn’t recognize me, after all, I hadn’t shaved my facial hair in a year. Anybody would mistake a dirty beard with common burglary, it always comes down to that common adage: “When he’s hairy, he’s sure to be dangerously scary!” 

I told my dad, ‘hey it’s me!’, that I was still alive and, for the most part, quite well.

My dad seemed to hesitate for a while. At one moment his grip was kept firm onto the gun’s handguard, his sagged eyes kept their glace pierced into the deepest parts of my skull. But I could sense anxiousness, a sense of a man being faced with a crossroad of two entirely different outcomes and solutions. My dad dropped the gun onto the floor and sighed. He grunted as he scruffled the curls of his almond brown hair, a few white strands drifted downwards like snowflakes, slipping through the gaps of the porch, merging with the growing snow below. 

‘What do you want, son?’ My dad asked with an impatient tone. 

I told both of my parents that I needed money. 

‘Of course, why else would your ass be out here.’ My dad sighed and reached for his back pocket but my mother’s hands, which released themselves from the windbreaker, transitioned from stressful wrinkles and bare knuckles to gentle and seemingly understanding as they positioned themselves on top of my father’s arm to prevent him from pulling out whatever was in his back pocket. 

My dad turned around and saw my mother’s eyes, eyes that can see through more fibers of my being compared to my father’s, eyes that dictate absolute wisdom and understanding, eyes that were not made from retinas and corneas and cones but rather being a single entity of its own. They weren’t the eyes of God, they were the eyes of the beyond. 

My old man then spun around to face me, eyeing me with eyes of his own once again. This time, however, he noticed my prized collection. 

‘You got a plan?’ He asked. 

I ecstatically nodded, then took the residue of paint that was on the edges of my frostbitten hands and drew a single lemon on one of my cardboards. I told them that this idea wouldn’t take much from them. 

It started off slow and small; I had to wait till the snow had considerably melted, or else customers would have a considerably hard time going through the considerably tough snow to get to where I would set up shop. I used all of my prized collection to construct an impenetrable stall, the money from my parents would then be spent on lemons, glass jars, a cooler, and [Saturn’s Dreams.]. I labeled the stall, “Ice Fresh Lemonade.” 

When the new season finally sprung out from the corpse of winter, I spent my days squeezing, grinding, pouring, purchasing, convincing, yelling, sprinkling, and selling. Customers would arrive thirstily and depart satisfied, and the numbers would exponentially increase as the season of summer burned away spring. And though I was getting a profit to match my net worth of one full food truck, it still wasn’t enough to purchase a house of my own. It was the Duck’s arrival that changed my fate, that opened a crossroads of my own. 

    It was like any other day. I had been working on the idea for a whole year, at that point, I was dressing quite formally and even shaved off any remnants of facial hair that stuck with me the year before. I witnessed a couple of large companies merging right in front of my stall, had a few promising business proposals made not to me, and even got on live television as blurred background decoration. It was just like any other day… I continued to run the stand when the Duck walked up to the lemonade stand and he said to me: ‘Hey! Bum bum bum. Got any grapes?’

    At first, I didn’t know what to make of the question. But as I continue to write this, I now realize that that was not a question, but rather, a statement. This is the declaration of judgment day, compressed into a structure of seven words, three separate punctuation, and the subjective onomatopoeia with the consistency of three; all of which are engraved in the smallest parts of my amygdala and hippocampus. Sacred, divine. Hellish, devil spawn. Any adjective, regardless of it being the root of all evil or good, will be a perfect fit for those words. The Duck himself was composed of a yellow body and an orange bill, both colors were the worst tinge of their respective family. With a persistency that could only be described as infinite, the Duck allowed himself to visit the stand on a daily basis, not to by anything, but to request an item of mythical delicacy. 

With every visit, I’ve noticed patterns:

1. The Duck appears from the nearby oak tree at exactly 10 am every morning I am present inside the stall.

1. The Duck asks the same question only to be denied by me. 

1. After being denied, the Duck follows the exact path it left behind the day before, only to disappear where my eyes can’t follow. 

1. [HE/IT] demands grapes, the fruit of the Gods; he wants the myth. 

    I’ve attempted everything to ward the Duck off, to convince him that grapes aren’t real. When that didn’t work, I threatened to use the Duck’s fatal weapon: Duck Tape. But even when I actually did tape him up, he broke free, rather easily I must say. Finally, I got to my knees and begged. I crawled to the Duck’s small flippers and kissed the webbings in between his toes, pleading for him to leave me and my stall be. Seeing this state of absolute pitifulness must have triggered something within the Duck for he stopped his routine path for once. The Duck smiled, he smiled so hard that the teeth themselves started to overlap his bill. The Duck bent down and said his second statement:

‘Do you think this world has any lemonade?’

    Again, I didn’t know what to make of it at first…but as I now stare off into the endless valleys of factories all built to produce one product, I began to laugh. It wasn’t a painfilled laugh or one that was driven out by maniac tendencies, no no it was not. It was just…a laugh, nothing else really. 

I haven’t seen the Duck in over half a century now. The stench of lemonade wants to make me vomit.

“C’mon Duck, I’ll buy you some grapes on the way over…”