One Fine Night...

My friend Lizzy was driving me to town one warm, humid night two weeks back, on the pretext of looking for a Korean restaurant, but we both knew that the real reason was to gaze and gawk at the cute guys whom are supposed to be in abundance in that area.

So we happily jumped into her SUV and started our mission, but not before stopping at Dunkin Donuts to get my choco-nut and her strawberry fix. Lizzy is petite, with long, straight flowing hair and is generally quite sweet. She's not great with directions, so I had to steer us.

We reached the destination, the Korean restaurant was there but the cute guys were nowhere to be seen. There were several preppy-looking ones, some leery middle-aged businessmen (yucks!) and one or two foreigners tottering after their happy hour at the bar.

Resigned to failure, we decided to call it a day and go home to watch CSI instead. I suggested a short cut. The route was straightforward - take a shortcut through the clubhouse, drive along a private road, emerge from the other end to a residential area and look for my car which was parked near a playground.

Child's play? Almost.

We did take the shortcut, after being subjected to a road check at the clubhouse where two armed security guards initially refused us entry. After some conversation, we persuaded them to let us pass, which they did. So we entered this long, dark, lonely winding road that wrapped itself around a golf course. There were no other cars on the road, which made it all the more eerie for us.

Then we ran into a roadblock. The entire road was barricaded. We had to either go back the way we came, or take a disused road which forked from the one we were on. Since both of us were reluctant to go back to the long, dark, lonely road from whence we came, I decided to take the forked road. Lizzy nodded in agreement and drove on. Nothing prepared us for what happened next.

Very suddenly, a thick mist covered our vehicle. The thick, swirling fog came from all directions and quickly shrouded the solitary streetlamp right above us. It swept across the shrubs on both sides of the road and started to blur our view. Very soon, our windshield was completely covered in mist and we were forced to slow down. Ten metres and a thousand questions through Lizzy's mind later, she finally asked, "hey, doesn't this remind you of a scene from the Twilight Zone?"

"Da, da, da, da..." I hummed (in reflex) the famous tune from the TV series and turned to look at her. She was quite pale. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tight. Then she did something unexpected.

She stepped on the brakes and said, "Excuse me, I am going to check out this fog." Before I could finish saying "good idea", she had already wound down her car window, poked her head out at the mist and sucked in a great deal of whiff.

The next instant, she yelled and closed the car window as quickly as she could.

"Insecticide!"

The municipal was fumigating the area and sprayed a great deal of insecticide to get rid of the mosquitoes.

Oh well, at least the interior of Lizzy's car was insect-free for a while...