This is the Story of Bernard and Bernice

I woke this morning fuzzy from the remnants of a dream that I was writing (or living, I wasn't sure) a young-adults novel about two young lovers, Bernard and Bernice, who are separated after Bernard is arrested for a crime he didn't commit and sent to a militaristic disciplinary school for boys. The story started as just a simple tale, but became something quite different as Bernard and Bernice's quest to return to each other shifted from the realm of the everyday mundane to a more fantastical world of mystery and magic.

So tonight, I sat down and wrote for a bit.

This is it: the story of Bernard and Bernice.

It doesn’t matter how they met, or where it started, at least for now. What matters is that they’re together, and that they feel like they’ve always been together, and will always be together, and that’s how it should be.

But that’s not how it always is.

The story starts with the car.

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The car sat in the parking lot with its lights on. Bernice saw it first, and pointed it out to Bernard. The parking lot of the Seven-Eleven was empty, except for the car, because it was very late, or even very early, depending how you look at it. Seven-Eleven was open, though, because Seven-Eleven always is. Bernard and Bernice were awake, because they wake at odd hours, and dislike sleeping; they want to be awake as much as possible. They were at the Seven-Eleven to buy sunflower seeds, for Bernice and her bird, a parakeet named Joe. Bernard doesn’t like sunflower seeds.

“It’s lights are on,” said Bernice, tugging on the sleeve of Bernard’s jacket. It was early fall, perfect weather for light jackets, windy, brisk.

“Mm-hmm,” said Bernard. He was looking through his pockets for money.

“I don’t think they’re supposed to be.” The car was empty. “Someone’s going to come back and find their car dead.”

“It’s probably locked,” said Bernard. It was a new-type car, and looked expensive. It looked like the kind of car that worked with a remote, so the driver could lock it and unlock with the press of a button. A car liked that, it practically locked itself, and sometimes even did. For that matter, it usually turned off its own lights.

“You could check.” Bernice was big on empathy; she could feel the frustration of the person waking up in the morning, going to get their car, and finding it dead. Being late for work, maybe even losing their job. All for the sake of a little switch. It was such an easy opportunity to make a difference.

Bernard smiled at Bernice, knowing what she was thinking. They’d always been together, after all. “I can check,” he said.

Bernard walked over to the car and tried the door, and was surprised to find it open. Strike two for modern technology. Strike one was the lights.

He bent in the car and looked inside, looking for a light switch. The dashboard was nothing BUT switches, switches and dials and knobs, all with little symbols indicating their function. But the makers of the car, in their efforts to impress the prospective buyer as new and different, had come up with new and different symbols, for a new and different type of car, and in the process, they’d made the dashboard unintelligible. It looked like the hieroglyphics on pyramid walls.

Bernard climbed further in, to better situate himself and get a clearer view of the dashboard, and in doing so, he saw that the keys were still partly in the ignition.

“Can you find the light switch?” called Bernice.

Bernard looked up from the dashboard to tell her he’d found something else, just in time to see the police cruiser that had silently pulled up behind Bernice turn on its flashing lights.