The three eyed cat sitting sphinx on your bed is talking socioeconomics while you dress for work. You’ve never owned a cat but he makes sense.
It’s time to go.
Thirty priests in two columns walking backwards down the sidewalk, their eyes white as they stare at the sun, chanting low and fervent. Sounds like Latin but you don’t know the words.
You make the sign of the cross in reverse without thinking.
There’s a dead dog in the road begging you to throw the stick one more time but you have a newspaper to buy, sorry bud maybe next time.
Six blocks away from work now.
The heat is stifling.
You threw up maggots in the alleyway next to the office and shrugged, something in your head whispered, “The meat must’ve soured, you’re alright.”
The office is a vacant disaster, your desk an island.
The news is reassuring, the pages mostly blank with the words “NOTHING IS FINE, CARRY ON” in bold print, the susurrus in your head settles.
Nothing is fine as something slithers through your mouth, a slimy kind of sinuous spread through your body you tell yourself is fatigue.
Maybe a drink of water.
You’re standing in the green bathroom, noting distantly that you’re barefoot and wearing your dead wife’s negligee, not feeling the blood from your nose and forehead dripping onto your feet.
We all have off days.
Your coworker Alan is shitting his intestines into the last stall, door wide, sweating an oily sheen matching perfectly the sickly tint of the tile.
He’s talking to you about the P&L reports from last quarter while you return to beating your forehead into the mirror. The numbers were up.
The intrusion of an odd thought,
“Something seems wrong,” to Alan who is now a silent wax dummy sitting on an overflowing throne of viscera. He never was one for small talk.
Blinking furiously, focus. Now you’re taking Alan’s shoes and coat because he isn’t protesting and the niggling feeling of an off-kilter universe demands it. Something seems wrong.
Stepping into the hallway, the three-eyed cat is sitting on a bench suggesting you lie down and let him clean the cuts in your face. Of course.
This makes perfect sense.