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Little Emergencies of Living
It happened one sunny morning. Well, mid-morning, anyway, if the clock were to be believed, and they generally were, not being particularly prone to lying.
He executed a reasonably laudable roll and tuck out of bed for a man his age, rolled across the carpet on his knees, half-rolled across a good stretch of carpet when his roll-and-tuck out of the bed proved not to be as sophisticated a maneuver as he'd hoped, grabbed the pack of cigarettes lying innocently by the innocent clock, and came to rest with his elbows splayed on the dresser.
It was cold with a slight wind, which wasn't right. There shouldn't have been a breeze. Not in his bedroom, at least. He could hear the breeze outside, along the stucco-sort of walls of his apartment building. Okay, it wasn't stucco. It was white-ish beige, probably more beige than white-ish. But he called it stucco, made him feel like he lived in LA or something, to live in a stucco building. Or say he lived in a stucco building. One with a breeze, a steady breeze blowing right through his bedroom, what the hell was up with that?
He rolled his head back towards the window, which was closed, and even further back towards the bed he'd just vacated in the decreasingly stylish tuck-and-roll style not seconds before. The awkward pop of his neck testified to the waning attractiveness of doing that again, at least for the morning, as he'd surely forget the awkward pop and slight rug burn from his rollslide across the carpet to the dresser and his cigarettes. And then who knows? Some other morning he was likely to try it again. It happened. You live and do stuff. That was his motto. Well, it wasn't quite a motto so much as it was this thing he said, though never out loud, thankfully, and didn't look particularly strange going about living his motto, the way some people might, if their motto was something slightly more extreme than "Live and do stuff."
If you looked closely, quite a lot of people could have been following his motto, whether they meant to or not. But where the hell was that breeze coming from?
He swiveled his head as best he could back the other way, towards the door.
Again, no major causes of a breeze could be identified at first glance, or even first stare. Just the door. Which wasn't a cause, that was the only thing he saw, if he observed selectively. (This was ignoring the pile of shirts he'd been meaning to hang up or fold or something, maybe stuff in a closet somewhere, so long as they were out of sight. This was also ignoring the cat sitting by the door, licking the rug.) No distinctive cracking noise from his neck meant that he was waking up, which meant he was okay to have a cigarette, he couldn't stomach having a cigarette first thing in the morning. Once he'd woken up, however, was a different matter.
Wait, he didn't have a cat. And it was getting damn cold in there, with the breeze and everything. This wouldn't happen if he lived somewhere nice and warm, somewhere like LA, from what he could gather, it wouldn't be so damn cold with damn cats everywhere. Stupid musical, as well. In his bedroom. He couldn't quite remember how a cat got into his bedroom, not generally being a cat person, himself, and certainly not one prone to keeping them in his bedroom. Or apartment, for that matter.
He checked. No hangover, not really. The minor headache he had might have been from the blood settling in his head after his morning tumble/tuck-and-roll out of bed and into the dresser. Blood, Jesus. Ah, right, no blood coming out his nose, which was good, though he wasn't entirely sure why he'd checked his nose for blood, as he hadn't had a nose bleed in years. More than years. Decades. Probably decades. He checked his nose again. Nope, still no blood. He blamed the cat. He tried to see into the mirror on his dresser to see if he wasn't scratched, but he couldn't see from where he was kneeling. His mirror on the dresser was one of those that were raised slightly off the dresser, so you could fit things under them.
He was almost positive that wasn't the reason why they made his dresser in that particular fashion, but it's what he used the extra space beneath the mirror before the dresser top for, for storing stuff. Like, oh, socks. Why had he put a pair of socks, they looked clean, there were two, with the top lip of one sock folded over the top of another sock in the oddly sexual way socks go together. Well, not sexual, but he always thought of socks loving that moment in the day they got to get out of the washing machine, get dry, and get folded together, one over the other like lovers. He didn't often spend a long time on these sort of thoughts, they just generally passed through.
He reached up with one arm, shrugging his shoulder up so far he could feel it in his adam's apple and grabbed the socks, and brought the arm back down.
Later in the morning, with socks on his hands and a cat shooed in front of him, he found God, sitting at his breakfast table.
And the patio door was open. In November.
disclaimer:
The preceding was a short story, included in the forthcoming short story collection from the Head Editor of Sane Magazine, tentatively titled "A Virtuous Horse."
This bit is the disclaimer, which isn't included in the short story collection, and is why you pay for this premium online content, the Value Added.
Considerably more Value is Added if you've a fast connection and can get to more issues in a shorter time, if you're to believe Time is Money, and Don't Take into Account the Money you've spent on Bandwidth.
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes. That was that, then.