Kris did not remember his dream when he awoke, but could
still feel the emotional collision of it.
A sort of psychic residue persisted, an unsettling, contradictory
confluence of empowerment and obliteration.
He had knocked over Maggie’s little box of treasures. Precious trinkets and photos lay scattered
chaotically across the floor. It was a
perfect analog, Kris thought, to his own brain at the moment. Clippings and images and soundbites littered the
workspace in his mind. The phrase “Je ne
sais quoi?” remained on a continual playback, still looping from just before
Kris had fallen asleep. The vestiges of
his dream haunted about the backstage of his thoughts; Where had he been? Someplace familiar. Yet another part of his brain was,
unbeknownst to him, still fixating on that missing AA token. And there was something about a leather band
was that very important.
And then an altogether terrible realization began to creep
slowly over his consciousness, as slowly as the shadows that crawl across a
church cloister. When was the last time
he had seen Maggie take a drink? Why had
she been dressed in that slutty Catholic schoolgirl getup that night at Art
Slam? What was she doing on that side of
town all by herself? “Madness is their
native tongue.” What did that mean?
Something snapped.
Something tectonic began to shift within Kris. If Kris had ever read Mary Pendleton’s
favorite author, he might have recognized his internal transformation as that “his inner man gave him other evidences of a
revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a
total change of dynasty and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate
to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister.”
The snap was, in fact, a mousetrap, which Abraham Lincoln
sped off to investigate.
Kris followed the sound to its source in the bathroom. Abraham Lincoln was seated still, staring at
something with a laser beam focus.
Behind the pedestal of the sink, a mouse scrambled frantically and
futilely to free its broken hind leg from the brass wire of an Avery brand HouseTrap. It ran wildly in place until it could do so
no longer, and collapsed into shallow, quick panting, its tiny heart racing
like a hummingbird. Abraham watched the
creature, his pupils as big as black pearls.
Kris, on the other hand, looked upon the creature with dead eyes. He lifted one of his heavy black Doc Martin
boots and brought it to rest delicately upon the mouse. He then proceeded to slowly press the
inch-thick sole down upon the creature until the mouse’s shrill squeals ceased,
crushing critter and trap into one. “You
can’t save ‘em all,” Kris said.
Kris caught site of himself in the mirror and did a quick
assessment: his stitches looked puffy
from inattention; he a real night’s sleep, his face looked a little swollen
from his newly acquired drinking habit, and he could stand a shave. But the thing that bothered him was none of
these; what really bummed Kris out was the state of his hair. “Look at you,” he said to his reflection, “Ya
nappy little, pea-headed Buckwheat.
You’re slippin’, Kris, slippin’, man.”
Kris rummaged through the medicine cabinet and discovered a half-dull,
disposable pink ladies’ razor. He closed
the door to the cabinet and said to himself, “Now let’s see about getting you
that cut.”
It had been an altogether terrible realization.
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