“It wasn’t a dream, curse you!”

I slapped my palm down hard on Nem’s desk.  I had reacted so rabidly in the provoking face of the office magician that it took an endless five seconds for the pain in my hand to reach my brain to reach my shrieking reflex.

“I hope this is one of your tricks!” I yelled within that five seconds, shoving my hand in front of his face – the hand impaled by every last pencil in Nem’s pencil cup.  Sixteen of them, total.  I wanted to ask why he would keep them so hazardously displayed: eraser-down, lead tip-up, but I was distracted by a further development.

“How’d you get the blood to come out like tha… ?” I began.  “A bleeding penci… ?  That’s… very… clev… uhhh…”

I awoke in a dark room, my stabbed hand drowning in a mop bucket nearby.   The palm of my hand pulsated and stung as I tore it out of the mucky bucket.  The wound had been bandaged, the pencils removed, the spot of blood the shape and size of a mythic cycloptic eye winning every single staring contest match.  I dried the bandage on the roll of paper towels that had been acting quite comfortably as a pillow for my hat-covered…

“Wait!  My hat!”

I flailed my arms just above my head, over and through the threshold of a fallen tower made of public park yard cast-offs and personally stolen goods.  It was gone!  Or invisible.  But that’s impossible, so yes, then, it was gone!

“NEEEMMMMM!” I growled, pressing my knees against the minefield of dried gum globules that was once a floor.  I suddenly became awash in fluorescent gold.  The door had flung open.  The bandaged hand privileged more shade than any hand in the history of hands ever could in the blinding bright, but the soreness mitigated any strength the stabbing had scared away, so I let it fall limply beside the mop bucket and squeezed my eyes shut until even more shade immediately crept over me.

“Geet ap!”  It was the frightful squeal of a little man – but not that little man – in a button-up shirt with a cowboy-riding unicorn embroidered on its shoulders.  “Geet ap!  Geet ap!”

“Kapok…?” I asked, inching forward on the fuzzy linoleum.

“NIT! NIT!” he squealed, still in unseen terrain.   “NITNITNITNITNITNITNITNIT!”

“Nit?”  I asked, still crawling forward.  The bristles of a broom crashed against my black khaki’d bottom, repeatedly before I had no choice but to turn my inching into scuttling through a doorway into daylight where I was welcomed by two cigarette-smuggling teen girls.

I had seen them before, in passing.  One of the girls belonged to a hygienist at the dental offices on the third floor, while the other girl presumably belonged to the other other girl.

“Cree poo blah?!” screeched one of them.  The one I hadn’t bumped on my way through the emergency exit.  I apologized.  “Cree poo blahrr goo lickin?!” she continued.

My senses began to return and the gibberish that spilt from the lips of humans began to once again resemble English.  The other didn’t say much.  She just gyrated with a surprised expression on her face.

“She’s choking!  Help her!”

“Choking?” I asked, crossing my arms, unconvinced.  “On what?”

The girl exaggeratedly waved her cigarette in the air, while the choking girl who no longer had a cigarette hanging from her lips looked like she might devour my soul.  She wouldn’t though, not until that withered ash treat popped back up or dropped way down.

“I have no time for this,” I told the girl, hurrying down the handicapped ramp toward the lobby’s entrance.  “I have to find my hat!”

She hollered after me with a mouth so foul, she didn’t need the enhancement or support of a skinny stick of tar.  “I’ll come back when I find my hat!”

With that, I was inside the building and riding the elevator to the 21st floor.

There was no music.  No mirrors.  There was the brown marble paneling lining the ascending box and an implacable buzzing in my naked ears.  The watch on my wrist had stopped decades ago, when I was 15, about a year after I found it in the gutter of a pizza parlor that served ice cream after dark, and had been decorative ever since.  “Is the elevator even moving?” I thought as my eyelids began to droop.  I touched my hair, not a strand of which had passed through my fingers or even the air’s fingers since I slipped the mouth of that gloriously cobbled-together dunce cap over the unwashed, ratty, slippery grease garden of my hair and waltzed through the streets and aisles and halls and bedrooms and gave them no choice but to bow at my golden feet and try, just try, to plant a beholden kiss upon them as they kick up and slam down and forward thrust until they sway this pointy-tipped prize out the door for eternity but be damned glad to be graced just the once.

But is someone else doing the gracing now?  Is someone else enjoying foot smoochies?  Is someone else convincing the world its significance is actually sopping wet with fraud?  What would happen, I wondered, if whoever wore the hat was found ou—

The elevator doors clunked open to my office floor.  It was still bustling with the illusion of work, with bodies scraping their pants-suitted thighs together, or violating the copy machine with their fingers.  I stomped over to Nem’s desk, rolling up my sleeves to reveal my blinding farmer’s tan and wondering how that was ever supposed to look intimidating.  Even when I flexed, I had to wonder from what part of my body the muscle was meant to bulge because my bicep didn’t even twitch.  I had to figure out some threatening-enough pose before reaching Nem’s desk.  One that preferably made him forget that if I were to strike him with a fist, and backed it with my fullest might, he’d be likely to scratch the point of impact for all this fist could create is a measly itch.  So I formed a fist and flung it in the air like a protest sign against hat thieves, but quickly withdrew it when it too closely resembled the Black Panther insignia.  That wasn’t scary coming from me.  Just confusing.  So I spread both my muscle-less arms and tumbled my fists along, but let them fall to my side when it appeared I wanted to encapsulate him in a hug-turned-backrub.  So I unraveled my fists and made claws at the air, like a menacing monster hit with a radioactive disease and whose appetite for human flesh is only as strong as the thousands of spikes in its mouth prepared to devour it.  I snarled past cubicles of people so petrified they didn’t dare look up from their phone calls or computer monitors.  I drooled all down my polo shirt and pretended it was foam.  I was rabid.  I was thirsty.  For all Nem knew, I was going to have his lungs for dessert.

Nem’s chair was empty.  I was a sad monster.

I lowered my claws, hung my head and tried to wipe the bloating drool stain from my chest.  I felt no reason to stop by my desk, even when I recognized out of the corner of my eye someone sitting at it.

“Oh.  Hey, Nem.”  I grabbed a tissue out of a random trash bin and used it to blot the drool stai—

“Wait!  What?”

The office magician sat at my desk, head in hands, staring pensively at the wall socket.  All my hopes to terrorize were dashed at the divine sight of my heavenly dunce cap.  He made no effort to stop me as I lunged toward it and stripped it off the desk back into my possession.  I caressed the outside, feeling for any violations.  My rage subsided when I found that nothing untoward had taken place, and disappeared completely when I realized that I had no more reason for rage.

“There is nothing,” he said, his hands smashing his lips into an unwelcome kiss.

“Huh?”

He dropped his arms limply to his side and sat back in my chair, still burrowing holes with his hollow eyes into the wall.  The office magician appeared to be out of tricks.  He said it again.

“There is nothing.”  I looked at the hat cradled in my arms.  Surely he wasn’t talking about the hat, I thought.  It’s so indisputably special.

“There is nothing special about the hat,” he said.  I felt the rage returning.

“I thought it was all there.  I thought you had achieved something and the hat was the cause.  But now I know the truth.”

He whirled around in the chair and gave a disappointed, sacrificial smyle.  He shrugged and from his lips came an aberration of reality I was unwilling to accept and pretended not to project onto any thing or any one.

“It’s just a hat,” he said.

Between impaling my hand with sixteen sharpened pencils, passing out from the blood loss, being stuffed in the janitor’s closet, causing a young girl to choke on a lit cigarette, and stalking down Nem the Hat Thief and therefore the one responsible for all of these setbacks, time had been sucked out and stripped away and no matter how fast I trotted down the cobblestone path to the castledoor of the Cortex, no matter how many beads of sweat coalesced under the brim of my dunce cap waiting for their eventual morning extraction, I would arrive too late.  I would find the Cortex empty.  I would hear no irksome noises of pleasure.  I would find not even Fizz at the window, her regular station.  I would find the hatch in the floor left open.  The door with the wheel suctioned to it that the Little Man opened the previous night before Kapok gave a spiel with words I had yet to glossarize.  I dipped my feet in the dark pool.  I descended the ladder.  I heard even more unpleasant, troubling, yet far more familiar noises than laughter.  I made it to the end of the ladder.  The floor was slippery.  The air was freezing and dank.  Slurping echoed in the darkness.  As I drew near, the noises reverberated down the walls of the narrow passageway: sucking, glugging, chomping, smacking and gulping.  As I felt along the wall, a switch came under the brush of my numbing fingertips.  I flicked it upward and the darkness died in the illumination, but with a deeper darkness taking its place.

My eyes took time to adjust, but what became clear was that they were all there, hundreds of them, sitting on the floor like elementary school children huddled inside the halls on a rainy day.  They had been caught in an act that would prompt me to shout a string of words that maybe you’ll shout along with me, as if from the rowdy audience of an ‘80s hair-metal band reunion show.

“Ugh! Ew!! Holy Fuck!! What’s in that Bowl?!??!”

When he looked up from his dish, Kapok’s eyes were solid red.  His mouth was overflowing with pink goop, catching in the basin-like object between his legs, resting on a protruding, violently grumbling belly.  The rest of them – Fizz, Cotton, Baobob and Boboab, Hollyhocks, even the Little Man, and so many others – stopped their slurping and shot their heads up in my direction.  All their eyes were no less red; their mouths all no less oozing pink and purple slop, looking like hot dog smoothies not nearly blended long enough to be drinkable, and from hot dogs that weren’t prepared well enough not to include the blood and pus of whatever else goes into making those things.

“We have an impostor in our midst,” he said.

I choked on my stomach, and made slow steps backward toward the ladder.  I wished my biceps weren’t so non-existent, as I might have had a chance at speedily scaling that ladder, or at least fending them off long enough to escape without becoming the pink seepage dribbling down their chins.

“Oh, r-r-r-eally?” I stammered out.  “Wh-who?”

The Mallows rose and all pointed a finger in the direction of the impostor.  Before I shut my eyes and held on ever so tightly to my hat, I wondered if I had really seen what I did.  Just before I plunged myself in treacherous darkness, my eyes had finally adjusted to the light.  And the image imprinted on the backs of my eyelids was that of the entire band of Mallows, red eyes and wet chins, and not a single one of them wearing his or her trademark hat.  If those weren’t their hats, I thought, biting my lip and nearly shredding the dunce cap with my fingernails, then what could that have been ejecting itself from their heads?

It mattered zero.  Punishment was soon to befall the impostor.

« Spurious Endeavors Part Seven

People are not used to loving

He remembered reading this line in a book.

People are not used to loving, it’s like scoring the clay to make another piece stick.

He remembered underlining this with red pen in the hopes of drawing great themes from a deceptive simplicity.

The music he listened to was like that, the places where he walked. Deceptively simple. Take the forest for instance. Take the pine and the hollyhock and lichen and morels.

At one time, he too was not used to loving. It was a dull pace, but he could keep his balance. Even stride. Circle in the park.

The line from the book was oddly placed and out of context. This is what initially grabbed his attention. The leaves had been turning orange, but they would fade and fall from their branches. That is what anyone could expect. The spongy dirt beneath his tennis shoes. Worms unbedded after a heavy rain.

The creek in the forest had a thick wall of natural clay. He dug out a hunk of it with a sharp stick and formed a hard ball with his hands. It was just like the store-bought kind, but with bits of silt and debris. He sculpted a tiny figurine and left it on a rotted log to dry in the sun.

Now, the thought of loving someone was strangely tempting. It was a feeling he could not get used to and this is what pleased him most.

There were ways of keeping her in the back of his mind, but he was exhausted from holding her there for so long.

scoring the clay to make another piece stick

He just needed to walk a while longer. Hum a little tune across the ragged slope of foxtail ferns. There were tiny cracks forming all along the figurine as it changed color in the heat.

“Visiting time is over,” she said.

He would not let go. His eyes burned as he stared through streaking tears at the figure lying on the hospital bed. Her arms and legs were strapped to metal bedposts. Her face was pale and her eyes darted around the room. She did not know who he was. She was not his mother. But she was his mother. Her face was his mother’s beautiful face. Her smile was his mother’s beautiful smile. But she was not his mother. Still he held onto her hand.

He pulled her hand up and ran the fingers across his face, wiping the tears away. The fingers trembled but her face showed no response. He could remember all of the times she had touched his face before. He wanted her to come home, to get out of this place. She had been acting strangely ever since his father had been killed, but she was okay. She was okay. She had stopped coming home from work after that. He didn’t know where she would go but he could forgive her for that. He was sad too. He loved his father too. He felt her hand on his face and the tears would no longer come. She was okay. He knew it. She could come home now.

“She’s okay. She can come home now,” he said to the nurse. “I know she’s okay.” But the nurse was gone. He was alone with his mother in the white room with dark shadows that smelled of untainted antiseptic. His mother looked at him and then looked away quickly. When she looked again he looked into her eyes. They were blank, expressionless. Emotionless. He had never seen her this way before, but he knew she was okay. She had to be. She had to come home. He wanted her to come home.

And then the nurse was behind him again. Strong, hairy arms grabbed him and gently pulled him away. Away. Away from his mother. His beautiful mother. He wanted her to come home.

“But she’s okay! She can come home now cos she’s okay!”

“Visiting time is over,” he heard from over his shoulder. This time it was more forceful. The strong arms were merciless, unrelenting to his frenzied struggle. They pulled him out of the room, into the white hallway with the dark shadows. He missed his mother. He could see her face through the open door. Why couldn’t he stay longer? Why couldn’t she come home? He wanted her to come home. He loved his father too. Why didn’t they put him in here with his mother? He loved his father too.

He was outside. The building was big. Huge. How did he get outside? He wasn’t sure. But he was outside. The doors were closed. He looked up at all of the windows, all of the stories. He wasn’t sure which one his mother was on. He pretended that she was in a corner room on the fifth floor and he waved to the window. The building looked as if it could collapse at any time. Vines crawled up the side like snakes and disappeared onto the roof. There must be somebody in every one of those rooms, he thought. He wondered if they disappeared too. Does everybody disappear? He looked down and was relieved that he could see his arms and his legs. They were not strapped down. He was free. The building was huge.
He started walking. Where, he did not know. He felt like walking. The air was nice. He looked around at the trees. They all looked like weeping willows. He had never seen a weeping willow before. But these looked like they were weeping willows. They must have been weeping willows. The shadows were grey. It must be getting late, he thought. The shadows looked like they were creeping. They were creeping towards him, whispering to him that his mother was crazy. He looked around. Did anybody else hear the shadows? There was a nice looking old man on a bench. He had some kind of a twitch. Maybe he heard the shadows too. He whispered back: “My mother is not crazy. She’s okay. She can come home now cos she’s okay.”

The man on the bench abruptly jerked his head in Thom’s direction and licked his lips. Thom stood motionless for a moment, too afraid to move, and then he ran towards the gates at the far side of the yard. He was crying again. “My mother is not crazy!” he screamed at the shadows. He did not look back at the old man on the bench. He wanted to disappear. People disappear. Sometimes. If they want it bad enough. He wanted to disappear. He could still feel the big arms around him, choking him. He could not breathe. He wanted his mother. He wished he still had her hand. Just her hand. That would be alright for now. The tears burned on his cheeks. Burning like fire. He could not breathe. The shadows were chasing him. They were still whispering. He ran through the gates. They were open.

“Hey! Watch out kid!” the gate guard yelled.

Thom looked up and saw a bus moving straight towards him. He dived to the side of the road and landed in a flower garden. He laid there for what seemed like days. He was breathing hard and he wasn’t sure why. His mind was racing and he found himself imagining what his father must have felt just before he jumped. Did he jump? How did it happen? Thom couldn’t quite remember. He was alone. The air felt nice.

He opened his eyes. He saw the bright blue sky and the clouds. They were moving fast. Too fast. The clouds were racing. His head was spinning. The gate guard was standing over him, saying things he could not understand. He could not hear anything. Then he heard the shadows. They were still whispering, sardonically mocking him. He couldn’t see them anymore because he was outside of the wall. But he could hear them. The gate guard was still talking. What was he saying? Was he whispering like the shadows? He was. Thom grimaced and when the gate guard leaned down to help him up Thom kicked him. He was on his feet. He was running. Houses, cities, worlds flew by. Where was he? He tried to look at the street signs as they darted past but he couldn’t read them. The whole world was spinning and he was standing still. But he was running. He was in a dream. He was dreaming. He must be. He tripped once…no twice, he couldn’t tell. His knees were bleeding. His clothes were covered in potting soil. He couldn’t remember how it got there. The houses flew by. He wanted his mother’s hand to wipe the tears from his face. He loved his mother. And he loved his father too.

How did he do it? His father had disappeared. Thom knew that he had seen him. Where did he go? He ran to the front door and found it unlocked. Was he inside? All he saw was darkness. He heard his father’s voice, whispering. It was whispering things that he couldn’t understand and he could feel the world spinning but he was standing still. He closed the door so that nobody else could hear his father whispering. It was dark. The lights were off. He flipped the switch but nothing happened. He was inside one of the whispering shadows. It had eaten him. But it was his father’s voice. He knew it was. But what was he saying?

“Where are you?” Thom called out in desperation. “Why can’t I see you?”

And then he could understand. It was his father’s voice. And he could understand.

“I’m here,” the shadow said. “I’m everywhere around you.”

“But why can’t I see you?”

“Because I’ve disappeared, Thom. I’m here but I’ve disappeared.”

“I want to disappear,” said Thom. “I want to disappear.”

The shadows were silent. Nothing moved. The world stopped turning. The clouds had stopped moving. He couldn’t see the clouds, but he knew they had stopped moving. He hugged himself. It was cold.

“Why can’t I see you father? Make me disappear so I can see you,” Thom cried.

“I’m sorry son…”

The voices fell silent. All of them. Thom waited. He waited for an eternity. It wasn’t so cold anymore. He could feel heat coming from somewhere. There was a fire in the furnace. How did that get there? He looked around and saw that he was alone. It was dark but there were no shadows. They were gone. The shadows were gone.

“Father!” He cried emphatically. “Father! Where are you?”

There was no reply.

Thom gazed into the furnace. What was his father sorry about? He stared at his shoes. They were covered in mud and potting soil. His hand clutched something cold and promising. He looked behind him and could make out by the light of the furnace the marks his shoes had left on the cement floor. Then he was looking around at the room. Where was he? The furnace was in the basement. How did he get in the basement? There was a red stain on the wall near the furnace. Why would anybody splatter paint on the wall in the basement? He found the creaky stairs and slowly walked up them. The doorway at the top of the stairwell gave easily when he pushed it. He remembered that the latch was broken. The door swung open, and as it did, a strange and blinding light was uncovered. Thom left his hand on the broken door latch for a long time and stared at the blinding white light. He could see nothing but its brilliance. He could feel nothing but its sadness. He stared at the light and was entranced by its beauty and its sadness and his finger twitched and he felt the roar but did not hear it and the room was dark and the red stain on the wall was fresh and Thom had disappeared.

I was still beaming even as The Little Man eerily and portentously shifted his gaze downward to meet my eyeline – a big absentee occurrence in this vast, glimmering room – while all others persistently ignored the face people wore and instead focused on their captivating hats. A blameless act, as they all inadvertently competed for most outlandish headwear. As far as I’m concerned they all earned equal high-tier ribbons and medals.

Take Okra’s magnificent medusa-like doodad where live snakes were each other’s snacks until they slithered out the bottoms of each other, repeating this formation in a hypnotic display.

Or how about Cotton’s cannon poking through her afro of shimmery pink fluff? On the other side of the cannon barrel, a fuse was lit and sizzling with a spark that dwindled toward a destination surely to ignite the firing of some bulbous ball. This I predicted as I noticed that no one communed to her right where the gaping mouth of the cannon had been aimed.

Or the man called Baobob, with a thick block of wood strapped to his head; the one upon which his doppelganger, Boboab, tap danced.

I took special fancy to the cavernous ice caves that Hollyhocks so expertly balanced over her billowing curls. Her hand was as warm and squishy as a mound of melted blacktop-bound butter when I was privileged enough to shake it. “Burrr!” I said, lamely. If she had betrayed the forbidden code by which these hat-wearers and hat-lookers-at seemed to follow so adamantly, she may have stopped smiling and scowled at the side of my facial front, and made some effort to remove herself from my slight and painfully insignificant presence among these wonders of human flesh encasements. But she didn’t. She must have liked my bouncy balls.

For a brief but tense moment I found myself on the floor, rubble raining all around me. A hole had been blasted through one of the walls but it seemed not to perturb any one but the guy Kapok helped back to his feet, and patting the pale dust off his blue jeans.

“Oh, that’s just Cotton,” he said. I noticed wisps of smoke escaping the cannon barrel jammed through Cotton’s pink ‘fro as she held a hand to her mouth and made an “oops” face. The little girl with the alligator head on her own head shuffled by with one of those violet boxes and gathered as many bits of the aftermath as she could stuff inside. “That’s how she sprouts,” said Kapok.

Upon being left without a guide, I made the thoughtless and potentially hazardous mistake of finding that Little Man with the sunflowers blossoming from his hat (who I had overheard being referred to as Zick) and asked a question one may never consider to be so offensive as he had.

“Where might I find the bathroom?” I asked, causing his eyes to creep downward from my hat to my eyeline and I was chilled to witness within them a word flashing by as if on one of those distracting cable news tickers: “IMPOSTER!”

The word may have scurried by loudly, but he kept his lips glued shut and only reacted when a bit of sunlight burnt his cheek and he jolted to the side. “FIZZ! FACE THE WINDOW!”

“I am!” she yelped back, freeing more champagne onto the juddering floor. She knelt down and held the rim of her empty glass against the edge of the puddle. She wafted the air over it until every last droplet re-joined the respective prisons of her glass, her mouth and finally her stomach where, presumably, the champagne and all other fluids would remain until a toilet revealed its never- so-elusive self somewhere beyond the barred castledoor.

Then a mystifying and disturbing thought attacked the brain hiding beneath my decorated dunce cap. What a tantalizing tangle of threads this thought neglected to weave. “What if,” I would never dream of saying aloud, “these people never, ever use the bathroom?”

It was the sun, the actual one, and not Fizz’s headdress that had peeved Zick. He had run off to an adjacent room where I found him squatting over a wheel suctioned to the floor. He let out a grunt as he gave it a grip and tugged until it turned. He noticed me inching closer and threw up his palm.

“No, no, that’s quite all right,” he said hastily. “I know what you’re going to say, and the answer is going to be ‘no.’”

“I was only going to offer my help,” I said. “Because you’re breathing pretty heavily, and you’re sweating like a mule.”

“That’s not sweat,” he said, flustered. “It’s… it’s reproductive fluid. Haven’t you ever seen that before?”

“Not on a man’s forehead,” I said, earnestly.

The Little Man rolled his eyes. “From the flowers, Imposter.”

I felt the need to correct him. “My name is O…”

“Your name is a trifle now.”

Kapok put his hand on my shoulder again to interrupt.

“It is?” I asked. “That’s fantastic!”

Kapok hollered down at The Little Man still straddling the wheel on the floor. “We should allow the seedling to truly experience initiation, don’t you think?” The Little Man rose to his feet — and Kapok’s shins.  He spoke through clenched teeth.

“Do you really think that’s wise?”

“I do,” Kapok nodded. His arms and hat ribbons crossed. There was a silent gap into which tension leaked in droves. All the attendees had gathered around us and awaited approval from under Zick’s stagnant sunflowers.

He spoke ominously but I could tell the only person in the room he made nervous was the one whose eyes he scowled into throughout, even if he never addressed a single syllable to me personally.

“Don’t forget how all this began, Kapok. Don’t forget the murky conditions in which you were granted entry through that door. This is where all that matters and will ever matter is meant to thrive and grow into something even greater. Something unfathomable to those outside that door. You were given privilege. You were given sanctuary. Do not think for a second you can abuse what I have so willfully blessed you with. Because I can take it back in an atto. Do not forget that. I haven’t.”
The Little Man broke his stare with my eyes and stomped away, over the wheel on the floor and between the velvet curtains. We all watched as he disappeared finally into a thriving garden of soaring topiary.

“Wow,” I said. “I think I just sprouted a brick.”

“Tell him!” someone shouted and set off a chain reaction of “Tell him!”s and “Now!”s and one “Get on with it!” Kapok whirled around to face my hat again with that off-putting look on his face that I would later learn has been referred to throughout history as a “smyle.”

“Each night,” he said, eyes profulgent, “the Mallows convene in the Cortex to produce good will and cheer.  It is imperative we keep the presentation of elation at its absolute crest because the more positivity mustered, the healthier the sprouts. As sprouts abound inside the foyer, Madia gathers them up in their own individual boxes which she then places there, upon the mantle over the fireplace. This continues until dawn, when we each take a box in hand and walk together, ever so mindfully, down to the Taro where we feed our sprouts one-by-one to the Eudicot Cycloner.  After all the sprouts are devoured, the Eudicot Cycloner gives us a reading which hopefully indicates how much longer the Mallows are required to wait until the beginning stages of The Inundation are underway.”

I’m not sure how much time had passed before Kapok spoke again.

“What?” he said. “What part didn’t you understand?”

Spurious Endeavors Part Eight »
« Spurious Endeavors Part Six

My father’s panicky voice came raspily through the wall, “Dawn. Dawn!” And then a dull dead thud, reverberating through the ceramic bathtub and across the white floor. It wasn’t hard wood. It was linoleum tile. It was in the bathroom next to my bedroom and I heard my mother scuttling to the bathroom across the faded blue carpet, thok, thok, as her sock soles hit the padding covering the old creaky wood. And then she screamed.

I rushed to the bathroom door and looked in. There my mother crouched at the other end of the bathroom next to the toilet cradling my father’s head. His eyes were closed but his body was convulsing violently. She had her arm up under his chin keeping his head in a sort of chokehold and she was crying and she yelled at me, “Call 911! Alan! Alan wake up!” She was terrified. Her face was drained of almost all life and hope as she desperately clung to him, keeping his teeth from chattering and so biting off his tongue. His feet shuttered and his fingertips searched around where they lay. He looked so helpless and sick, pale as a ghost, sticky, cold, shuddering on the floor, a tearfall streaming into his hair from my mother’s cheeks. She yelled again, “Call 911! NOW!”

I ran the three feet to my dresser and dialed those forbidden numbers, those emergency numbers that are always off-limits in the suburbs where nothing remotely interesting ever happens and most people have the non-emergency police number on speed-dial so they can park their cars on the street overnight ten times a year, and when I put the phone to my ear I heard my own fast breathing come back to me through the earpiece. Dropped call. I had forgotten that that happened two out of every three calls I tried to make. My mother is screaming and yabbering in some panic language and my father is still an earthquake on the floor. I make a mad dash past the bathroom, through the hallway, to the living room where the wall phone is and pick it up. I once again dial the numbers, the feeling of awe spiraling through me as I do so, making me invincible, setting me apart as one of those code-breakers who calls 911. My fingers punch the numbers like icy daggers stabbing an endless wall of cellophane. It’s ringing, I marvel.

“Alan! Alan, talk to me! Are you okay?”

“What is the nature of your emergency?”

“Oh my God I was so scared! You had a seizure!”

“My father is having a seizure.”

“Okay. I’ll transfer you now. You have a nice day, sir.”

“What happened?” Strained, confused.

Three rings.

“What is your emergency?”

“My father is having a seizure.”

“Okay. What is your name?”

“Jeremy McCool.”

“You had a seiz…NO! Come back!”

“Could you spell your last name Mr. McCole?”

“ALAN! JEREMY CALL 911!”

“I AM! m-c-c-o-o-l.”

“Oh my God. Alan! Come back.” Hopelessness. Stirring. “Thank God!”

“Did he lose consciousness?”

“Yes.” I walked back towards the bathroom.

“Try to remain calm. Hold his chin so he doesn’t bite his tongue off.”

I nodded.

“What is your address?”

My father was dry-heaving into the toilet and then he spewed a thick clear fluid. His eyes were open. Wide open.

“Thank you, God! Thank you, Jesus!”

I gave her our address. “He’s awake,” I added. “He came out of it but he’s still shaky and puking.”

“Has he ever had a seizure before?”

“Are you okay? You’re all sweaty.” Nervous laughter. “You need a shower.”

“No. Epilepsy runs in his family, though.”

“Okay. A unit is on its way. The paramedics should be there within six minutes. Until then try to keep him awake and keep him calm. If he goes back into it, pull his chin up so he doesn’t bite off his tongue.”

I replaced the receiver and peered into the bathroom. My mother was sitting against the old wall heater with her arms around my father’s chest and she was smiling and trying not to panic.

“An ambulance is coming,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Babe, can you get up? Try to get up. You need to brush your teeth before they can see you.”

“I don’t know. Ooooh…” More dry-heaving.

She used to make me brush my teeth before going to the dentist to get them cleaned. I went to open the door for the paramedics when they arrived and as I walked away I turned and saw that she had him standing, doubled over, but standing. He was rinsing his mouth out in the sink. My fiancé came and hugged me from behind as I let the paramedics in and she said, “You’re handling this really well. I thought it would be like the time they came for my mom. Remember? I thought they were going to have to take you away too.”

“I know. I got better, I guess.”

She hugged me from behind and put her head on my shoulder as we watched the men come and take my father to the sofa and set him down and ask him questions and we watched my mother answer them and they told her to let him answer for himself and then we watched them take him away on a stretcher down the front steps to the ambulance. I saw the red lights flashing like cherry prisms on the white door and then they were gone. The house was empty and still. Except for us. We sat down on the sofa where they had inquisitioned my father and she told me she was proud of me and I told her that I felt sick and then I got my jacket and we left for the hospital.

It turned out to be a severe case of dehydration. He was fine the next day.

Strolling into the office the next morning, I realized I’d been awake for nearly 20 hours without a nap break. This was absolutely unheard of! Not for long, however, because by the end of the day everyone had heard about it. I must have told that story to the entire office. No one seemed very interested, in fact some people maintained their busy state of work as I went on and on exclaiming gibberish about the precious time I had.

“The Hats!”

“The Crabulex (or what have you)!”

“The Edible Weiner (or something or other)!”

“You wouldn’t believe it!” I howled to Betty, who I’m certain heard me, though I don’t think the person on the other end of her phone line did.

I managed to avoid my desk the whole day as I had been quite the traveling storyteller.  When I finally did return, I caught a certain office magician rummaging through my address book.

“There’s nothing in there,” I said. Ever so startled, the office magician fumbled the book and uncharacteristically sent the blank cards flying through the air.

I’d have asked why he was there or what he was doing, or if he would also like to hear about my immeasurably enchanting evening, but he scurried away so fast all I could say was, “Hey, you forgot your hat!”

When he didn’t return for it, I rested it on the ledge of my cubicle. “Psh, more like a cereal bowl,” I muttered under my breath with derision, “for a baby… ’s lizard,” I added.

The previous night, when I asked the hat-adorned heads’ room about the rotting and maggot-infested pet carcasses outside, I was met with truly empty blinks.  Then came an interruptive noise from below.

“Oh my!” shouted The Little Man. Everyone turned toward him and waited as though he was ready to impart some grand revelation. “Do you realize what I just said?” Everyone shook their hats.

“Organized yet chaotic? I never thought that anything with those characteristics could be so organic?” He was quoting himself. Every one waited still. “Organic! A hybrid marriage of those two respective cognitions!”

The whole room erupted in cacophonic glory. I had no choice but to imitate the same noise.

I had been able to deceptively pass off my understanding of that noise through accurate replication.  It was a task I repeated for my office co-prisoners.  “What do you suppose that noise is?” I asked each person in the office when I arrived at this point in the story. The answers I extracted were as interesting as they were conflicting.

“Hunger?”

“I don’t get it.”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!!”

“Sounds like you were at some big orgy. Can I have the address?”

I told my crestfallen co-workers about how Kapok, the tall one, guided me across the vibrating floor to each person and their subsequent hats. In shaking their hands – or bowing just slightly enough not to disturb our tips – I noticed that nobody ever looked me in the eye. Their gaze stuck permanently above my forehead as if they all had some unfortunate and debilitating upward esotropia. If anyone had the inclination to glance anywhere below the brim, they might have recognized me as the vagrant who appeared the previous night, when the Little Man with sunflowers growing out of his hat opened the door, took one venomed look at my bare head and ordered me to go rusticate myself.

I told my disenchanted co-workers about how as I got the full tour from Kapok, that same Little Man was busy using a hanky to mop up the champagne spills from Fizz’s backside . As he crankily whipped the hanky to the side of her silver sparkling backside in an attempt to dry it, he muttered as though this was a regular activity for him, however repeatedly or unappreciatively he partook of it. “If you didn’t drink so much, you wouldn’t spill so much,” he spat.

I told them how I spent the entire night with my whole body humming. Surely it was due to the floor being set permanently on vibrate, but even if it hadn’t I still would have felt positively radiant.

I told them with apprehension how, during a moment of downtime after Kapok was pulled away to resolve a matter in the floating kitchen, my urethra began to itch. “This is common,” I said to the glaring nearby attendees as I blatantly scratched. I glided awkwardly to the front of the room where the Little Man remained.  He had been trying to convince Fizz to dance with him, but only after every time she politely rejected his request.

“Excuse me,” I said, tapping the Little Man’s shoulder. “Where might I find the bathroom?”

I told my unappreciative-of-good-stories co-workers about how The Little Man’s pinching and tugging hand froze after being served my question. The rest of the room around him continued to buzz with fun and good cheer as his little hand left the vicinity of Fizz’s tailbone. I had unknowingly but rightfully kept my voice to enough of a minimum to prevent the inclusion of others’ attention in asking my, up until now, highly normal and innocent question. His beady eyes became unstuck from my forehead where they had been resting all evening. They began to drop. Slowly and knowingly, they got beadier as they descended over the candy bits and over the pine cone.  They squeezed beadier still as they climbed over the shot glass of urine and over the stripped animal hide. His eyes quaked in their sockets as he forced them further than they’d ever gone before: over the brim of the cap, over my raised caterpillar eyebrows, and deeply, icily into my eyes.

I told my nescient co-workers about how at that moment, one of the Little Man’s sunflowers wilted, and I knew it was no coincidence.

The story I had been telling of the night before took a grim and perilous turn when I arrived at this twisted, shocking ruffle of a reveal.

“Co-worker.” I said in a hushed, ominous tone. “There was no bathroom.”

Spurious Endeavors Part Seven »
« Spurious Endeavors Part Five

One of my co-workers is an astoundingly brilliant musician.

His name is Nem. He is a Hispanic albino, and as far as I know they don’t have a word for that yet. Every morning he strolls through the office, cubicle to cubicle, brandishing his instruments and showing off his latest trick. He is self-taught and has no regard for the books one may be recommended in order to improve one’s skills. He wears no flamboyant uniform, dons no top hat (except when it’s a prop in his trick) (and even then, it’s puny stacked against those belonging to the fascinating group whose door I knocked on for an hour the previous night while wearing my very own hat, which also indeed dwarfed his), and he never has anyone to back him up during his acts.

“How’d you do that?!” People would marvel after his big finishes, which were always magniloquent. Nem would give an annoying, smug shrug as if to say, “Can’t tell ya that, Betty.” And then he would say something equally annoying like, “I can’t tell ya that, Steve.” He infuriated me with his apparent genius. “No books taught me what I know today,” he’d say. It sounded preposterous!

One day I was desperate to understand his pattern of thoughts: “So you just, what, dreamt up this idea one day, and picked up one of your doo-hickeys and fiddled about until you came to some harmonious result that you would then, I dunno, struggle with and practice ‘til you got it right enough to bring in here and demonstrate for all your co-workers so that they’ll, like, applaud you and congratulate you on being able to wow them to the point of admiration and acceptance?”

Nem made a strange face, like the ones made by the people in hats but without the accompanying even stranger noise, and nodded vigorously.

“Why would you do that?” I was dissatisfied with his oozing complacency.

“Can’t tell ya that, Ace.”

Nem always had some nickname for everybody in the office, and most of the time they were as boring and lazily thought up as their real names.

Oh, did I say he was a ‘musician?’ I meant, ‘magician.’

Nem is a magician, not a musician. Although he once argued that musicians can too be magicians, and that one isn’t exclusive from the other. What was he prattling on about? Wielding a guitar is not the same as waving a wand. Right?

“A magician’s wand and a conductor’s baton are virtually indistinguishable,” he’d say, but I couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly talking about trains.

“Whatever, Nem.”

The first time Nem caught a gander at me and my new hat, he ambled up to my desk with vacant hands. He was between tricks and still finalizing his latest behind closed doors, so he had nothing that day to offer. For once it was my day for tricks.

“Magnificent!” he exclaimed, keeping his eyes high above my forehead. Others gathered around him, peering over his shoulders at the sight which managed to impressively impress the known impresser. The others glanced at my hat which resulted in their faces contorting to typical and familiar shapes: that of disappointment, misunderstanding, and the unspoken declaration of the word “weirdo.” When they returned to their desks almost immediately, Nem remained. His chest and shoulders bordered on heaving with excitement. His eyes were misty and large as saucers, and they rarely fell under my hat. When they did, it was only to ensure who was under it; the one deserving of the compliments he was intending to pay. “It’s staggering, really. I’m absolutely perplexed.”

I took this as a positive even though I couldn’t discern why, or which part had struck him so deeply. “You’re virtually indistinguishable from the person you were yesterday!” he said.

“What is this over here?” he asked, pointing at one of the bouncy balls.

“How did you come up with the idea for this back here?” he asked, circling behind my swivel chair.

“Extraordinary,” he said again, still hovering and giving no indication of a hasty self-extraction. I certainly couldn’t tell him to go away, I decided. That would have robbed me of additional compliments. Besides, he asked me questions to which I already knew the answers because they were questions that had been asked the previous night, from behind the crippling mystique of that castledoor.

After an hour of importunate knocking, the little man appeared again, this time branding himself in my mind as the door man. I found out later he was not the official doorman, but only stood closest to it because his hat – of gloriously germinating sunflowers – was best planted next to the young woman whose hat produced rays of actual sunlight. And she was suitably planted next to the window for the sake of the others’ prospective blindness. Her name was Fizz.

“Kapok, there’s something happening out here.” A tall man appeared behind the little man. He was tall in relation to any other person, not just one of such underwhelming stature. He appeared to be fixated on my makeshift hat as well. It was a peculiar sight: two people of such juxtaposing height ogling a specific piece of my body, even if it were only an extension. Kapok spoke.

“Oh,” and “wow,” he said with the appropriate pause. Kapok’s hat was similarly shaped to mine though its pattern was made up of millions of tiny indented squares. Within each of them, a spectacular scene had been hand-painted. It was as though all the original masterpieces of obsolete eras in history had been shrunken and hung inside the tiny boxes in his hat. At the tip, two curly ribbons sprung outward and proceeded to imitate the motions of Kapok’s arms.

“Why, it’s the most baffling, blundering, brilliant, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!” squealed the little man. “I never thought anything so organized yet chaotic could be so organic!”

There were murmurs coming from inside the room the two men were obstructing with their bodies and the bodies of their hats. One particular aggravation, albeit minor, came in form of one of the sunflowers on the little man’s hat, which moved itself in front of my eyes no matter where they tried to escape to, blocking my view of the golden room until Kapok made a grand leap of a gesture.

“I definitely, definitely approve,” he said. “Won’t you come in?” He ushered me inside, and so did the strands at the tip of his hat.

I stepped inside the crowded room and the ground beneath my sneakers vibrated. It was a sensation that wouldn’t cease until I stepped back onto the cobblestone alleyway just outside the door. When the vibration sent me stumbling backwards, startled, everyone in the room gasped and burbled words to each other. They didn’t seem to mind that some of their ears were covered by their head wear.

“Are you sufficient?” Kapok asked, concerned, though his apprehension may have been more about regretting his own rash decision of inviting me into their elite circle than my sudden equilibrium malfunction.

“Yes, fine,” I lied, hopeful that at some point it might be true. “I just…”

“Ah,” he said, as if he anticipated what I was about to say. I didn’t have anything in mind, so it was a relief he interrupted with such overwhelming understanding. “Just a sprout,” he assured the rest of the room, who nodded knowingly and continued making that chillingly unfamiliar face.

The woman with the sunlight-expelling headdress behind me pointed with her champagne glass. “I saw it,” she said. “Back here. It just popped out.”

I turned around and felt my face begin to melt. I immediately shaded my eyes with my hand, but it was as pointless as bringing floaties to a tsunami. She knelt down to retrieve whatever it might have been that I’d “sprouted.” When she arose, the blinding rays of sunlight retreated back out the window. I could see her, but just barely through squinted eyes. “Here it is,” she said pinching something between her fingers. “A valuable nugget, I trust.”

“Surely,” Kapok said. A little girl passed by holding a small box, violet in color and its flaps open. Fizz dropped the ‘valuable’ nugget inside and I caught a glimpse of it as the little girl sauntered under my nose and placed it over the dormant fireplace, above which a mantle gave support to many identical boxes. The little girl’s hat was the front half of an alligator’s body with its gaping grimace open toward the sky.

The object inside the box – the one which my hat had “sprouted” – wasn’t valuable at all, though I wouldn’t admit as much to this lot. If they were keen to believe it was something of importance, so be it. I wouldn’t dare tell them the truth.

It was just an acorn.

The little man noticed me again squinting in the direction of the sunlight, which was never completely exhausted from the room.

“The best way to deal with Fizz is to not look at her,” he informed me.

Kapok put a hand on my shoulder. “C’mon, I’ll introduce you to everybody.”

“Just a second,” I said. The room fell disquietingly silent again. Hoping to put to rest an issue that had been bothering me quite a bit through this whole ordeal, I continued. “May I ask, what is the explanation for the heaps of dead animals outside the door?”

Their faces twisted and their capped heads rolled along their shrugging shoulders. Finally a woman with bug-eyes, and a hat that swirled around the pole which spiked upward through the center and reached all the way to the top where holographs of miniature humans were repeatedly climbing and throwing themselves down as though it were a gigantic playground slide, spoke with such innocence I had no choice but to be convinced.

“What animals?” she asked.

Spurious Endeavors Part Six »
« Spurious Endeavors Part Four

Let’s face it. No sunflowers were going to bloom out of this ancient dunce cap, and if I somehow found a way to plant seeds in it, they wouldn’t grow fast enough to my liking. I was on a deadline, I decided, and I was to complete my own version of a delectably intriguing hat by the following night.

Like an unmasked jouster, I strolled through the common the next day with the dunce cap poking out dangerously from under my arm. I nodded at on-looking strangers and shopkeepers and waved at children, no doubt putting all of them on guard. They were unaware of how I might one day be able to protect them. If my ploy were to succeed in having me inducted into the secret society of hats and laughs, I would automatically ascend to a higher realm where the most fleeting glimpse above my head would turn the most sour-pussed lurk into a believer of hope and fortitude. My mesmeric hat would charm and inspire drug addicts to put down the crack pipe, and serial killers to leave their victims’ bodies whole and intact. It would hearten prostitutes to apply for a waitressing job, or dognappers and kidnappers to pluck flowers instead (but not from someone else’s yard, or any public area where a sign forbid it). My enchanting hat would help children stay awake in class. And maybe, just maybe, it would hearten Queen Latifah fans to buy some Beatles or Kinks records. The most ephemeral glance at my hat would correct the multitude of inexcusable errors made by humans over the centuries and set them on a path of righteous and moral rectitude. My hat would exceed so highly in its majesty, that it would be the summum bonum for all who would be lucky enough to be graced by its glow.

But before that were to happen, I’d have to steal some shit and glue them to my dunce cap.

The park proved to provide a dizzying array of knick knacks and useful scraps. Children swarmed around the picnic tables for a birthday celebration. A piñata had just been slaughtered and its sweet, hard entrails were being devoured by the invitees. I swooped in and ignored the hollering of frightened parents as I scooped as many kaleidoscopic goodies as the dunce cap could carry.

I hid from the angry, sugared-up mob in the trees.  The trees which happened to present even more accessorial gems. I stuffed the upside down cap with leaves and twigs and berries, and whatever else I could find up there. At night when I heard only crickets (if I’d actually seen any, I would’ve taken them too), I landed on my feet and tore up the earth until I filled the cap with a satisfactory amount. It was then off to my office for more supplies.

I passed a wall brandishing “wet paint.”  It was a warning, but I perceived it as an invitation. I rolled the dunce cap along the wall, gathering an untidy red stripe. Pleased, I continued my mosey.

During my trek across the common toward my workplace, I wondered how a hat might ever be complete. Do they continue adding as time goes on, or is it a mark of their own limitations by how elaborate the hat comes across upon first impressions? Has anyone been turned away at the castledoor, besides my hatless self, for simply miscalculating the lavishness his or her own hat? The hats behind that door couldn’t have been more dissimilar from each other. Some were as simple as the one with sunflowers growing out of it, though that one had somehow been alive. The bodies of other hats remained stationary and purely sprung objects. If all of them had been gyrating or breathing, I wouldn’t have felt so confident in posing as one of them.

I arrived at the office at my usual time of exiting, so the place was typically empty. And by “empty,” I do mean, “open for robbery.”

The supplies cabinet was packed with paper clips, thumb tacks, rulers, staplers, pens and markers, stacks of blank paper, and enough ink to fill a lake. But they all shared a monotonous quality that no combination could eliminate, so I moved to the nearest desk. I tugged the top drawer out and a trio of yellow and pink bouncy balls, looking like miniature planets, came tumbling. I snatched them up, and fed them to the cap.

A shot glass from Ottumwa, Iowa was displayed on another desk. Snatched.

Antennas from a desktop radio. Both ears, snatched.

I moved onto the next desk where a shiny cut of jewelry was not so skillfully protected. It glimmered under the desk lamp. It was clearly an antique, quite possibly a hand-me-down. At its base was a replica of a house that creaked open and inside was a tiny black and white photograph of a stunning woman in her 20s. Her smoldering eyes made my heart sink a little, and her bare shoulders were of a smoothness I’d never before been privileged. I wondered if it was the desk owner’s mother, or grandmother, and then I noticed a pamphlet pierced to the bulletin board behind the computer monitor. The same woman from the locket, only aged about 60 years, was represented on the cover in a more recent photograph. One of her last, it would seem, considering it bore the heading: “Agnes Nkiruka Lily. April 23, 1917 – April 18, 2009.”

The pamphlet was for her funeral, to take place the following day in Hertfordshire, about a year’s walk from where I stood. I momentarily shared in the desk owner’s grief for a woman I had never met or heard of before finding her looking ravishing in a photograph inside of a locket hidden inside of an anonymous desk drawer.

Snatched.

I avoided my own desk, knowing full well how empty it was and headed straight to the restroom. I dipped the Iowa shot glass in an unflushed toilet and set it neatly down on the sink while I used the wooden point of a plunger to shatter the boxy window and hoard the falling shards of glass.

I returned to the supplies cabinet, past the ransacked cubicles, and nabbed dozens of bottles of glue. I stripped a forgotten coat off of the rack and laid it out on the floor. I dumped the cap’s contents beside me and placed my soon-to-be ticket into a world of acceptance and unfettered joy in the center of the coat. Squeezing two glue containers at a time, I doused every inch of the humongous cone. I used no system in decorating it. I followed no code. I blindly reached over to my pile of inherited goods and added one item after the other, spinning the cap accordingly. I sputtered extra glue around the rim of the urine-filled shot glass and turned it over fast, pressing it hard against the side of the cap, ensuring a regular swish back and forth inside of it as I walk.

Six hours, fifty pieces of candy, one tree’s worth of what makes a tree a tree, one wall of wet paint, one shattered window, one nugget of fashionable and expensive jewelry, two extending antenna ears, and one urine-swishing Iowa shot glass later, I placed the sky scraping point of glory atop my mucky head, and hid it once and for all.

I retraced my steps from the previous night that had lead me to the wood partition behind which they were surely still celebrating, if nothing else, themselves. The hat was heavy up there, but wore on me no more than my newfound confidence. It was as though I was walking in slow motion. Although that might have been because I was being conscious of the still hardening glue, and didn’t want any piece to fall off.
I once again arrived at the alleyway lined with towers of putrefying animals. I was cautious to avoid them, like I had been before, but as I looked more closely could see their carcasses were vibrating with the new residence of maggots, roaches, and flies. I began to tremble, losing my footing in the slippery slop of spilled blood and entrails. Who destroyed these animals? I wondered. Did they destroy each other? Or was this some insidious and intricate security system set by the hat-wearers?

I knelt beside a coyote whose ribs had been licked clean of meat. I looked into its still-gazing eyes and patted its peaceful looking head. As I lifted my hand from its skull, I brought back with it the only part of the animal that still indicated it was an animal – the poor coyote’s scalp. It had attached itself to the palm of my hand, and I don’t know if it was out of tribute, or a way to distract the group from the obvious inferiority of my hat, but I slapped the bloody end of the coyote’s scalp and smoothed it across the front of the dunce cap until it stuck.

I stepped up to the large door and, looking out from below a coyote’s shredded scalp and so much more, I formed a fist.

Knock. Knock.

Spurious Endeavors Part Five »
« Spurious Endeavors Part Three

The first notable marvel about these hats, besides the elaborate and meticulous way in which they seemed to be crafted, was their size.

I always thought the Pope’s hat never rose higher than ridiculous, but I suppose it would need to be twice as large to do so. It was clear to me, in observing this room full of jaw-dropping headwear, that there is an invisible line hanging above any hat-wearing head. The tip of the Pope’s hat pokes the dividing line between where “ridiculous” ends and “exuberant” begins. These hats reached high above that line. So high, in fact, that another line may have yet to be drawn.

“Hey, you!” There was a burst of noise before everyone fell silent. The trap doors of their mouths slammed shut and their eyes befell the dismal creature hovering in the doorway. A tiny man in a brown suit, complete with polka-dots on his bowtie, leapt off a chair and hurried toward the mistakenly ajar castle-style door. “Out! Out! Out!”

The little man’s hat was nearly as tall as his body, with sunflowers on it magically blooming before my eyes.

“Who is it?” asked a voice from inside. As the little man turned his head to respond to the uncharacteristically silent room – “Just some hatless vagrant.” – I caught a glimpse of the back of his hat where roots had gathered. It was as though the sunflowers were growing right through the top of his head and out the holes in the hat. They were overwhelmingly alive, pulsating and throbbing with such desperation; it was as though they harbored too many nutrients and not enough ways to relinquish them.

“I’m deeply sorry for the intrusion,” I said in a zombie like trance. The little man only shooed me away more vigorously, as though I carried plague, or dandruff.

“This is no place for people like you,” he spoke up to me. “Never hover in this doorway again.”

His slam was swift for such a little man versus such a heavy door. The noises that had so tantalized me continued as I once again passed the pyramids of pet carcasses, this time making no effort to mask the smell.

Another night kept up by new and confusing but fascinating discoveries. There were sights to match the sounds, and what sights they turned out to be! In my entire life, I had never owned a hat. I never fashionably capped my cranium with so much as a food bowl when I was a baby. But in this bizarre, after hours club house, it was as though a new species had evolved right under my nose. What would it take, I wondered, to be invited into such an exclusive bunch? They wouldn’t take me like this, I decided. Not so boringly bareheaded and therefore dull to the point of being offensive to the visual sense.

So I scoped my dwelling in a frothing mad panic, scouring every inch for a single hat-like article. No bowl in my cupboard was tall enough for the standards set by their example, nor were they wide enough to fit around my intolerant clumps of hair. I emptied the larger garbage container on the kitchen floor, but its mouth was too wide and swallowed most of my upper torso. I emptied the smaller garbage container on the bathroom floor and, still, the effect was less of a hat and more of a man lamely trying to camouflage himself in the trash bin aisle at Wal-Mart. Also, the stench was less than desirable.

I sat in the dark for hours, scraping my scalp to a sticky, bloodied mess. While washing them later, I watched the dirt and encrusted blood from under my fingernails mix with the running, swirling faucet water. It reminded me of my elementary school years and how nearly each day would end with this precise event. But it was never someone else’s blood I’d send down the janitor closet sink. No, it was merely my own. I’m a stumbler, like I said, and I always have been. I have since mastered my clumsy ways and you’d be surprised how seldom I abrade my flesh to the unpleasant extent of drawing blood. Whenever I keep the blood in, I come out ahead.

I remembered something else from my adolescence, albeit begrudgingly. I was never a good student, you see, and I spent most of class time asleep on my bed of books. Ms. Rubbage hardly said anything about it at first, mostly due to her suffering from a bone irregularity that caused her jaw to misalign and detach whenever overused. She chewed her meals like a sedated guinea pig. She taught the class from her desk where a microphone had been installed and her soft mumble of a voice tweeted out of speakers hanging from every corner of the room. Utilizing this setup, she would read to her students. It may have been the hypnotic ease in which her screwy jaw forced her to speak, or the fact that class began promptly at 7 a.m., but those days were spent with Ms. Rubbage narrating my dreams.

Occasionally she’d lean into the microphone and press her lips against the cold grate and do her version of shouting my name. It was usually effective in waking me up and always embarrassing. I’d sit back fast, pull the book to my nose and pretend like nothing happened.

The last time I ever fell asleep in class was the day she’d had enough. I was off in a most glorious land of driving chocolate bunnies and munching caramel-centered hover cars when the birds of rage rampaged through the fabric and brought me back to Ms. Rubbage’s dungeon and, more precisely, her shadow.

“EVERY DAY!” she yelled, suddenly standing over my desk. “EVERY DAY, YOU WASTE MY TIME AND EVERYONE ELSE’S!” She no longer needed the microphone.

“YOU HAVE OFFENDED ME FOR THE LAST TIME! YOU WILL NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING! YOU ARE SCU…”

Before she was able to make the ‘M’ sound that would effectively complete her sentence, her bottom lip had traveled to a geographically inconvenient location on her face: off of her face.

During Ms. Rubbage’s tirade, her problematic jaw had dislodged beneath her skin and contorted the spongy flesh of her lower lip and chin. Saliva poured from the gaping chasm that was once her mouth, over the jagged slope of her teeth and into the pages of my open book. To appear polite in the disfigured face of all that I’d caused, I shut the front cover.

Ms. Rubbage was out for two weeks while her fill-in, Mr. Muddin, an ex-footballer whose nose had been broken so many times it no longer worked and was only on his face for decoration, took over the reins. He was nauseating. He’d gasp for breath between sentences, and he permanently spoke in that deep nasal whine, like anyone does when their nostrils are pinched shut.

Mr. Muddin and Ms. Rubbage were dating.

He was angry with me because he thought I’d caused Ms. Rubbage’s accident. But when I insisted it wasn’t my fault, and simply God’s misunderstood sense of humor, he opened the dreaded cabinet in the back of the room – the cabinet that, when opened, made every student gasp and their knees fretfully bang together.

Mr. Muddin didn’t hesitate as he reached in and pulled from it his weapon of choice. Every head in the class squirmed on its neck to catch a glimpse of my punishment.

A ruler?

A paddle?

The lobster tank?  Which would it be?

I shut my eyes and felt Mr. Muddin’s rough fingers wrap around my cushy wrist. It tugged just hard enough to ensure I’d follow. Eyes still shut, I did. The rough fingers sprung from rougher hands that gripped my shoulders and sat me down on a tiny bench. Hot air splashed against my cheek. “You will sit here every day until summer,” Mr. Muddin commanded. When the hot air became room temperature, I opened my eyes and found myself staring at the corner of the room. The walls jutted past me, and I could hear the sniggering of my peers behind my back. Before I could guess why, I felt something hug my head and fasten there, so very tight.

“And you will wear this until the end of every day.”

As this memory cantankerously found its way to the forefront of my thoughts, I realized it brought with it to the present, a consolation prize. I found myself on my feet, sprightly and choking on my sudden good fortune. I skipped down the hall and entered a room much-neglected over the years. Boxes of useless junk abounded, but there it lay in all its potential glory, sitting in the closet on the forgotten top shelf of a rickety bookrack.

“You magnificent specimen,” I said with sparkly eyes. I took it down from the shelf and handled it so cautiously, barely disturbing the three or four new layers of dust that had caked along the surface. I put it back to proper use after all these years, replacing it to its old habitat and I stood proudly in front of the mirror.

I suddenly began to take the form of someone who might one day be accepted into that enticing set of individuals with their own individual stamp. But first, I thought, I would have to dress this thing up; make it acceptable and beautiful, no matter how hard I’d have to work to do so. Because I could not go back to that castledoor, I thought, with the word “DUNCE” printed in giant bold letters down the front of this hideous cone-shaped cap.

Spurious Endeavors Part Four »
« Spurious Endeavors Part Two

Because I managed to dodge sleep during the night, the work day was spent dreaming of tubes running from the nostrils of unconscious dinosaurs to a communal lake, the top of which had crusted over with yellow. The mountains beyond the trees were ablaze and the sky a deep crimson. The heaving bellies of behemoth beasts rumbled the earth and the yellow lake began to bubble.

A crotchety man’s voice appeared beside me. “Make a note of this,” it said. “It’ll count toward your final grade.” I turned my head and caught my reflection in the round frame glasses somehow fastened around the ancient dinosaur’s nose which appeared to be the size and shape of a bread loaf. Had I seen the reflection outside of my own perspective, I may not have recognized it. When was the last time you saw your dinosaur self outside of some amusing, boredom-killing internet rendering?

“I am awake!” I shouted triumphantly to the empty office. But it was night and everyone had gone. My achievement had once again gone unshared. Good for them! I could’ve yelled, but didn’t, opting instead to retire my pencil to its drawer and lock the doors behind me.

As I walked across the cobblestone, scratching my scalp suddenly turned to fondling the cliques of hair clumps that had segregated themselves from each other at some point during my brief transformation into a dinosaur. I stroked them with wonder, as if to get better acquainted with their new locations. Their slimy oils bathed my fingers, so I took a detour through the dicey diagonals of the back entrances of boarded up shops and eateries toward the fountain in the center “core yard” as it is misrepresented on the sign surely meant to have read “court yard.” I should know.  I approved the building plan. I did it, of course, half-blind and semi-conscious.

The fountain was asleep in its own way; even the usual ripples sent across the water possessed remarkable stoicism. Neglecting to roll up my sleeves, I stabbed the fountain pond with the points of my fingers and hid my wrists below. The sound of the splash shared a striking similarity to something I’d forgotten since the night before. I splashed again, deliberately to invoke the sound. That noise! It had returned! The one I couldn’t replicate. It was slightly different this night; heartier but imperfect, as though the noise had to pass through gobs of food before exiting the lips. I stopped splashing in the fountain and discovered the noises were not by my hands, but by others in a distance so near, I could hear additional clatter. The jangling of keys, the jingling of bells. The clinks of silverware and tableware and the slurping from what I can only imagine is glassware.

My heart began to thunder. My stomach began to rise. My legs began to inch me in the direction of the noises, for I could not bear to imagine any longer the ignorant and deceptive sights my brain had chosen to match with them. I snuck down alleys, past heaps of garbage and dumpster bins. (I could’ve sworn I saw a human foot protruding from under the lid of one). The pandemonium was nearly upon me, or rather, I came to be nearly upon it.

I held my shirt collar to my nose as I passed grotesque piles of mangled fur and bone. Dogs and cats, starved and neglected, continued to rot between the close walls of the narrow alleyway. I watched where I stepped so as not to disturb nature’s course. If I felt a squish under my shoe, I might have felt partly responsible for the atrocities taking place. I hopped and skipped and dodged the furry, red stained patches of pavement into the golden glow at the end of the gag-inducing display.

I arrived. I was successful. I removed my shirt collar from my nose and mouth. The sweet smell of fresh pastries and warm apple cider replaced and overpowered anything nearby that may have been decomposing.

A thick, chamber-like door was open a sliver and the noise was so near it smothered my senses. I was a part of it. I could see what it looked like. I could see that those deep, booming, hearty, truncated yelling spurts actually did come through open mouths, but in a fashion I had not yet been able to visualize. In the instance that this sound is made by a human, the cheeks jut out and the lips curl upward. It was horrific and new, and I grimaced for I did not understand this ghastly sight.

“Smyle!” someone inside shouted before a blast of illumination disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. I shook the momentary blindness away and moved closer to the crack in the doorway. The room was full of people, just like any other I’d seen, but something about them was different and even more disturbing than the expression they wore when they made that infectious noise. They all shared the same distracting extremity. In all designs and patterns, and of all the colors of the rainbow. Painstakingly constructed from wood, plastic, yarn, construction paper, metal, glass, tinsel, tree bark and leaves. Of steel, porcelain, fur, leather, rubber. Some shimmered in the light; some provided the light. Others reflected the light that another provided. I put a hand to my head and felt once again the greasy mat that covered it and I felt an emotion I would later learn to describe as jealousy.

All of the people inside that room wore the most lavish and extravagant hats I had ever seen.

Spurious Endeavors Part Three »
« Spurious Endeavors Part One