Spurious Endeavors or Ugh! Ew!! Holy Fuck!! What’s in that Bowl?!??! Part Six

Part Six.

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 »
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