DA LI JE ONO

Work calls me on a Saturday. They can't find the country ham. It's in the fridge. I tell them it's there, and they are then able to recognize it. Fatah is running a leaf blower three inches away during the phone call. I hang up.

I'm still sick. I felt headachey when I got up, but not horrible. Then it's like I remembered something and the fatigue shot back through me like a vaccine. Curing me of any ambition. I'm a rat at sea on a piece of floating wood, passing out, waking up, watching the land of my life get further away as I get drenched and then cooked over and over by the waves and the bastard sun. Fungus from the wood is reprogramming me, replacing my cells with its rank bloom. I've been dreaming, tossed in my sleep. Themes all knotted together like an octopus in tetany, in freak spasm. Familiar faces who were secret encounters, incognito cameos earlier in the story, now revealed as agents in secret roles, filling as many holes in the mechanic as they then create. Lines of narrative, world tracks in a fever bulk. But a cold fever. No gauze, just razor brite.

Yesterday I forgot to take the cats back to the vet for their second shots. I will have to call and tell them I have been horribly sick. They'll understand. They'll let me off the hook.

I get back in the bathtub. I'm not even really sick. I just don't have energy. I keep thinking of Peter Watts' parable of the woman who died of thirst, not because she couldn't see the water faucet, but because she couldn't recognize it.

I let the water burn my feet. I just keep them in there, burning, getting redder. The nerves are like pampered slaves, reluctantly and with much shuffling of feet, carrying their message of banal pain to the big house. Infoweb. Neobiology. Shunt topology. Knot theory. All happening serially with the pig blood, rat blood, bird blood pooching out my body meat.

Somehow, nothing really changes. Things just become less and less recognizable to me.

The one thing I keep coming back to-- of the pistol gagging me, of the maybe tears it would bring to my eyes, of the romance of the clitoral trigger attached to the phallic weapon, and sucking it, fingering it, like the last lover. It's like hugging a pillow, to imagine it.

Zzzz