I wake up and jolt out of bed into a standing position, one hundred jumping jacks right off the bat, hoo-rah, I learned that exhortation from my brother who got kicked out of the marines. I would have joined the marines, but I decided to show solidarity with my brother and all that. The sacrifices one makes for family. Then push ups, I don’t even count them, I just do them until I fall down, exhausted, and then I stand up and pace back and forth real quick and angry, leaning forward, and just work myself up and get super fucking pissed, and then do it over again. When I fall down the next time, I’m livid, I go look myself over in the full mirror and spit at my image’s face, watch the spittle drip down across my chest. “I’m scum,” I think to myself over and over again. “If you can’t do some more motherfucking pushups, I’m going to smash the shit out of you like that scene in Apocalypse Now,” I say out loud to myself in a menacing tone. I take that back, it’s beyond menacing, it’s barely human, it’s a growl, more beast than man. Then I get back down on the ground and do it again. By this time there’s a healthy trail of green snot running down my face and into my mustache, I don’t worry, that’s cool, just a little sinus infection never hurt anyone, capiche? But it doesn’t stop this time, its like my nasal cavities are rifts in space-time leading to other universes, and those universes are just one huge sinus infection pouring out my nose. At first, I ignore it, do some deadlifts, but it pours out even faster, and more voluminously. It gets all over my hands and dries out and cements them to a pair of 30 pound dumb bells I was pumping. I scream for help, but nobody can hear me. I run to the door, but I can’t manage to turn the knob with the ‘bells in my hand. Panting, I do the only thing I can do, I start pummeling the thick oak door, and crack it open slowly. It doesn’t take long (I’m totally in shape) and I’m out on the street. There’s some lady walking her two dachshunds, when they see me they run in terror. By now, I am completely coated in green snot, but it doesn’t slow me down, in fact, I feel invigorated. The mucus coats the soles of my feet and allows me to sort of slide along the ground while I throw my weighted arms forward to gain momentum, all while getting a good pump going. I catch up to the lady in no time, the dachshunds make a brave stand, but it doesn’t matter, they’re quickly suffocated in ropes of mucus pouring from my body. I try to tell the lady what happened to me, but she screams and tries to pepper spray me, but it can’t get through my mucus barrier. I try to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, but I do it too hard and crush her, she falls to the ground, It must have happened quickly, but when I remember it, it’s in slow motion. Too late to save her, I bend over her body as the cursed mucus envelops her whole body, as a fly stuck in sap. One day, I think, as I weep, her body too will be preserved thus for future generation to turn over and marvel at, as the sap turned to amber holds the fly as a trinket for a child to turn over in his finger. In its futile terror an unnamed but timeless moment never quite passes. I weep as the mucus overtakes me too and turns hard and crusty. If I kept moving, I might have evaded it a while longer, but my will is not so strong as it was at the day’s beginning. I crumple to the ground and let it harden around me. I weep, but my tears are not preserved, as my body will. They will be absorbed into the substance of the mucus and spread out within it. To the future, I will have accepted my fate stoically, face uncontorted by fear, waiting just as placidly as the fly, the woman, and those two brave dachshunds, bearing their open jaws in contempt of death, in contempt of time itself. Hoo-rah.
Good stuff, Daniel!
ReplyDelete-Jacob