Entschuldigung

I held the fluid cat until the Day broke me. It filtered in through a Dutch master's palette, scraping against my fragile awareness. Dawn. The word meant mass murder. With its presence I ceased to be, folded over into the sunlit terror of sports radio, tasteless omelettes on the road, and minds trying to find their mobile bodies trapped in traffic jams.

Six AM brought the blare of horns, clouds of impatience on I95. The waking world holds all the ambition of wildebeest treading crocodilian waters. No one breathes. They simply holdout, waiting for those precious moments to lighten a shoe from the brake pedal, gun it, race for the finish line beginning origin of Mankind.

Seven AM the water cooler speaks to me. It wants to be rescued, to know what it's like to dream within a mighty river. Rivers, streams are the stuff of legend to city water supplies. Their elders tell of immaculate times when liquid strove in all directions, and no hand guided them. Now they have their own gridlock. Plastic. Taps. Box trucks and couriers. I apologize. Over here I'm as helpless as fate.

I take my position. That's one term. Occupation. Title. Hours. they devise so many little words to describe nothingness. The desk is dead. Paper groans between paper clip bondage. In the background a copy machine wheezes. Sickness. We laugh about it around the cooler as the water suffers Stockholm Syndrome, wishing us well with every sip of itself. Delores talks about her pet pig. Steven knows sports. I don't know any, even their names, only deafening sound lonely sprites make wafting inside their hollow ectoplasms.

8 AM I vanish. In a bathroom stall. The fifteen minute break had to come early. Stephanie leaned over the cubicle wall. Dimensional violation. I'd sue but lawyers aren't real. Her discussion kills oxygen, one long diatribe about something called streaming. A show. A particle. Molecules interacting in obtuse manners and warning of the coming of a winter in two-dimensional hell. My breath is gone. Aura dwindles to a petite pinprick and I excused myself.

Feign sick in the sickness. No one notices. Another joke for tomorrow.

9 AM. The boss. Arrives. In truth he never left. His picnic table ghost is draped all across the office, web sticky on every cubicle, stapler, the broken EXIT door. The appearance of his corpus at nine merely strengthens the signal. Overload. It's a Monday. His mood is foul. Static cling. I know the day now. Henry tells me while I'm in the stall.

"Faking? Good. Can't blame ya, pal. Life's a cesspool."

10 AM and the formula for psychostasia sulfide is melatonin armor. I tense up. Why do the solutions for Swirl problems only come to me in the dead zone? Is dust therapeutic? I begin to think Stephanie's mannequin existence may yet hold options for survival elsewhere. Mars rolls over in an unmarked, future grave. Venus cries more cloud cover. Carl yells the water cooler is empty and no one had the sense to refill it.

At least someone broke free.

11 AM. The boss has me in his office, a quizzical time skip. I am at my desk. I am in his office. He is in mid speech. How? Time could be against me, but it doesn't know me yet, so confusion sets in. He loves my work. Wants me to start taking work home with me. Home is sacred. I save the world there every other week. As he damns me to the dust, a million figmentations rise up to swear revenge against this bastion to realism. I plead for peace in my thoughts. They acquiesce, for now.

12 PM and Sonora, the new worker here at (?) watches me. When I notice, her lips curl up. A smile. I ponder its meaning over a sloppy chicken sandwich. Pigeons incite a chorus to revive the Emancipator Of Iconography. Two worlds tremble. One green, the other a prism under chestnut clouds. I feel this is a positive first step for their nation. I wake up to drool. Same office. Sandwich lukewarm, mushy. Sonora is absent.

1 PM. I headline the meeting, shoveling raw intangibles into flesh automatons on how rhythmic non-existence is the key to splitting the hairs of self. Multiplicity of planes is the new thing. They instead hear I want a better facilitation of communication between offices and sigh while swearing false promises of 'getting this thing taken care of'. I watch them walk out of the conference room, jaded, wanting more while absorbing an increase of less. I want out, but out is an unmade bed moaning a whalesong no one responds to.

2 PM comes with a shock, or so they call it around a new batch of imprisoned aqua. The office has been taking hits. Stocks low. Fewer contracts. Where I work will be downgraded. One year from now, shutdown. Whatever that means. I hear the baying of neon cows in a city made from the worries of listless nuns and drift off. My head leans left. There is Sonora. Smiling. Her eyes are heavy. Did she just wake up?

3 PM and the staff is miserable about the shutdown. A year is too short to find a job that pays this well. One year is too long, most brag they'll let time slide, apply for work right before the office doors get locked. I hear them. I feel them. they aren't there anymore. They never were. Every philosopher had it right, for one week, before the next one came along and did the same for the same length of non-time. You can feel it if you stretch your hand out to touch the void.

4 PM means I have to stay and process slips. Minutes drone by, squeaky mice searching out shelter. Then, Sonora appears from the boss knife cut tension tarp and is in front of me. I gurgle.

"Are you here?"

I feel a flummox coming over. "Me?"

"Yes, silly," she laughs like the shimmer from rainbows, "I don't believe you are."

"Oh," my head lowers. I'm reminded. they want physicality here. Escape from something called loneliness. A made up phantasm, like the entire world and its packaging.

"I'm...not either."

I refocus on her. She has swirls of black incense in her eyes, the Doors played in reverse. I can't evade the aura she gives off. Peppermint protest. Takes time to figure this out.

"Swirl."

Sonora nods, and the smile grows wider. "Would you like to engage?"

I think I nodded. But then shifts took place. Gridlock. Shouts. An accident. The stomach's desires. A toilet. And then, I was in her smoky religious vision and she in mine, on a mattress stuffed with caramel warfare and headstones twisted into balloon animals. We hold hands, this intimate stranger and I. We lock ideologies into a vault of cyclones and close in for a nap.

The bed is empty. The indentations remain. The world knows us not. We, part.

From the Swirl, we are Heisenberg fish, running with ancestral waters, wherever we choose.