A Morning
The sun was a bastard for rising so early. Jamie Watkins, splayed askew below the weight of sweat-drenched sheets, contemplated whether this act was a purposeful provocation. He felt the sun’s warmth seep through the windows, and shifted the dampened sheets uncomfortably. He had sweat all through the night again, something his physician had sworn was finished. He would have to call and schedule another appointment. Now wasn’t the time.
He lifted the heavy, dirty sheets off his chest, and slid his legs out slowly to hang along the bedside. His feet touched the ground, feeling little strands of carpet meander their way through his tired toes. It was a pleasant greeting, and the edges of his mouth turned upward in a bout of little heavenly praise. The tail of a cat drifted past his leg, only slightly stimulating the dew-touched folicles. Sensation was still only slowly proceeding, and with head bowed it seemed to accept the tail with a mild and timid raise of an arm.
Jamie was always slow to get up. His cat Lucas, a tabby in the upper-mid range of the feline BMI, flopped around on the carpet as if to entice Jamie to stand and draw forward. Lucas stared with eyes reflecting the sunlight from the un-curtained window, and his stare developed the sort of glassy look one sees on the eyes of the comatose or the disingenuous. Jamie wondered if Lucas wasn’t similarly disposed.
Rising slowly from the bed, Jamie felt his knees straighten and protest slightly at the expense of effort. He wasn’t in bad shape, if anything he was fairly fit, but his legs seemed at all times to murmur curses and profanities towards the waiting world. It was in this mindset that they protested and then fell quiet as Jamie stretched and began the quiet shuffling commute out of his room.
Lucas followed closely, entreating Jamie to refill the food bowl now sitting empty just outside the kitchen. He moved forward, and back, and along Jamie’s path, hoping at each intersection to derive an affirmative response. The response he received was little more than a few muttered words along the lines of “shut up, cat”. But without the requisite English skills, he assumed it was something pleasant.
The noise of cat meows now replaced with sounds of eating, Jamie found himself still damp and drifting towards the shower. The shower head loomed overhead as he approached it, and after a quick undressing, stood directly above as if asserting dominance. Jamie didn’t notice, or care, and his mind went to thoughts of calls to physicians, and whether those particular physicians should be told off. The water seemed to make its way into his brain, and soon he was thinking of sailboats, and the cost of buying one, and the impossibility of owning one, and the prospective joy if that impossibility were ever reached.
The rest of the morning was spent in that way; mind sliding back and forth like unsecured boxes on the deck of the Maybeth, a name he settled on sometime during a vigorous brushing of teeth. He would take it out to sea, and drop anchor somewhere pleasant and remote. It wouldn’t matter if his skin were damp, and he’d swim every day. He could fish when he wanted, and break coconuts, to use as a food source, or an instrument. He day-dreamt now of clacking them together, and for the first time all morning broke into a full-fledged smile, chuckling to himself as he noticed his own demeanor. He looked up at the mirror and laughed.
He had, at some point, stopped paying attention to his brushing, and he saw now a ring of foam had formed around and over his lips, giving him the look of a dog, rabid and mange-ridden. He took some water from the faucet and removed the bits of toothpaste foam, thinking that this may very well be the highlight of his day. Spitting the rest of the toothpaste out, and taking in some water soon to follow suit, he remembered instantly the business of the day. Today, he had to fire people. Not just a few firings. He was a lower-level department head, well, Executive Vice President of Shipping and Receiving. And today, it fell upon him to announce a new round of layoffs.
The meeting where he’d been told wasn’t a pleasant one. His superiors and equals, arrayed around an oblong wooden desk, sat in varying degrees of discomfort. For half, it was a sort of solemn frustration, for the rest, a concern that this was perhaps the meeting for their own sacking. Not a pleasant place to be.
Jamie hated layoffs, and he liked the people he worked with. But he’d been told in terms so clear you could drink from them that either he layed off 30% of the department, or he was out. As much as he hated layoffs, he hated being fired more.
So, he shuffled to his room, and stepped into his trousers, and wrestled on a shirt. He wrapped a tie like a loosened noose around his neck, and fidgeted and fixated on varying details for several minutes. Lucas had returned, and now curled and caressed his way between Jamie’s legs. Jamie could see bits of cat fur sticking, clinging fatalistically to his pant legs. He shooed Lucas away, and reached for the nearby lint roller. Rolling first calmly and then furiously at his pant legs, he acted in sudden fervor against the lint. But it clung, and wouldn’t let go, and after minutes of this frantic combat, Jamie ceased and accepted that maybe it wouldn’t come off right now. He sighed a sigh of contemplation and resignation, and finally, donning his jacket, made for the door.
