Assorted Donuts
$4.20
Earl Mason is still seeing patterns. When the cat has rubbed her cheeks on every surface she desires, she slinks out of range of Earl's hands and abandons the petting pattern for this morning. Earl wonders how many times he could be present for Jaber's petting pattern, if he allowed himself to sit in front of the fireplace all day. Jaber slinks away like her elastic snapped - she's switched over to a new pattern now, something a little more layered than the petting pattern which involves a stop to her food dish. But this stop is one of several nodes Jaber will be visiting, and her walk to the food dish, across the kitchen linoleum, involved a novel path, if you trace it to the square millimeter. Furthermore, Earl thinks, she never ran a petting pattern quite like that before. No, there were differences. He caught more fur in his hand that time, he became a human catbrush, also picking out crumbs and plaster-dust from the thick fur. He wonders how Jaber's fur stays so glossy despite all the crap that gets caught in it. Must be good cat food. He should order another life's supply, in case he gets another life in this life.
Today he is going to receive his assorted donuts. Six of them. He is not Bob the mustard-stained man, and his imagination is tame, but he isn't lame, he walks, and his cat does the talking, he just can't figure out what it means yet, and he's in no hurry to.
But, living in an alternate reality, someone across the divide endures a cramp that pulsates through bowels and stabs into the chest, groaning gas squeezing nerve cells against biological banks - and whoever this is, he is connected to Earl in some nervous way. Earl wonders if this guy is plagued with virii, or is he just another normal aching paining depression feigning fuck? He doesn't know who he is himself, so the identity of the other is pretty much an enduring mystery.
Earl puts the lie to bed, liking the sound of his own name and hating it all the same, lying in metaphors and soft-downy contradictory filth. He remains above the bed frame, on top of a massive mattress, in an avalanche of assonance, chemically okay, for now. Fresh linen, a bed in the living room, and a roaring fireplace, and Jaber, off in another pattern, Jaber walking through the cat door to the outside, perhaps to get hit by a car on the highway, but Jaber is probably not a part of that pattern. Jaber will be back to be petted.
Earl had been a Mason but he doesn't remember very much about what it meant, conveniently for a writer on the other side of the divide. Earl is deciding to be content. He unbuttons his long white sleeves at the wrist and stretches his arms behind his head. White lies, light lies. Lies are life, and he's swallowed the last of his guilty pride.
Not far across the highway is a postcard scene, a
White lies. Lie down, Earl. Yes, you can dream. Dreams are where the frontier is, and you don't need zopiglonger. Cannabis robs you of your dreams. All you need is that smooth mattress. And remember, the donuts are on their way, in an unmarked, clear, plastic bag. An assortment. You will change your setting, and then you will eat them.
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