Fired up Adobe Buzzword from Acrobat.com this morning. I needed to port my login over to the new site. Plus a recent article on the Writer’s Technology Companion had me feeling guilty I’ve not given this platform much of a shake.
Of course I’ve been away awhile. I’ve been working on some hefty documentation at work. I needed a break from composing sentences–we all know how painful that is for me.
His body lay face up on the tile floor; his head jammed sturdily in the corner of the kitchen cabinets. Each of his arms spread an even distance from his torso with the hands hooked under the toe-kick. This is the way he would look to a groundling if he were flying overhead. The only asymmetry: his turned head and his scratching fingers.
This man, Travis probably, scrapes gently at the wooden edge running from his left eye to near infinity. He’s been making this one single simple movement all his life. The surface is mostly smooth but for a bit of a burr that catches his nail as he extends the tip fully. His fingerprints catch it, turning the knuckles slightly, as he contracts. Some part of his mind must be counting the strokes, must be calculating when the burr will erode completely while his finger grows fresh skin cells to replace the ones rubbed off in the process. It’s possible that there is, in fact, a number in there somewhere. This man, Travis, has no plans to retrieve it.
He enjoys the solid elevated sensation the tile provides. Travis is sure he can feel the concrete below the tile, the sand below the concrete, the clay beneath the sand, and the whole of Earth below that. He doesn’t have to imagine he’s atop a pedestal of obdurate granite. He is atop such a thing. He’s been place here personally by tearless God or fate or fucking circumstance.
The mundane cabinets balance the centrifugal exertion of everything that’s happened since it happened. Without his arms and hands under these, he’s sure he’d be pressed through the ceiling and attic and roof and into the sky. Travis is not moving his arms from their secure place just yet. He does turn his head to look upward along his anticipated trajectory. If he grows bored of the scratching–or the burr comes loose–and he has nothing better to do but be flung further into space he’d like to be able to roll to the side to align his body with the rafters so he can be passed through the softer parts. A Dole banana sticker on the underside of the counter flares in his attention.
###
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Let me. Let me. Let me!” Connie begs.
“Constance, you can’t reach the cupboards,” says Travis.
“I can reach here.” Constance dabs the sticker to the underside of the counter top and runs into the living room.
“Get back in the kitchen to eat…” Travis gives up this time.
###
His body lay face up on the tile floor, but now he’s curled and sobbing. The floor does not move nearer the ceiling.
Word count: 508
Day 238