If there’s one thing you should remember about me, it’s that I’m flat out nosy. I’m the sort of person who will stop everything to stare out the window if I think something interesting might be going on. But you know what? I know how to city, and rule number one is: never make eye contact.
So when I heard someone shouting, I just kept my eyes on where I was going and hurried into my building. For all I knew, they could have been yelling at me, and anyway, never make eye contact. There was a nice rhythm to the yelling, a little like a talk-radio type rant.
The sound dissipated as I went up the stairs, held out by the awkwardly placed wooden doors. After two years of working in this building, I still don’t completely have the hang of opening a door mid-flight.
By the time I reached the kitchen, I could again hear the steady stream of curses. “Wow, this guy is mad,” I mumbled to myself as I frolicked over to the windows. From here I had a birds eye view of the pate of his head, as well as his lack of a companion. That’s right, he was yelling at nobody. Metaphorically, I like to think that he’s yelling at the city, at humanity, at the universe; but it’s that kind of thinking that gets me in trouble. So, feeling his ennui, I went and put my sandwich in the fridge.
In between meetings and in the midst of starting the billing cycle for the month, I kept thinking about the man outside. I work in an engineering office, so, if you will indulge me for a moment, there's a swirl of logic and numbers surrounding me. Logic is math with words, and music is numbers, and everything can be broken down into numbers; except when it can't. I could tell you that the man outside my office was schizophrenic, and I might be right. But he could also be a prophet of sorts, someone who can see the human condition in its entirety, and simply can't deal with what he's seeing. Maybe he broke the cardinal rule, and made eye contact with all the tragedies stacked up on top of each other.
On the bus home from work, I sat across from a man who was eating a chicken leg. I stared at my phone and tried not to giggle. The bus filled up, but the chicken leg kept its seat. No one wanted to ask him to move it.
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I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, but I've been working on Murder in the Ferns. I actually have a ton of blog drafts, including one about the Easter Bunny that just got a little too dark. I started on another short story as well, called Alys in Wonderland. I bet you can't guess what it's a rewrite of.