SSDD
Today is a brand new day, just like the millions of other days you’ve tucked in as postscripts, crumpled at the bottom of the trash can. You’ll know when it’s been too long when the can starts to overflow with the dead bodies. You button your shirt and think about the journey you must make: you must travel for five minutes to reach the subway, where you will commute for seventeen point six minutes before walking another four point three minutes to get to work.
Numbers are lines and curves that if you bend hard enough, you’ll produce calculated screams and streams of nonsense on Microsoft Excel. You once tried to tell Johnson your theory on numbers but he’d only said, "Numbers don’t scream’. Smith in the cubicle over had poked his head and recommended you pursue poetry instead. You don’t know if you can do poetry; poetry seems like it can only be written by people who actually have things to say.
You fiddle with your tie, straighten out your suit jacket. When you walk out, you see a box of Trix perched there on the table. It leers at you. You leer back, taking out a bowl from the cabinets and retrieving a spoon from one of the drawers. It comes naturally, the movement embedded in your muscle memory. One day, you’ll be eighty years old and you’ll forget about your mother and the lover you had who left you for a more interesting person but you won’t forget that silverware is located in the second drawer to the left. The thought sends a strange feeling scuttling down your spine so without further ado, you retrieve a jug of milk from the fridge. You pour the milk into the bowl first. The milk swirls inside and hums at you. "Mmmm," it says. "Mmm."
"Shut the fuck up," you say back and upend the box of cereal into the bowl. Glistening rainbow balls scatter across the milk, like footsteps across a pond. They dye the milk ghoulish colors, grotesquely crimson and turquoise and orange. You haven’t seen fireworks in a long time because you’ve had no one to see it with. The rabbit on the cereal box shrieks in laughter. You question why the artist hired by Trix cereal decided to draw the rabbit’s eyebrows disconnected from its face. Meanwhile, the rabbit howls in glee: "Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids!" Maybe the rabbit is a pedophile or maybe the rabbit is a disillusioned adult who divides its time between getting wasted in bars and going on magical journeys with whitewashed children.
You finish your cereal listening to the cackles of a cardboard rabbit. You walk to the subway, paying attention to the landmarks signaling your descent: the construction, a giant mass of screeching limbs and metal maws; the fire hydrant that stands there on the intersection, its arms lifted into the air, hollering, "Praise the Lord, Jesus Christ!" You go down the stairs and you wait for the subway to come hurtling through. All the masses flood in.
Many things happen on the subway. It’s as trippy as hell. White noise filters through the speakers and the woman who announces stops keeps coughing in sputters. Once, she coughs so hard that her intestines start leaking through the speakers. You watch as blood seeps down the walls of the subway. The riders are motionless in a tide of red. They all have wide unblinking eyes that are fractured by twenty carat rubies, jaws that hiss and click. One of them gets up to dance, wings clacking. Some grumble, snakes tumbling out their mouths and black moons shivering down their bodies. There are a couple quiet ones too, with wrung out flesh and cement sinew, that smell of cigarette smoke and rancid piss.
Sixteen point seven minutes later, you exit the subway. Sounds taste tinny on your tongue, smells curl inside your ear holes, taste moistens the nose. You think back to the empty bowl and the spoon and you wonder whether they are touching each other, sensuously, vigorously. Do they feel intimate? Are they holding one another tenderly? Are they so close that the distant world can be reinvented? At least they have each other.
Two point one minutes afterwards, you reach your company. It’s a massive affair. "The job you’ve always dreamed of," they say. It has TV screens for windows, stuck together with paperclips and pieces of unpopped bubblegum.
You climb up the stairs in a dream-daze but you are not alone, followed by the giggling of mammal pedophiles, a train of swaying intestines and subway-goers. Nobody says anything as you pass by their cubicles. They’re bent too far down over their papers to notice.
You start crawling up, your skin shriveling as you crawl. When you look back, you see an exoskeleton of your body lying behind, a husk of your old self made of crinkling cellophane and button eyes. It’s swallowed by the grand parade. Good riddance. You are made of road-kill and you walk on bones made of syringe needles. Voices swirl around you. You think you have passed the seventh floor, which you work on, so you move higher until you reach the roof.
Everything stops. The rabbit lays down and its teeth pop out of its mouth, skittering across the floor in giggles. Intestines crumple into leaves. The trash can is broken. Dead bodies are inside of it. Dead bodies are inside of you and they rot into ashes, smoldering fractals and charcoal plains and your state of nonexistence.
The you on the roof spreads its arms wide. It falls and it falls and it falls but you never hear it hit the ground because at nine eighteen again, your day will start over to the sound of clashing cymbals and calculated screams.
“Poor bastard,” says Johnson, looking at the body.
“Yes,” agrees Smith. “I suppose he just couldn’t take it anymore.”