Away and Away Again

Tonight they sing at 8PM, then on a plane by midnight. They wake up in New York and dash to the 6x10 room. Shortly after, they speed off to Rome. Good luck tracking them down. Feel free to email, call, or send up smoke signals. Some day they will stop and sit and you can find them then.

Couch Nap

He once asked her if they could sell the bed and replace it with a couch. She refused, citing the cost of the bed, the comfort of the mattress, the arrangement of bedroom furnishings. He shared with her all of the comfortable naps he had had on couches -- the most comfortable, in fact. He had never heard of couch bugs, either. She still denied him. He surrendered to the eternal sleeping place: the bed.

This conversation came to mind as he stood at the top of the stairs and watched the movers toss his mattress down the stairs. The mattress did not tumble end over end as cartoons once taught him it would. Instead, it bounced slightly, then slid to a stop at the bottom. He had seen the residents of this building, stepped past their dropped coffee, scoffed at their spilled paint, wretched at the waft of dog urine (it was dog, wasn't it?). Even without a microscope, he had a good idea of what debris, fungi, and bacteria would latch onto the mattress.

Now he could make his case for a couch. No more filthy mattress, only cozy couch. His mind darted to gratitude at not having a couch to toss down with the mattress. His precious couch would have been made into a dirty stair sled. Bastards. The time of couch approached, he could feel it. Throw it all down the stairs, mover men! He cared not for the day of couch was nigh. The imagined promise of a couch so overwhelmed him that he fell asleep at the top of the stairs. No one thought to wake him, they were too busy destroying his possessions.

The Spider That Killed Thanksgiving

More on this later...