When my alarm clock went off this morning I found it impossible to believe that it was actually morning. I reached over and grabbed my alarm clock, having just turned it off, and turned it toward me. I was hoping to find that there had been a mistake. I was hoping that it was really four or five in the morning - that I had just messed up when I set the alarm. I was wrong.
It was already seven o’clock. I thought for, oh, about fifteen seconds, and decided I was going to sleep for a while longer. I would be late for work, that was obvious, but if me walking into the office around 8:30 or 9:00 turned even one head then I should start sleeping even later; there hasn’t been a day this year that I have shown up to work on time.
As I lay there, trying to fall back to sleep, but trying not to fall all the way back to sleep – so that I could make sure and wake up at a somewhat reasonable time – I drifted in and out of wakenness.
Starting to fall asleep, but not yet all the way there, I heard a young voice cry from outside the apartment, “Help me! Help me!” And there was violent banging on my front door. Awake, I was worried for the child outside my door, but it seemed to me it had to be a dream.
Still, I wasn’t exactly sure, and something inside told me that I should go check to make sure everything was alright. My eyes impossible to keep open, I heard the child yell again, this time as if responding to someone, “Yeah right! Help! Help me! Please open the door!”
Waking again, I couldn’t help but feel that this might really be happening. It took every spoon full of determination that I had in me, but I got out of bed and walked to the front door.
Wearing only my boxers, which happened to not even be doing a very good job of covering me at that moment, I decided to look through the peep hole in the door. I couldn’t see anything. Not that I couldn’t see anyone outside, I couldn’t see anything, just blackness. So I was going to have to open the door if I wanted to make sure of what was going on.
I opened the door a crack to look out, but I didn’t see or hear anyone. I opened the door a little more and stuck my head out. If there had been a kid looking for help outside this door, they had either found it, or had been found by whatever they were running from. Besides, there was probably not a child to begin with.
As I walked back to my room, having decided that I was up now, and that I should probably just take a shower, I noticed that my pinky toe, the one on my right foot, it felt of pins as if it was asleep.
“Wake up sleepy head!” I screamed as I prepared the shower. “If I have to be awake, then so do you, Mr Pinky-toe. This is a team effort we are shooting for, after all. We’re either all awake, or all asleep. Everyone else in this tired body is awake, so wake! and join us.”
As I stepped into the shower I wiggled my right foot and toes around a bit to get the blood flowing.
I, well, I am most defiantly not among to breed of what is referred to as morning people. Mornings, for me, are inherently bad – evil, even. At work, if someone asks me how I am doing, and it is before the hour of noon, I usually respond simply with the quip, “It’s morning,” and by raising my coffee mug, if it was handy, with a slight shrug.
I find it unfair that society has somehow decided that everyone should be morning people. I found it a bit ridiculous, actually, that anyone should have to be at work at eight in the morning, and functioning well enough to be a productive member of the corporate team.
When had this revolution occurred? When had the morning people won this war? And can the rest of society overcome this a.m. terrorism that it has been tormented by for so long?
These are the kinds of thoughts I think in the shower in the morning. These and thoughts about how there is no way I will make it through the end of the day still breathing.
Under the running water I slowly came to life. As I proceeded with the usual shower chores – washing my hair, washing behind my ears and such – I grew worried that my little pinky toe was still asleep. I worried about it, but not too much. That is, not until I got down there to the washing of my feet bit, and as I looked I found that my pinky toe wasn’t asleep – my pinky toe just wasn’t. I mean it wasn’t fucking there at all!
I’m not talking about one of those cool alien abduction things where my pinky toe is missing and it looks as if my pinky toe was never even there. No, I am saying that my pinky toe wasn’t there anymore, all that was left was a cauterized nub – and you have to wonder how something like that can happen.
I was so surprised by this that I pulled my foot up toward my sleepy eyes to make sure I wasn’t just seeing things. As I did this I was thrown off balance and fell backwards out of the shower - half pulling the shower curtain off the rings and about an inch away from the toilet doing real damage to my cranial member.
Wet and hurting from falling on my ass out of the bathtub, and still holding my foot as close to my face as I could get it, I couldn’t move for a moment. When I did, when I could finally move again, I did.
I jumped up as fast as I could and ran out of the bathroom into my bedroom. There I grabbed the covers of my bed and flung them back as fast as I could. No blood, there was no blood on the sheets.
“The – the – wha – the, what the hell happened to my toe!” I stuttered barely above a whisper. “It can’t just be gone!”
I grabbed the covers again, this time pulling them off the bed, shaking them to make sure there wasn’t anything in them. Nothing. I ran over to the other side of my bed where I had flung the covers before, and looked on the floor. I fell to the ground. I looked under my bed. I looked under my nightstand. I looked through my entire room.
One wouldn’t think that a pinky toe, or any toe, could just disappear, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, not even after frantically tearing apart my whole room in my search.
I pulled myself off the floor and walked through the rest of the apartment. I walked to the kitchen. Walked to the front door, where I had been lulled earlier by my dreams. Nothing. Nowhere.
One might not think that a pinky toe could just disappear, but if you’ve ever given it enough attention to notice, you will note that one finds their-self to be wrong quite often.