Unconscious
By Viqui
- 200 reads
I fix my eyes to the ground. I don’t want to look at it. I feel the mud seeping between my fingers and soaking through my jeans onto my knees, and I wonder how the ground has become so waterlogged. I think I might start to sink if I don’t move, but I don’t know how to move. I look forward. I can just about make out the top of the fence through the thick fog. My house is just beyond that fence. I want to be there. I can’t get there. I see the dull, dying thing out the corner of my eye, large in the sky. I don’t want to look at it. I think if I don’t look at it, it might stop. Stop breaking. You used to be able to eclipse it with one finger held high and one eye closed. No more. So big and so broken. A sound. Loud. A breaking sound, like a fissure in the earth’s crust. But it’s bigger. Much bigger. It’s breaking from the pressure. I look up. I shouldn’t have. The straining and the snapping and the breaking. The noise. Getting louder. Louder than my cries. I can’t tell if it’s the ground or my body shaking. It gets louder. Louder. It breaks. A piece of the moon begins to fall.
That tired muggy feeling where you don’t know what day it is and that ten seconds you spend staring at your alarm clock wondering if it’s accidentally started jingling an hour early. The worse feeling when you realise that it’s 7:00am and your alarm clock has woken you up at exactly the time it was meant to, so you can get up and carry your duvet with you all the way to the bathroom. I seem to be more tired in the mornings now, which is strange, because it’s the beginning of April and the mornings have been getting lighter for a while now. I fumble for the snooze button and knock my alarm clock to the floor, swiftly followed by my glass of water. That shuts it up.
My day at work starts with the usual good mornings, 'hellos', polite nods and courteous half smiles of the ground floor. I then continue on to the 'good morning Mr Howards' and 'cup of tea Mr Howards?' of the first-floor-suck-ups trying to get themselves one level higher up the escalator by the end of the year, before reaching the 'morning Alans' and the 'alright arse holes' of the top floor. They know me a bit better there.
“Good journey to work, Mr Howard?”
Newly-promoted first floor suck-up. He clearly doesn’t yet realise that just like everyone else who needs to get into London in the morning, my journey is always bad, and therefore do not wish to be reminded of the seven minutes I spent cornered on the tube train by a man five inches taller and three stone heavier than me, pressing the arch of my back further into the window ledge. Or the fifteen minutes I spent prior to that staring at posters for Wicked, Hugo Boss and TalkTalk, cut short only by two intervals of overcrowded trains that I dared not brave boarding.
“Fantastic,” I say, avoiding eye contact to ensure the conversation doesn’t continue as I proceed to the security behind my closed office door. I practically collapse onto my chair at two minutes to nine and feeling a little flushed, reach into my top drawer to grab some Hugo Boss refreshment, “absolutely fantastic.”
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