He, Dynamite. (Part 4)

The box. Decidedly battered. The puddle of sauce from a takeaway consumed who knows when now creeping its way up the cardboard, distorting the prints on the box, my name now ebbing slowly out of existence behind a cloudy orange goo. How incredibly insightful of them. 

I dipped my finger into the puddle and approached the living room window. After a dew trips back and forth my next aphorism, surely a classic, was smeared on the glass, a faint shadow of the message - "We all lose ourselves in our own goo." - falling on the carpet as the sun - that wonderful sun again - leant to the words the power it had offered me earlier that morning. Success is surely imminent.

A beat-up old notebook that I don't recall having been terribly useful, but that must have been more than terribly useful judging by the good thumbing I appeared to have given it at some point, became obviously useful once more as I used it to mop up - or splatter away - the sauce. This box, now, this box was of clear and undeniable use. The wonders that it must have held, and how honourably it must have served its time moved me something fierce. I would never forget this box. I pulled the easy-peel cardboard strip and, before looking through the contents, emptied them out so that I could wear my new helmet-crown. 

Comfortable. Uncomfortable suddenly. For, as each of us knows, nothing is more unnerving, more nigglingly annoying than the feeling that you have seen something somewhere before, but where? Comfortable again as I realised that I had seen laying on the floor amongst too much parcel-filler the device whose inception, design, and possible construction had occupied my thoughts for weeks. Uncomfortable once more as it dawned on me that I could not be seeing this object. How had it come to be?

The device lay there, perfect. My face reflected in the back of the head of the spoon was distorted...just my face maybe? The body of it smooth and sleek, moulded to the shape of the mean male hand, but no meanness about it, broken only in its perfection by the plastic tab preventing contact between the battery and whatever. The button at its base barely perceptible, just as I had dreamed. Beside the device, in a small cardboard case, lay the blue, yellow, red, and black markers that could be used to personalise the handle. A gentleman's stirrer. I stared at it, trying to destroy it or at the very least possess it to leave my presence, for it was an impossible thing. From behind my ear I pulled a folded piece of tracing paper. From my trouser pocket, a magnifying lens. I compared the apparently real device to the minute blueprint, looking for some imperfectio, some proof that it was not mine. None.

 I kicked it away, under the sofa to decay with the crumbs and forgotten dreams. As I walked into the street, fully clothed but mentally naked, I heard from some dark corner the gentle whirring of progress, and I saw in my mind the unstoppable rotation of the spoon. Power incarnate. The faces of all those lives I had hoped to change flashed before me. One, I swear, knocked me down. What, now, did I have to live for?