Teeth of the Grinder

Emerge from the bathroom. My shit smelled bad, like a torched vagrant left in a butcher's dumpster.

I'm still trying to shake the murky heat from my skull. It's thick and stifling. It isolates my stray thoughts and smothers them.

The suite floats by, bathed in a cloying haze, indistinct shapes hobbling as I tunnel past office doors and chattering cubicles.

The girl ahead of me has a nice ass. Siezing on the motivation, I drag myself after her like a crippled wolf, already aware of the outcome of the hunt, the futility of my struggling instinct.

Last night I had a dream about a girl. In the dream, she was crying because we had met under casual circumstances, and she had fallen in love with me immediately. I assumed, from her reserved demeanor, that she had no interest in me, although secretly I was in love with her too. We were separated after our meeting, though somehow she had my number and was trying to call me. She kept getting my dad's house (I haven't spoken to the man in years). When we were reunited by accident, she cried and professed her love. We fell to some kind of sex act while swimming naked through the half-flooded halls of my work place.

When I woke up, I wondered if it was about time I re-attached my severed penis.

The disembodied ass I have been abstractly watching swims out of my clouded vision. My eyes still feel like bleached and gelatinous carcasses, each in their own pit of tar. They're raw and sticky and scumming over.

Later, a computer screen emerges from the muck. I'm trying to focus on it, but the messages are trivial. The entire Internet feels like a contrived fiction, flat and unconvincing and laminated by a fragile little windshield.

Tiny, made-up Internet-people squeeze their messages out onto the flatness like the splattered juices of insects. I soon find myself squashed in that world, eviscerated and watching my pecked-out guts form into words.

I hit send. The act feels desperate, like an S.O.S. My innards are flushed away down some obscure tube. I hope someone at the other end will read the message. "Is the staff meeting cancelled?"

Then I reflect; everyone I know is just so much software.