The Next Days

Bad Guys Need Flowers - New Chapter, Pt. 13

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Cal awoke the next morning. The exact time was irrelevant. The fact that it was morning was astounding.

Exhausted from the sheer perplexity of the previous day, Cal had fallen asleep before midnight. Rare was the night he turned himself off before Conan, but rarities exist because they occur. Oftentimes, rarities are viewed as items of joy – a diamond of rare color, a horse of rare strength, a rapper of rare rhymnation. In the case at hand, rarity was a disaster.

What the hell was Cal going to do with a whole day?

He certainly wasn’t going to look for jobs – that was clear. He’d done that the last x number of days, and the banal literature categorized under the title “Job Postings” had driven him to the point of hallucination. Or so he’d decided the night before.

Surely none of that scorpion stuff was real. Who would spend the time to import so many desert creatures to the Midwest? Somebody who got up in the morning, maybe; still, even after Cal grasped this concept of “a full day’s work,” the possibility remained slim.

The “notes in the pockets” thing? A nice trick. Hardly feasible in the real world.

And that girl…

“Look. There’s my computer,” Cal thought. “All nice and not blown up. What more proof do I need that life is as it always was – static.”

Cal lurched towards his door, having come to a conclusion as to what to do: Use the bathroom. As he walked, the morning sun shot blinding darts of light at his eyes. This is what the sun is won to do, yes, but it usually only does so through certain windows at certain times of day. For some, those times do not exist. Consequently, things happen. Unaccustomed to the solar element, and unaccustomed to the act of morning walking in general, Cal lurched a bit too far. A thing happened. He slammed face first into the door. Stars swirled, shooting darts of their own metaphysical light. Fortunately for Cal, this light existed at no certain time in his visual spectrum. No further thing happened.

Recovering well enough to realize that his next step should be backwards, away from the door, Cal did so. The move proved prudent. There, staring him straight in the face, posted to the door, was a note:

It really happened. Obviously.