From: Scott Mintred
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 2:26 PM
To: [The Boss]
Subject: A short work of non-fiction!


I awoke this morning in a most disorganized state! I was on my back (I never sleep on my back!), my head lolling absently to the side, drool drying at the corners of my mouth.

I looked to my right, expecting my wife. Nothing. I looked at the clock, expecting a quarter past ten. No such luck. Oh, but I'd needed the sleep!

I assessed my body's temperament: a walnut had surely been stuffed beneath the skin of my neck on either side of my throat. To make matters worse, some fiend of terror had my bones turned mostly back to the marrow of the womb, and so softened, it was difficult for my limbs to attain even the basest of movements. A heavy sweat suffused my skin and all of the sheets surrounding me.

A shower was in order! And so I took to the bathroom with as much haste as my stooped posture and closed throat could afford me. Taking off my wedding-ring, I cleaned myself with a minimum of dallying. I had a train to catch, after all.

. . .

Drying off and donning my clothes, I rued the shower. The curative properties of hot showers are well known, and beset by illness as I was, I'd imagined the shower a bastion of permanent relief, yet now, mentally regarding myself, I felt no better than I had upon waking. My mind was sharper, certainly, yet not deft enough to keep my clumsy hands under its command as I miss-buckled my belt.

Coffee was the next item on the agenda: surely it would only serve to further rattle my already strained physical self, but a boon for my mind it would undoubtedly be!

I enjoyed my coffee and cigarette, which was surprising. Indeed my throat had opened up to a greater extent, and although each breath brought with it a penetrating ache, I no longer felt as if I was grasping in fright for each bite of cool, smoky air. So it was that I sat, ruminated, and enjoyed what little moments of happiness I could wring from my frightful morn.

. . .

Of course, dear reader, I would have been a fool not to have considered simply going back to bed and "calling in sick" (which I would never do. I would, rather, "email news of my illness", or some such, to my immediate supervisor). As I rode the train, I even confess that in my off-put condition I was gravely considering changing trains at an opportune station to head in the opposite direction, thereby allowing my return to bed in short order.

And I must say, (in the split-second weakness of a braggart) that you would have to commend my fortitude in this situation, as a weaker man would have succumb to his whims of fancy before reaching but the interior of his front door!

Here, I find the once-familiar office to be a strange and foreign place: noises are louder, today. Hallways seem to stretch on, diluted into a greater distance by the pressure of difficult movement and a shortened gait. My mind gets lost too easily at the sight of digital trinkets (those that herald the change of bits on a distant computer, and those that are a call-to-arms in remedy of an equally distant computer in greater distress than even I), and I focus on each luminescent letter individually, unable to simply retrieve the concept of their collection at a glance (I was once able to do so! I remember this, I swear it!)

Despite my delay in arriving to this place, I can now only muse and daydream about a fine train (temporally fine, for the decor is unchanging from train to train) which departs the very basement of my now turned-about office at a mere half an hour past five o'clock, and would whisk me to my automobile and thence the auto to my familiar abode in a mere forty-five minutes.

It is not the train itself that I wish for, you reader of overwrought nonsense, but rather the comfort in the familiar, and the quiet yet oft sarcastic tendings of my dear wife!

And so it is that I implore you, oh wise and caring reader!, oh reader of great sense and virtue!, to forgive me any act of impropriety on this day, and that you pity a poor, weak, and stooped commuter such as myself as I shuffle once more into the stainless-steel maws of my only hope for (albeit temporary) salvation: my train.