

     He pushed hard against his bed in order to heave his heavy, stiff body from it.  Emerging from the soft mattress was like towing a 100 pound sack of potatoes from the bed.  The sporadic, faint tapping against his windows indicated that it was already raining at this still, dark hour.  Like the final dying moan of a wildebeast collapsing in the heartless, dusty earth, a long groan from his gut broke the stillness of the morning.  He wondered if the rain that so rhythmically pelted his window was a fleeting visitor, soon to be gone when no one would notice.  It had a way of doing that.
     Tricky rain, he said.  With that, he began to investigate his closet.  He could wear clothes that would outsmart the rain.  He slowly laced up the first boot.  This boot can outsmart the rain, he thought.  It is waterproof, but it also has precisely some of the features that his sneakers do.  As he finished putting on the last of his dual-purpose garments, he opened his curtain, revealing a smooth, blue sky capped by the fiery, yellow ball of the sun.  The rain is getting trickier, he mused.
     He stared at the mug full of steaming brown liquid.  Every single day of my life I can't begin to function without this, he marveled.  He wasn't incredulous about feeling dependent upon the coffee.  Rather, he found it ludicrous that he was willing to settle for brown caffeine water.  This isn't coffee.  This is not coffee.  I know coffee when I taste it.  He began to stare at his hands, losing interest in the not coffee.  Complex systems of creases, lines, wrinkles, fjords.  Old man hands.  He had drunk not coffee so many times that the years had piled up high when he had his back turned to them.  The years were like a stack of plates piled so high that they were leaning, barely offsetting the pull of gravity against them.  If he could only put one more plate atop the stack.  If he could add one more after that.  Oh Please God, don't let that pile fall over.  Let that stack rise higher than the the apex of the leaning tower of Pisa.  Let those plates be greasy, half-loaded with salads and spaghettis.  Let them be chipped, cracked, outdated, mismatched.  But God let that stack hold forever.
     He locked his front door and walked to the outside.  On the sidewalk slowly crawled a creature.  It was colored yellow and black just like a yellowjacket bee.  But instead of wings, it had what looked like a coat of porcupine needles.  Or maybe it looked more like a fur coat.  The creature inched along at an impossibly slow pace.  He stared fascinated at the yellow and black creature, caught up in its audacity.  After thousands and thousands of hours for the creature, it had made it to the street.  Now it was going to enter traffic.  The cars sped by without regard.  Giant steamrolling wheels pounded the unforgiving cement as the bug pushed on unabated.
     

