For Edwin Pentop-Rage, Tuesday mornings normally included muesli for breakfast, a run round the park, a cool down and stretch, and a shower. They normally didn’t include lying on a sticky floor with a surprised look on your face, a throbbing headache and wondering what that metallic smell was. And yet, that’s where he found himself. He didn’t remember the celling being quite so blurry before either. Then again, he hadn’t often looked at it. It was only his unexpected circumstances that gave Edwin the opportunity to give the ceiling a good hard staring at.
The throbbing in his legs turned to pain and Edwin lifted up slightly to look at them. His head felt like lead and the effort to lift it was almost too much, as was the sight of his limbs with feet missing and blood slowly oozing from the open wounds. It was more than he really wanted to see but at least the wall was clean which was more than could be said of the floor.
Edwin let his head thud back down, happy that the blood pumping from his severed legs hadn’t reached that far up his body. Nobody wants to lie down in in a mess of sticky gore which, as luck would have it, the thin pile of his cheap carpet was soaking up nicely.
Behind him, Edwin could hear a thump, thump, thump and he craned his head around to see. There sat Tony Thomas, Edwin’s dog, with his tail thumping the floor as he wagged it, happy in the knowledge that his master would be pleased to see him. And the foot he’d brought.
“Good boy, Tony,” Edwin managed to say. “And if you could make sure the cat doesn’t eat the other…”
Tony Thomas dropped the foot by Edwin’s head and scooted off to do dog things. Edwin stayed where he was and tried to remember what he’d done to cause this mess in the first place. He was sure he’d done nothing more than lean casually against the wall to catch his breath after his morning run.
Yes, that sounded right. He’d leant against the wall, the cat had walked past, Edwin had shifted slightly to let the cat through and had gone a little dizzy. Then he’d fallen through the wall and left his feet in the other room.
It still didn’t make any sense. What were the odds, wondered Edwin, of the molecules of your body perfectly lining up with the spaces between the molecules of the wall? Maths wasn’t his speciality and neither was physics. Maybe it was the cat. He’d never trusted that cat. He didn’t even want a cat, it had just sort of moved in.
The last of Edwin’s blood oozed from his legs and he felt the weight of the unwanted cat as it jumped onto his chest and pawed at him before settling down to nap. Tony Thomas reappeared with Edwin’s other foot.
“Good boy, Tony. Good boy.”
Leave a Reply