Satoko jumped up, like a trained gymnast leaping to her feet after a floor exercise. She walked directly at Stonefish and grabbed his wader belt. He could see and smell her breath in the cold morning air; it was a fragrant blend of Spam musubi, Orange Crush and Milk Duds with a hint of Tic-tac residue. Stonefish didn't know whether to push her away or pull her closer. He had to decide quickly which choice to make, because it was clear now what she wanted from him.
A relentless buzzing sound was hammering Stone's skull. It seemed like it was coming from the basement well where Satoko was dragging him. But no, it sounded familiar, more like his alarm. His crust- filled eyes popped open and stared at the blinking and blurry LED.
4:30 AM.
He hammered the snooze button. Then, thinking better, he slid the Alarm function to off.
Goddamn alarm.
Another Monday morning. Another Monday morning set to alert for Fishing Time. But Stones had screwed it up, this alarm was set for yesterday. For Sunday AM. He was now awake a full two hours earlier than he needed to be. The prospect of work by 8 was nothing like that of a day on the water. He shook his head, wondered if this would make a funny story, and concluded, correctly, it would not. No one needs to hear about your dreams or how you woke. .
He lay back on the bed, staring up at the void. Still, What was that crazy dream? The VHS tape, the crab, the swimmer, the perfume. It was madness. Except for the smell. The room, his room, smelled of the perfume she wore. The swimmer's perfume. And today, of all days, February 14th. Valentine's day. It's 4:30 Am on the most romantic day of the year. Awake when he didn't want to be awake. Remembering a mad dream. Running loops of ideas through his head. In the dark. And still there was the wiff of it, a fragrance, the swimmer's funk.
But that wasn't all. there were noises.
At first slow rasps, almost whispers. But as he counted, they became deeper, resonant, vibratory and ultimately thunderous. And unmistakable as snores. Someone was next to him in this bed. He dared not turn his head, for he was now a little nervous. The snores were getting louder. The phonics of it did not suggest a small, petit airway with tiny cute little tonsils now and then poking their little fleshy heads out into the pharyngeal cavity, swayin' in the breeze to coquettishly say:
"Hey there Mr Hard Palate.....come here often?"
No, this was an altogether professional affair, bigger, no nonsense. Resonant like a bass note on grand a church organ. Or say a truffle-sized, truffle-colored, hemorroid ball-valving a generous fart to a tuned-up symphonically appropriate 7.5 richter scale percussive flatus. Rumbling. 18 wheeler on pothole-filled side streets rumbling. A freight train a comin' seriousness to it. You could feel whatever tissue chunk was causing this wobbling. You could picture it flopping back and forth off of a substantial fleshy tissue neck. All of it was occurring perhaps two or so feet from Stone's healing ear.
He lay there wondering how large the tonsilar appendages, the epiglottal folds must be. No doubt they were bobbing up and down to oropharynx with air intake, and then expelled back to nasopharynx with exhalation. At the very minimum this chunk of resonant sloppy tissue he thought was probably as large as grape. Or a big black mussel. But more likely the size of a golf ball. Maybe not with the white dimpled carapace of a golf ball, but like the weird fucked-up innards of a golf ball with elastic webbing and earthen tones and so on.
The obstructing lump would be mucousy, wet. Maybe like the innards of a golf ball fished out from some frogwater. Mildewed. Maybe like a peeled and sorta rotten ornamental quince. Or maybe it was more squishy like a lychee. A weird thumb-sized fleshy, moist, dark-hued lychee fruit rattling around close to the hard palate, but like, really wanting to party with that known lothario, Epiglottis. It would be covered in spidery veins and smears of mucous and tiny bubbles of spit. Maybe it looked just like a truffle-sized hemorrhoid, but in the throat, and not smelling bad, no not smelling bad at all. Maybe smelling like a truffle, but not like a hemorrhoid. Maybe it was just a huge nugget of ambergris that lived there. Fragrant, waxy, mobile, airway obstructing, and then not.
These thoughts kept looping in his head. All of them accompanied by a symphony of low frequency high decibel noise. Now and then the sounds ceased for 20, 40, 60 seconds before barking back to life. Like some kind of stalled plane exercise, you wait for it to NOT start back up and wonder if this was it. OScillations. By 4:45 the snoring was still going on. Cyclic. Then back to rasping and near imperceptible quiet. Minutes, hours, circadian, ultradian, multiday, seasons, years, eras, eons. cycles.
Wake early to fish, wake later to work.
He thought he should be annoyed by it. He thought he should want to prod this person just to make it quit. But he couldn't. He couldn't because he found it strangely comforting. Strangely vital. This was warm, familiar. And his thoughts came back to Valentine's day. Was it something he would call love? He shook his head, this couldn't be, I mean it's 4:50 AM and 20 minutes earlier a crazy Japanese Crab Walker was dragging him to a basement well, and now he's all oxytocin and prolactin and serotonin and thinking the elephant in the room beside him is described best as Love?
No, that was insane.
Or was it....
My new secret weapon for picking up stuff I don’t wish to touch in the never ending battle against parking lot littering scumbags.
