Median

      You don't know why, but every time you close your eyes, you find that you are opening them onto the place where you really are: inside of it.

     It is a narrow vertical crevice between the two halves of an interstate median wall.

     The usual, expected things are there with you: fragments of fallen leaves, spiderwebs, the skeletons of mice... But, upsetting all of your expectations, there is also Egregious David.

     Egregious David sits crouching in his incredibly small way, waiting for your eyes to close open onto him. When you blink, you are forced to behold Egregious David. And what Egregious David is doing in there is both nobody's business and everybody's worst nightmare. When consciousness inoculates you against prolonged periods of ocular closure, you only ever have to see cross-sections of his behaviors, activities, and blasphemous charades. But those are usually enough to send a stream of nitro cold brew jetting out of your mouth if you are sitting in a café, or drinking a nitro cold brew. You've stopped going to cafés as a result.

     Daytime is a time of unsteady peace for you. But, in the night, when your body succumbs to sleep and your eyelids close up shop, you are no longer your own. You do not have the use of your limbs, your hands. You are bound as a voyeur without a vehicle of fleisch through which to act upon the world. During those egregious hours, you are Egregious David's subject; and there is much to which he would subject you.

     The worst is when he shows you items that are discrete enough to have blown into the crevice of the median wall on the artificial wind of interstate traffic. He collects them, setting them in categorical piles, and then he shows them to you, procedurally, during your waking paralysis - when you become your true self inside of it. He retrieves each showpiece, nimbly, between thumb and forefinger, and holds it out before you, searching the response of your immobile, spherical eyes. 

     First, he presents you with a bubble-wrap envelope coated in golden foil, containing the residue of a long depleted narcotic powder. Then he shows you the broken wedge of a fast-food fountain drink lid, featuring one and a half indicator bubbles which tell you what fluid is inside of the cup. Then he shows you a tuft of artificial fur that could have been sourced from any number of things: a weave violently ripped at midnight, the hair of a baby doll, the liner of a ruminant's coat? Then he shows you a crumpled ball of non-specialized paper that is unendurably grey. Then he shows you a grain of processed white rice, on whose powdered surface the flattened remains of a weevil from some eastern Asian paddy is plastered. Then he shows you a sliver of glass that has been chipped off of a thick glass 'ice-block' wall somewhere in the city. Then he shows you half of a rollerball pen with blue-black ink inside. Then he shows you an old straw with yellow and red candy stripes. Then he shows you a fume. Then he shows you a 1944 Mauser pistol that has been obsessively maintained. Then he shows you a tooth blanketed in plaque and a pale pink juice. Then he shows you a rind. Then he shows you a hammer that he has pulled from his mouth. Then he shows you the truth. Then he shows you a piece of indivisible dirt. Then he shows you a selection of dog food pellets with mildly varying shapes: lentil, star, soft triangle.