the cats with catheads

the person addressing me is hysterical. his name is allax and i have known him for the better part of the year. i would say intimately. i have let a stray cat into the house. he is trying to explain something to me, but i am having trouble understanding. he does not seem to be himself. he says, this isn’t how it is supposed to be. cats aren’t supposed to have heads like that. that cat has the head of a cat but cats can’t have cat heads. this is impossible. i ask for clarification but he can’t seem to articulate what is wrong, just that something is inside out and upside down in the world. at first it think that perhaps this is some form of the capgras delusion, a rare syndrome that leads an individual to believe that objects or people are impostors because they don’t have the proper emotional resonance. allax tells me that he thinks that either some evil mastermind is corrupting the world somehow or that he is slipping between spaces.

i speak with allax for several hours and reach the conclusion that something has happened to him, but i don’t believe that it is supernatural. he reluctantly agrees to be tested by one of the worlds leading neuroscientists. I leave allax in the care of others. i don’t have the courage to face him. i am sure that by now he has been committed. lately, i have found myself in a curios epistemological position, or rather disposition. i find myself unsure of things. have dogs always barked? have trees always had electroluminescent properties? it seems as if there was a time when things were slightly different from before, more normal. either the world is changing and i am one of the only two people on earth to have noticed, or this isn’t my earth at all. i suppose there is always another explanation, but i dare not admit that possibility. to question my sanity would be to take away the only foundation i have left. i do not think that i can survive alone, isolated like this. i must find allax. perhaps together we can unravel these tangled eyebrows. i see a pear tree growing up from a crack in the sidewalk, the fruit tastes salty. Finally, something familiar.

some of you might be saying, oh that’s just the capgras delusion combined with synesthesia. well, i wouldn’t be so sure. it is surely a stranger universe out there than it is as it exists inside the mind.

quarter

the quarter lay there wedged between the girder and the concrete. the crowds pass close by unaware of the small treasure. the quarter spends its days weighing the value of currency in exchange for for purposeful ponderings. everyday for a few minutes it catches a glimpse of the sun just before the foot traffic wanes to a stop for the evening. adjacent buildings are eventually turned down and rebuilt in dynamic sweeping fashion. the roads and train tracks ascend higher, weaving through the skyline. the clacking of foot traffic transforms into a melodic hum. the quarter remains an isolated entity in a sea of change.

Orifice

In the year 3000 as people evolved into stronger and more efficient multitaskers, they grew increasingly annoyed with the limits of the oral orifice, or mouth to use the vernacular. The people elected to create a new hole in their heads for breathing. The conventional mouth would be reserved for speech and assorted gestures of physical affection.

Oddly, the vote to add the new mouth was nearly unanimous, but the discourse concerning its location was robust and unrelenting. It was eventually decided that the mastication orifice would be located at the naval as the stomach would then be adjacent to it. This would require that all restaurants redesign their tables and that a new system of dining etiquette be implemented. All this could be easily done, of course. After all, humanity had made sudden changes before (like the last time it called itself humanity) and had even become somewhat accustomed to them.

Suggestions to locate the new mouth on hands were courageously defended, but were in the end such arguments found themselves deceased and desisted.

After two decades, humanity decided to go back to its old arrangement. People found that they missed the sensation of food travelling aaaaaaalll the way down the esophagus down into the deep pits of their bellies. People then decided that longer necks were in order. Arrangements for modification of the species were made shortly after.