Hug the Undersquid

Every morning he woke up and kept his eyes closed for a while.

He would move his fingers ever so slightly, feeling his sheets, feeling the bedwarmth, feeling where it grew cooler at the edge. He would move his foot to feel the weight of the blankets, to feel the weight of his cat curled up down there. He would listen to the apartment he lived in alone. Sometimes his upstairs neighbor would be awake if they had to open at the diner. Sometimes the next door neighbor would be saying something to their kid. He would smell the coffee already being made by the coffee maker, and he would smell the last traces of last night’s dinner, if he actually cooked it and didn’t microwave it.

He would lie there taking it all in, wanting something he couldn’t have. He tried to be grateful for what  he did have. Usually he could be. Some days the only thing that got him out of bed was spite and the inertia of routine.

In short, he was no-one special, and that was fine. But he did want to be special. He wanted to be held, completely. Totally held. Held in such a way that he was erased from everything but the hand he was held in. He wanted to be small, very small, so small that he could disappear under someone’s curled fingers. And he wanted so to be something he could not be, he would lie there taking it all in: the voices of neighbors, the dimensions of his life and how they were too much.

Every morning he woke up and kept his eyes closed for a while and this morning he woke up and kept his eyes closed. For a while.

He moved his fingers, and the sheets were not his sheets.

They were coarser, and they tented oddly. Normally the weight of them spilling over the side of the bed kept them flat, but now they were somewhat stiff. The pillow felt scratchy on his ears, and his head was sunken into it.

The cat was not there, but that wasn’t unusual.

Last night he had cooked, braised cod with garlic, lots of garlic. The scent was a comfort to him, something his grandmother had cooked in her years living with his family. It was a smell that pervaded everything. He would have found it a bit unpleasant if he hadn’t done the cooking himself. But the smell wasn’t there this morning. Nor was the smell of coffee.

In its place: a clean smell, totally foreign to his home. Not that he let his place grow filthy by any means, but deep cleaning was a thing that only happened once a year at most. People didn’t tend to visit, so he didn’t see the point. And anyone who did, he reasoned, knows me and would understand. His house smelled human.

This morning, the room he was in smelled lived in, but clean. Cleaned. An effort had been made.

He couldn’t hear anything much at all. Not a neighbor, nor the shudder and weary sigh of the air conditioning, nor a semi on the interstate a few blocks over. He heard humming, light humming. A song he thought he might know. It sounded wrong. It sounded like it was coming over a stadium loudspeaker a mile away. Not tinny, just the size of the sound. A whisper that could fill a concert hall.

He recognized the song at last, after lying with his eyes closed for what seemed like forever. Lefty Frizell. “Saginaw, Michigan”. It made him smile as he remembered all the crazy rhymes in it.

He opened his eyes.

It wasn’t his room but he knew it wouldn’t be. The sheets were as coarse, no, coarser than he had felt them to be. He could almost poke a finger through the weave of them. The walls were covered with a riot of printed words and huge pictures. A string of lights, the size of watermelons and dark, around the top of the wall at the ceiling. A chintzy plastic chair, all molded as one piece, sat in the corner looking as if it would buckle under the weight of nothing.

My dad was a poor, hard-working Saginaw fisherman Too many times he came home with too little pay.

He swung his legs out. The floor, too, was plastic, and instead of the slight chill of his floor at home this one seemed to be perfectly room temperature.

He heard a rising noise that became a whine, then a cry, then a shriek as a tea kettle came to a boil. But again, it was from so far away, but sounded so close.

He stood up and looked around. One door. The window, as it turned out, was a sticker. It showed a nice scene of a grassy hillside. It occurred to him that he ought to be terrified, but he wasn’t. He felt that he was on the edge of something. He reached up distractedly and felt his pulse in his throat.

The doorknob was the color of the trim around the door, and did not turn.

And you can tell your dad I'm coming back a richer man I hit the biggest strike in Klondike history

He smiled. Saginaw, Michigan. Young ambitious man. Saginaw fisherman. All those rhymes that Lefty Frizell knew were a reach. He thought of him laughing as he wrote them down.

His hand was on the doorknob. The humming had stopped, he realized. It had grown quiet. His hand was on the doorknob. He tried to be grateful for what he did have. He tried not to want what he didn’t have. He couldn’t. He wanted it.

And now a thumping, not heavy but large, as if the weight of several thousand pounds were being gently placed on the ground. Over and over, in a regular rhythm, and louder and louder. His hand was on the doorknob. He thought to turn around to look at the bed but what if he turned back and his hand was on his own door?

He opened the door. She was sitting cross-legged in front of it, maybe a hundred feet away. The rest of the house had been swung away, he could see the stairs with no railings going up to a second floor. He looked back at her, looming sweetly, holding a mug the size of a cistern with both hands. She wore a fuzzy housecoat and was two hundred feet tall if she was anything. A room larger than anything he could describe stretched out behind her, filled with everyday life, of a size that dwarfed him. In front of him, on the ground, was a dimpled metal can full of something brown and clear and steaming. Tea. A life he could disappear into but not disappear. A star in a night sky that loved him.

Happy Tall-oween