🚀 go-pugleaf

A. M. Ward, his left eyebrow still oddly draped after the previous
night's entanglement with the lift mechanism, cast himself down
upon his couch, missing it by only an inch or so, thus enabling him
to appreciate the unerring symmetry of the design of its cover from
his position on the floor, though reserving a small portion of his
mind for the thoughts which, when aiming for the couch, he had
been intending to think, on the matter of whether the fact of his
having gotten up that morning had really done him any good at all.
Not that he had been notably happy in bed either, but, over the years,
he had learnt to come to terms with so much of the sheep he
innocently counted turning out to be wolves which howled through his
dreams in a disturbance of the slightly menacing peace which
occasionally wrapped his slumbers.  Besides, the sheer effort of
shaving had considerably depleted his day's energy-store, though, no,
on secondary recollection, he hadn't bothered to shave, so must have
been thinking of someone else.  Momentarily accelerated at the thought
of there maybe being a someone else, he rose and moved towards
his address-book, not really surprised to find that it was, after all,
still empty.  Figuring he might as well stay standing now he was there,
he shoved the address-book back into the flour-packet from which he
had taken it, dusted the flour from his shirt, and left by the back
door, saved from falling over the accumulation of milk-bottles outside
by a sudden twinge in the area where his left eyebrow had so recently
been, which caused him to clutch the doorframe, sidestepping as he did.

In the dim light of his office, his eyes lagged briefly upon the
same camisole which he had steadfastly delved for so many years,
but his sigh was force of habit rather than the sense of desperate
expectancy it had once been, as the picture had faded over the
course of the dusty summers, and, really, there was no longer much
chance of his recognising its wearer even if she did, one day, see
his advertisement in the evening classifieds and trek the stairs
to the room from which he ran his divorce & property management
clinic, which was hardly likely seeing that it was now seven weeks and
three days since he had last had a client, and that his telephone had,
he thought, been disconnected just after his dentist's bill came
through.  As he eased himself down in his chair, careful not to
disturb the card house, which, after four days' toil, had just run
into a fifth pack, the furthest he'd gotten yet, the ringing of the
phone reminded him that it was not it, but the refrigerator, which had
been disconnected, which could explain why his beer had been so very
tepid lately.

While the woman on the phone gave him details of the month's work
she was offering him, a reverie unfolded in his mind of what he could
do if he had a castle all to himself (though she had mentioned a
receptionist being there to assist him) for even a short while, with
only minor caretaking duties, and of how the quest for the camisoled
one might have more scope from the battlements than it had had from
his narrow window, which, now he thought of it, could, if washed,
vouchsafe more view than the current glimpse of an upper corner of
the poster, which he'd pretty well memorised by then, on the
bus-shelter opposite.  However, he had better things than cleaning to
do just then, and, as he put down the receiver, he was already searching
in his desk-drawer for his pen-knife.  Absorbed in seeing how many tries
it took him to hit a spot he'd marked in chalk about two inches below
the coat-hook, he didn't even notice the card-house toppling in the
resultant air-stream.

As he went by the poster on his way home that evening, he read its
declaration that "You Make Friends, Our Telephones Will Help You Keep
Them" one last time, knowing he wouldn't be passing that way again.