The Kia sped by, complete with a terrier hanging it’s head out of window in windblown ecstasy.

She was sitting at the corner table making flowers out of Post-it notes.

The signs read, “Please Excuse My Parrot”, “Parrot on Duty”, and “Beware of Parrot”, but there was no sign of an actual parrot anywhere, and no cage to be seen. It was terrifying to him that somewhere in the shadows, a beedie-eyed bird was watching him rifle through it’s owner’s things.

The captain of the little sailboat was in traction on account of the jokers who had swabbed the deck with three gallon jars of Vaseline.

There were fifteen to twenty bananas hanging in a cluster from the hanging pot rack. He remembered reading about a fruitarian bodybuilder in the 70s or 80s who ate large quantities of bananas and wondered if she was a disciple or if she was simply ripening them for banana bread.

What kind of person did that? It would take 10,000 words to explain.

There hadn’t been any explicit warnings against bringing a taxidermied duck through airport security.

He bounded down the stairs, pulled both shoes on without tying, but paused briefly at the entry to scribble on a stickie note: “Have a nice day!” And he was off.

It was her turn to clean the office refrigerator, which was usually a quick task of throwing out take-out bags and expired drinks. But not today.

He had hermitted himself deep in the forest, but that hadn’t stopped the constant interruptions. Spiders to chase out of the cabin. Squirrels scratching at the roof. Drips. Constant drips.

His focus muscle was weak. As such, the first few attempts were exhausting. But every attempt felt easier than the last.

He had found a box of old camcorder tapes while moving his dad out. The box had moved straight into his own storage, but had resurfaced during a massive decluttering project. He sent them out to be transferred to something watchable. When that hard drive arrived by courier, he had been in the middle of journalling his day plan, but that all went out the window as he plugged in and began scrolling. Like Christmas morning. And there were in fact several Christmas mornings in there. He had remembered being the proud adopter of anything electronic – the first and perpetual operator of that camcorder. But it was older than he remembered. His dad, as technologically incompetent as he was, had filled several tapes. Long, drawn out shots of inconsequential things. But they were old things. And some people. Watching inconsequential things that had happened 40 years ago brought waves of nostalgia and melancholy.

With his family out of town, it took three days of rock-bottom lifestyle-flailing before the reset. Fortunately he was a teetotaler, or at least a 99% practitioner of alcoholic temperance, as his treatment during those days of sugars and snacks and the like applied to harder vices most certainly would have made for a poor result. But here he was, the winds settled, the dog sleeping on the floor, writing a plan for his tomorrow self.

He wasn’t getting instant gratification out of this long-term, no-end project that he’d signed up for.

First of all, he got the first question on the application wrong: He couldn’t tell the difference between bird droppings and mouse droppings. There are real-life-knowledge prerequisites for exterminators. I mean, maybe this just isn’t the industry for him, no matter the keen interest.

He liked to pull out of his way to move his body through the two foot grasses. He loved how they slid across his nose, filling his senses with the heavenly dust that turned his owner’s eyes red every June. He didn’t know about the ticks perched patiently upon the blades: Little Fremen ready to ride a sand worm.

There was a line scored in pencil a foot from the bottom of the canvas. The artist had poured small buckets of paint near the top, and we had each been assigned a colour to watch. The first colour to drip down to the line would win the finished painting. He was watching green, and green was winning. He had no idea where he would put a 12’x12′ painting, and besides, he didn’t like where the aesthetics on this thing were going. So he walked up and spread the green line around with his palm so it wouldn’t advance any further. Pink won in the end. Unfortunately, pink was his wife, and anyone could tell by her excitement that she loved the thing.

She launched in from the laundry room, saying something about lasagna, and walked right into his 20cm tall masterpiece, scattering alphabet blocks everywhere.

It was raining hard that morning. She jogged the entire length of the High Line without crossing a single person, then retraced up the Greenway. She hadn’t bothered wearing her shell and was drenched by the time she reached her building.

Two weeks after they moved in together, she realized that he chewed his fish oil capsule every morning. It wasn’t a gummy. It was a capsule that exploded fishy oil across his tongue when he bit into it. He confirmed that it tasted awful, and he dreaded it every morning, but this was just the way he had always done it.