“Bruce’s Sauna”, said the sign on the door. They pushed the heavy cedar door open. The adult-sized Batman pyjama pants hung from a hook on the wall. He threw the pants onto the heated rocks and ladled on some water.

The little brown squirrel climbed up on the big brown fence to get the nut, which was actually a polished stone of brown obsidian, stolen by a magpie 1000 years ago from a merchant in Venice. The story of how it got to this house fence in Connecticut a millennium later is fantastic.

He looked across the spread that the B&B hosts had put together on the hutch: French toast and fixings. Fruit, skyr, syrups, and a pyramid of beautiful, thick, French toast powdered with icing sugar. But the gluten was off limits. You don’t fully appreciate generous French toast fixings until you can no longer eat the toast.

He had a large red chip clip clipping his nose shut.

He had been meditating and working on mindfulness for about three years, and he could definitely feel a difference. If his reactions to the world could be charted, the peaks and troughs would be tightened, and nothing really shocked him anymore. As such, he had been looking forward to this experience… a test of sorts: The watching of grown men and women chasing a giant wheel of cheese down a grassy hill.

“Don’t worry about that snake… that snake is okay. Yeah, he’s okay. Just don’t step on him and you’ll be fine. The bad snake is the one you want to worry about. You can tell the bad snake because it has a scar running down its face. That guy will crawl into your sheets at night. Man… I hope you don’t roll around in your sleep. Best not to move in your sleep, ever.”

The coffee was weak, but perhaps his taste buds were a bit off as well.

She ate her kiwis whole. Furry, scratchy skin and all.

It was remarkable how much a minor ache or sore throat could sidetrack his mindset. Just these little things… relatively small for a full-sized human, like a thorn in a lions paw, that nevertheless commanded continuous attention. A little yappy dog to its unfortunate owner: I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. Over here. I’m here. Preventing any sort of flow from happening, or happiness from forming. But then sometimes, he would locate the willpower to step back, look at the affliction and say, “You are there”, “You are there”, “You are there”. And it would calm. “There you are”. And it would quiet.

In her absence, the pup had flipped the kitty litter and skated it around the laundry room, den, and kitchen, while the cat watched indifferenently from it’s high perch near the window.

She came home from the orthodontist all loopy, with cheeks packed with gauze. Anything to do with gauze-in-the-cheeks reminded him of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, which lead to Marlon Brando in Island of Dr. Moreau, which lead to moo moos, which led to Homer Simpson.

He barged into the house, all barrel-chested like a 1950s movie star. “I need my chop saw back, man!”

He had late-night Ulkranian folk dance classes on Thursdays, and on Friday mornings, his ankles were so stiff he could barely descend the stairs.

That was the fourth time she had stubbed her toe on the Damien Hurst diamond encrusted skull that month!

The person he imagined he would see in a mirror when he was twenty-four was the same person he imaged he would see in a mirror now.

All week he lived for Saturday morning, but when it came he had no idea what to do with himself.

He put two bowls of chips on the coffee table but before anyone could reach in, he bowed his head and said, “let us pray”.

There was a cross-cut wormhole on the surface of the coffee table that was good for catching runaway pens.

According to the infographic meme, the opposite of a vampire is a mailman. He was a mailman, and he definitely didn’t drink blood for sustenance. So he was definitely not a vampire but maybe not the opposite of one either as he was growing a bit of a vandyke-shaped beard. But it made him think. On dark overcast days the lack of UV seemed to drain the life out of him and prevent blood from pumping to his brain in the way it should. He wondered if that was how a vampire would feel on a sunny day in July, or if sunglasses could alleviate most of that.

On his first night home after the trip, he woke up in a deepest dark of the early hours to pee, and shuffled into the closet instead of the bathroom. He walked into a wall that should have led to the toilet, then couldn’t find his way out until his wife turned on her bedside lamp to see what was going on in there.