Untimely #23 – Skeezer

They hear a noise but no one looks up. Not because they didn’t hear it—because like I said they heard it—but because they don’t. They are unflappable. The unflappables. The Unflappables capital u. Sometimes people call them that. OK, no one calls them that, but you could imagine people calling them that. “The Unflappables capital u.” You know? Kind of thing. They’re just used to it, the noise. All noise. Any noise. Any noise, I am not joking. Imagine a bee in your ear singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” at the top of its lungs. Kind of thing. Do you know once I got a fly in my eye and it got so far up there it only came out the next day? Truth. OK, maybe it was a gnat. But it was very painful. I slept with it in there, because I had to, because I was very tired, and so I tried not to touch it and in the morning I had actually forgotten about it. And I showered and everything and got on the bus and read my magazine and went in to work and then about two hours later I scratched my eye, because I had an itch, and holy hell did it hurt! I must have dislodged the gnat or the fly or whatever it was but it felt like a helicopter in there. And I started crying, uncontrollably, minus the sobbing and all of that. Just the tears. But floods and floods. Like my shirt was getting wet kind of floods. And Gary—he sits across me—he looked up and he’s like Bill, what the hell is wrong with you? Because of course what he meant was like omfg are you OK? But with Gary it always comes out like he’s gonna kick your ass. And I guess a lot of the time he is. Maybe half the time. But then for whatever reason he doesn’t, maybe ’cause he doesn’t want to go back to jail. Anyway, so he doesn’t kick my ass but I can tell he’s totally skeezing out because my nose has started running now, because they’re connected, all the pipes in your head, and so my shirt is wet and I’ve got snot dripping onto my lip but I am really and truly paralyzed it hurts so much. OK I’m not actually paralyzed but I just completely and totally forget where I am such is the intensity of the pain in my eyeball. Because it is a pain in my eyeball, seriously in it, not like near it or next to it or by it or on the side of it. It is my actual physical eyeball and I am in so many kinds of pain and I’m blinking like crazy almost like a reflex, like I can’t control it, and I’m freaking out like maybe I’m going to have to go to the hospital or something and then all of a sudden the pain passes like God plucks me from the sea where I’m drowning because I can’t swim and the instant His hand touches me the water clears from my lungs and I can breathe again. Like that, but I mean like less of a fairy and stuff ’cause I don’t even really believe in God or whatever. So then I feel something in the corner of my eye which is your canthus in case you didn’t know, the places where your boogers collect in the night if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t really wash your face before bed because you’re not a fairy or like if you’re a child and just dirty. I’ve never quite figured out if it’s something your eyes make like snot out of your eyelids or if it kind of drips out your nose and up and around but either way it’s pretty gross. But I guess it’s grosser if you snot out your eyes. No wait, maybe it’s grosser if your snot goes up and around the side of your nose and into your eyes. Either way it’s pretty gross and I haven’t had boogers in my eyes since I was like four I’m just saying. So I feel something in my canthus and instinctively I just reach up and touch it and it comes away on my finger and I look down and it’s this huge fucking gnat and it’s still alive and it starts flapping it’s wings all feebly and then I think, you poor silly thing, you were probably on your way to your family, maybe bringing back the food you had scavenged in a flower or a dead squirrel or something (fucking gross! That fucker was in my eye!) and all of a sudden you took a wrong turn and you wound up in my eye, but you didn’t die, you hung in there, you tried to survive as you slid back and forth across my eyeball and you nearly suffocated and you were too tired to fight it anymore and then miraculously just as you were about to go under for the last time the hand of God plucked you from the deeps and the instant His hand touches you (hey hang on a minute!) OK well whatever this fucking poor lost gnat spent the whole night in my eye and nearly died and I looked at it and all of these thoughts that took like twenty seconds to explain flashed before my eyes in like a quarter of a second and I contemplated the universe and my place in it and the gnat’s place in it and I felt a mystical connection to this tiny, powerless creature that had caused me so much pain and I thought of the mouse & the lion and Amos & Boris and David & Goliath and I looked down at this poor, half-squished bugger with wet wings and then I brought my thumb around to my forefinger like if I was making the A-OK! sign and I squashed the fuck out of it until it was just black streaks between my fingers. Piece of shit almost blinded me.