The Day the Mongols Came - Ozzy
The cat woke me up.
I spent the first hour after I woke looking at the 23 empty bottles of Robotussin DM that decorated the top of my dresser like a swarm of drunken children about to enact a suicide pact by leaping from the roof of the fading, cracked apartment tower that stood barely visible between a gap in the curtains of my apartment’s only window. The bottles were scattered, spilt, some on their sides or their caps or even miraculously balanced one atop the other. All shamefully empty, drained, vacant but for a thin sickly-sweet sticky layer of residue, 23 stomachs after a pre-rigor-mortis vomiting spree. A layer of dust had settled on the ones up against the wall, the four bottles from that first binge
(almost two months ago now I guess).
Anyway, the cat woke me up, and so I reeled to my feet and found the bathroom and slurped water from my cupped palms. Then I pissed and made coffee and filled the cat’s food dish and grabbed the newspapers from beneath the mail slot and settled back to consider the afternoon ahead of me.
Up until I realized the significance of the fact that there were two newspapers waiting for me beneath the mail slot, my afternoon was normal. I was there, sipping my coffee (Folger’s, good to that last reluctant ooze), and I was checking out the headlines, and I realized that I held two newspapers, August 4th and August 5th.
Then I dropped the newspapers, and dug another newspaper out of the wastebasket. August 3rd, it said, and I remembered glancing over its headlines about 24 hours before.
So I spent the next hour watching the bottles of Robo atop the dresser, as they bracketed, with marvelous stability, my copy of Crowley’s complete works. I stared at the empty bottles until I realized that the cat’s litter needed changing.
(Shit. I still haven’t changed the cat’s litter.)
It was an afternoon for realizations, it seems. Or perhaps an afternoon which was in pressing need of realizations. The first priority, I decided, was to have a sudden realization as to what happened to August 4th. For I remembered going to bed on the 3rd (well, okay, the 4th, about 2:00 am), and I remembered having some pleasant dreams, and then I woke up and found a newspaper dated August 5th beneath my mailslot.
I was considering the idea that I’d just peacefully slept for some 30 hours when I noticed the bloodstains on the silk lining of my Lord + Taylor’s double-pleated Y-neck front-zip one-piece. It hangs
from a nail above my bed, so that I can feel the lining when I’m squatting on the mattress preoccupied and absorbed in thought just as I was right then. I played with the lining until I noticed the row of gentle rust-colored drops running from shoulder to hem. Then I had to stop and stare at the 24 Robo bottles for a bit longer.
See, that stain would have been disturbing enough even at the best of times- I fuckin’ love that dress- but then, in the midst of that already-confused situation, those drops of blood managed to instantly eradicate the oversleep hypothesis. See, I know that coat well, I know it every day of my life, and I knew that that bloodstain hadn’t been there as I lay down to sleep on the night of August 3rd (well, yeah, the 4th, about 2:00 am).
My old wedding ring was gone, too.
I went and checked to be sure the deadbolt on the door was locked. (It was.) (I’m not sure why I felt the need to check on that.)
The pot of coffee was empty, and my mind almost functional, when I noticed that my ex-husband wasn’t there.
He’d been sleeping with me over the past few days. No place to stay, he said, and by the time he’d said that he was already unpacked. The asshole. He’d been there, grunting, as I woke up every morning. I’d begun to think he’d be there, in my bed, until I cut his throat and dumped him in the Thames, to tell you the truth. Anyway, no real bother to me, if he’d decided to hightail out. No bother at all.
Then I noticed the cat wasn’t there. Which was really just too much, since the cat had woken me up just a bit over an hour ago. And the window was shut, the door deadbolt-locked. The cat’s food dish was empty.
I looked at the 25 empty bottles of Robo on the dresser for a while, poured another cup of coffee, changed the cat’s litterbox, and settled back to watch Mongols on horses in the street below. They moved the way wounded beetles do, lurching and weaving in no one particular direction.
Finally I undid the deadbolt and went out into the hall, greeted by an icy blast of winter wind, coming in from the East, off the Steppes, a blast of wind that cleared my sinuses better than a quick lash of Woolite.
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