The Inefficacy of Morning

The clockwork knocking fragmented the florescent basement club. It sliced through the mescal soaked bar, ripping cigarette smoke apart like paper and dissecting  the group of heavily armed penguins. It was a chaos of shorn flippers, miniature Mafia hats, and violin cases all packed with calamitous herring. These fish had been force-fed vials of potassium God dammit! Disembodied beaks flew past me, still squawking indecipherable threats. Now I’d never know what they’d wanted. The fish had escaped their musical imprisonment. I closed my eyes as the room was filled with the wet squelch of fish hitting wall. With a disconcertingly merry tinkling the potassium vials shattered in their fishy guts and the herrings burned up in polka-dot pops of incandescent light.

“You flippered fiends will pay for this!” I cried. I dived under a two legged table and was gulped straight through the floor into an ocean of dusk.

I found myself wading through duvet as 9am light sieved through the curtains. The deep knocking of flesh against pliable wood had resumed. Someone was at the door.  “Damn Lottie,” I thought. “She’ll learn that this is not a civilised time for Marks!” I rolled over, sending out my response in the form of a despairing groan. Waves of oblivion heaved and stretched across my eyelids, and then flooded through the room, drowning thought.

Two hours later I escaped the Sandman’s drowsy groping to discover that it had been John trying to knock me into consciousness. A skinny caricature of a long deceased Victorian polite Englishness, who lives off roast dinners and has solemnly vowed to never utter those words society has deemed vulgar. This seems to cause him constant embarrassment. Probably on account of him actually being Welsh. Maybe this is what gave him that coiled nervous energy. I could only guess.

“He just wanted to know if you’d like to go for lunch,” a baffled Lottie informed me.

Lunch?! At 9am. Poor fool. I sighed. I could tell that it was going to be one of those days. And I was going to bury myself in paint and medieval books too! I could already see my plans of sublimity popping out of existence, leaving behind only a fading flash of shining glory imprinted onto my retinas. Poor thing never had a chance of existing. This day like so many others. I could see them all. A cornucopia of exploding potassium filled herring. I turned on the kettle. I needed tea. The zombies could come later.