MicroHorror

I’m sorry, cat,
I know that you were born free.
If only I had
equanimity.

***

As I approached the train tracks the siren triggered and the barriers lowered, indicating a train was about to cross. I stopped and stared into the azure sky so as to avoid any eye contact with those around me. Suddenly I felt something wet and slimy graze my calf, causing my entire body to jerk. I turned around and there stood an old lady… ha ha ha, no, it was not her who had made friends with my leg; she was walking her terrier and it was
that which had had a good sniff and a lick.

The lady was small and gracious, full of humility evident by the crinkle-cut ridges sculpted into her face, like a pre-kiln clay mushroom tightly bound with string. Her face showed the signs of a life lived conscientiously but disappointedly. She was the kind of woman who would make banal banter about the weather with a heroin addict who had just murdered their parents but a lady whose magnanimity would become subject to caprice if you even looked at her dog in any way less than amicable… leaving her with no doubts about pulling a Kalashnikov on your sorry ass.

They walked past, ignorant of the stink of death and failure that seeps from my pock-marked skin, and unbeknownst to me given that the barriers had come down and there wasn’t much further they could go. My surmise was that the old lady and her dog wanted a front row seat of the train passing by; a more practical form of trainspotting for the mature multi-tasking pedestrian, who likes only to have to cross the tracks to buy her loo roll and angel cake. Anyway, the dog must have become bored waiting as it began to jitter and then turned around and gave me a hard stare. Its eyes grew smaller and its legs started to move in different directions and I knew what was coming. I prayed that it wouldn’t; I closed my eyes and wished to the furthest burning star in the galaxy that the dog would not do what I thought it was going to do, in broad daylight, with people stood all around and on either side of the tracks. But it did…

…It barked and barked and jumped and barked and barked and jumped and barked. I am accustomed to humiliation but when you leave the house expecting to have a people/trouble-free run to the supermarket, the last thing you expect is this kind of embarrassment. Of course it could have meant nothing. Maybe the dog was on a daily dose of Valium and today his forgetful, nonagenarian owner had forgotten to sedate him. Or maybe it was like Magda’s dog Puffy, who just had an irrational dislike of certain strangers. I even developed a theory that the cats and dogs of Canterbury had conspired for the first time in history to destroy me; in this case the cat to suck out what little soul I was born with and the dog to expose the blackness that remained. However, the explanation that my obsessive, monomaniacal and paranoid excuse for a personality could not let go of…was evil. Fuck the persecution complex. I am evil. I have always suspected as much and now I have the confirmation. I am not a bad person, in fact I can actually be quite pleasant most of the time…but I was just born evil.