Chapter One: The Dusting
Splat. That’s how Jim really woke up this morning. Forget the Venti latte he gets at Starbucks before work; that would have to be put aside because Jim was literally full of shit.
Splat. Was it the worst possible splat one could encounter? Debatable. One variety of “splat” is the one you get walking across the street, and in your failure to look both ways, SPLAT: your corpse is flattened against a bus’s fascia.
Jim determined getting hit by a bus was worse after he was able to catch his breath, but this splat of shit really knocked the wind out of him. You think a bird shit on him? No. Far from the reality. This had to be at least 85 kilos of what looked like T-Rex excrement. Remember that pile of dung in Jurassic Park? Yeah, just like that. Oh, and let’s not ignore the odor. Remember when the Jewish prisoners hid underground in the outhouse shit tanks as they fled from the concentration camp guards in Schindler’s List? Well, the odor wasn’t quite that bad, but for comparison’s sake we’ll say eight-tenths on the Oscar Schindler scale of intolerable odors.
Standing there, not more than 50 feet from his front door, the Gods took a shit on Jim. At first, he didn’t know what to think. Hell, he didn’t know how to think. When you’re not breathing, you’re not thinking. First he felt a slap on the top of his head as if being stricken by a person’s hand. In the next thousandth of a second it felt like two fists on the shoulders. The next millisecond elapses and Jim is blinded. Whatever this was, it was now all over him. Somehow an amount of the fecal matter got up his nose and some more was lodged in his ear canals. At this point the odor hits Jim. He realizes it’s feces.
One second later: plenty of time for Jim’s brain to have had an initial reaction. Reflexes would have had Jim draw in a breath of air, but with shit caked all over his face, he keeps his mouth closed. Jim falls to the ground in shock.
“Oh my God!” Jim yells into the grass as he lie next to the sidewalk in front of his apartment building. “What the fuck is this shit?”
Jim claws the excrement out of his eyes, nose and mouth. He swats a pile that has managed to perch above his right ear. At this point, all you can see is Jim’s eyeballs as they race back and forth in this ocular sockets, frantically searching for a nearby hose.
He spots a spigot at the corner of the next building. He races over to get the repulsive crap off his body. His legs stumble him three paces, and then it happens: the gag reflex. Gag one: dry heave. Gag two: the milk and corn flakes have made their way halfway up Jim’s esophagus. Gag three: third time’s the charm. Monday morning’s breakfast has consigned itself to the morning’s wet grass.
By the third gag, Jim has arrived at the spigot. He turns on the water only to find it is just as brown as the shit caked over his skull. Unencumbered by the water’s color he grabs the hose draped over the spigot and shoots a stream of muddy rust into his forehead, eyes, nose and mouth.
Jim strips to his boxers and sprays himself with more water. He looks back to where the initial impact occurred just a minute earlier. He finally has a chance to look up to see where it may have originated. There was nothing immediately above him. He cranked his face further upward to the not-so-friendly skies.
Jim’s eyes refocused to look deep into the blue that lay between him and outer space. Still in plain sight is a lingering gaseous trail and a fighter jet is at the front of what looks like a contrail.
Jim stares up into the sky for a few moments more. Suddenly the fecal odor vanishes. He looks around and the pile of Jurassic-era shit that landed on him and the sidewalk is gone. He looks to his wet clothes strewn about the lawn of the building next door. There’s no fecal matter on the wet clothes, just a puddle of vomited milk and corn flakes.
What Jim does see in place of the Jurassic shit is a dusting of a white and silvery powder reminiscent of Ajax and metal shavings.
People along their morning walk to the bus station down the road are beginning to gather and point at Jim.
“Whatever that was, it came from that Jet and it made me hallucinate,” Jim mumbled to himself as he continued to make sense of the situation. More people were gathering and pointing at Jim’s wet, half-naked body.
“And whatever that shit is, it’s making me look like a dumb ass right now.”
It didn’t help that Jim’s boxers were white.
What will Jim make of this hallucination? Is he headed for the looney bin? What came from that jet? Will a local resident report Jim for indecent exposure? Who cleaned up the milky barf? Some of these questions will not be answered in the next edition of “As the World Orders”.
This image has nothing to do with Jim's struggle, or does it?
