David Comes to Life

David drank his rapidly cooling coffee and sneered at the taste. He thought of the word ‘sneer’ as he sneered, and in a sort of out-of-body experience envisioned his sneering like an internally projected film in a weird sort of multimedia sneering experience. Coffee was known at times to elicit different kinds of transcendental experiences in David, though rarely at such low volumes. In the past he had been known to vibrate and perhaps lose the ability to speak, instead communicating by enthusiastic nods of the head and exhaustive foot tapping. If he leaned his wrists, say, on a table edge, another individual could read his pulse at the other side of the table edge, like circulatory driven morse code “../—//…-/../-…/.-.-/.-/-/../-./—.”

David was prone to experiencing many different kinds of transcendental sensation; whether from a brisk walk in the morning, to, most recently, a travel vaccine for yellow fever in his right deltoid. That exact moment in time - so quick - it never ceased to amaze him how difficult it was to stay in any moment. There was that moment just before the needle hit, a distinct process of preparation and trepidation shaped by past and perceived future experience. Then came the exact point the bevelled molecule-wide surface of the needle pierced his epidermis, dermis, sub-dermis, adipose, muscle fibres, a confusion of painful stimuli and attempts at self-distraction from said-stimuli, like two squabbling boys trying to lay the blame on one another. Then, immediately post-wounding, a potentially infinite period of past experience and reflection, an inability even in the immediacy of pain to truly articulate what said stimulus felt like, either overstating or understating the power of that single, miniscule, universally unimportant moment in time, a mere breadcrumb on the infinite loaf of human existence. David thought then of getting another coffee but upon examining his watch decided that he didn’t want to vibrate at his desk for the next four hours. He returned to his crossword.

1 down: “size of knob” (6)

Even though it was a cryptic, David inevitably thought immediately of penises.

He looked across the street and watched a pigeon peck at a piece of sick.