Falling To Pieces.

FALLING TO PIECES.


By D. Jonas Laurence



One day I began falling to pieces.
I suppose now, looking back on it all, it had been imminent for quite some time, years in fact, a lifetime maybe, but it all began in earnest one day. One day I couldn’t cloud myself in milky, billowy, marshmallow pillows of alcohol, or drugs, or DVDs, or music, or books, or cooking shows, or radio broadcasts, or Playstation, or pornography, or shopping, or anything…
One day I could not deny the simple fact;
I was falling to pieces.

It began with my fingernails.
One day I was showering. I was washing my hair with an expensive dandruff shampoo that I need to use in order to keep my shoulders from looking like someone has sprinkled flaky piles of cocaine on them, when I felt something within the soapy coils of my hair.
I placed my head under the boiling hot stream of water and manoeuvred whatever it was in my hair until it was in my hand.
I looked down. It was a fingernail.
I inspected my hands and found that the nail of the little finger on my left hand was missing. It had simply fallen off.
I turned the fingernail clutched between the fingers of my right hand. I stared at it. There was no blood or evidence of it having been pulled or knocked off. It seemed to have just fallen off. And left nude pink skin in its place.
The next day another fingernail fell off.
And the next day another fell off.
And the same thing the next day.
And the next.
And the next.
Until I had no fingernails.

Of course my toenails were next to go.
They turned a strange orange and flaked off like cheese smelling cornflakes.
I found these hidden in the folds of my duvets.
Hidden in the folds of my socks.
Scattered to the corners of my rooms.
Ten of them.
I began to get worried.
Next thing to go was my hair.
I don’t just mean the hair on my head.
I mean all my hair.
I was soon as pube-less as a ten-year-old boy.
Hair even fell out of my nose.
And my eyebrows.
My eyelashes fell out for Christ’s sake!
Then one ear fell off as I was driving to work one morning.
That annoyed me.
Then one of my balls fell off when I arrived at work.
It fell out the bottom of my slacks and bounced down the hall like a flesh coloured ping-pong ball.
My secretary happened to be walking down the hall and stood on it with a mushy noise.
She screamed and I sent her home for the day.
(No pay of course as she had crushed my nut!)
I had begun carrying around a small rucksack and I placed my squashed nut in the rucksack along with my finger and toenails, my hair, and my right ear.
What next? I thought.
And as if in answer my nose fell onto the floor with a snotty slap.
Fuck! I screamed.
I picked my nose…up off the floor and threw it in my bag.
Then I ran from the office as fast as I could.
So fast in fact that I didn’t notice that my foreskin had fallen off somewhere.
I ran back to my car and drove out of the city.
I was sweating, panicking, freaking out, and I stopped to get a pack of cigarettes on the outskirts of the city.
I drove into the desert.
I smoked a cigarette with my arm hanging out the window.
The two nail-less fingers holding my cigarette fell off.
They bounced and skidded across the road and two hyenas picked up one each in their jaws and ran away laughing.
Bastards! I screamed and jammed on the brakes.
I skidded to a stop and reached into my glove compartment for my gun.
I jumped out of my car and aimed at the closer of the disappearing hyenas.
I pulled the trigger.
But I forgot that I no longer had a trigger finger.
The bastards got away.
So I got back in my car and started driving.
I began to get hungry and thirsty and decided to stop at the next restaurant I saw.
I saw a restaurant up ahead nestled in the shade of a huge red rock.
The name of the restaurant was THE HUGE RED ROCK RESTAURANT.
I skidded into the parking lot with dust and rocks and a slab of my elbow flying.
My mind was racing like a horse on speed.
I got out of my car, still sweating.
I stepped into the cool interior of the restaurant.
I went and sat at the bar.
The bartender and I seemed to be the only people in the place.
I put my rucksack down on the seat beside me.

“Hey guy,” the heavily tattooed bartender said to me, his muscled arms flexing, sticking out of the denim waistcoat (no shirt beneath) that he wore, “You okay? You don’t look so good.”
“Of course I don’t look too good!!” I screamed. “My fucken nose has fallen off! My right nut has fallen off and been stood on by my secretary! Give me a fucken whiskey. A double.”
The bartenders face grimaced at my outburst.
But he poured the whiskey anyway.
I gulped it in one.
My heart was racing again.
“Give me another.” I said.
So he did.
“You got any supa-glue?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘you got any supa-glue?’ What, you dumb or something?”
So the bartender sighed and rummaged in a drawer under the bar and passed me a tube of supa-glue.
I took my rucksack and opened it. I extracted my nose and smeared it with glue. I stuck it back on my face.
I took my squashed ball and moulded it like putty back into a shape like a testicle.
I rubbed glue on it and put my hand down my slacks, inside my silk boxer shorts.
I stuck my ball back on.
The bartender watched me with an amused look on his face.
I held up my hand, the one with the two fingers missing.
“Fucken hyenas got my fingers man.” I said.
“I hear you brother. I hear you.” He replied.
Next I stuck my ear back on.
Next I stuck my hair back on.
I was a poet and I did not know it.
I was getting tired.
I drank another whiskey.
I threw a lot of money on the bar. Enough for the whiskies and the supa-glue.
“Thanks for listening.” I said, and stood up to leave.
“It’s my job man. It’s my job.” The bartender said and began polishing the bar with smelly wood polish.
I left and got back in my car.
I looked in the mirror.
I looked a little better with my nose and hair back on, but I had glued my ear on upside-down. That pissed me off.
An exhaustion now came over me like a wave of poisoned gas.
I started my car and started driving.
I needed to find a place to sleep.
Finally I came to the outskirts of a small town. The sun was going down.
I slowed and near Main Street saw a sign in neon that said:
HOTEL SMALL TOWN – Rooms to rent – vacancies.
I parked my car outside and scooped up my rucksack and my supa-glue.
Faceless peoples walked the footpaths. Birds chirped. Dragonflies chased gnats and mosquitoes. Wolves howled in the distance. Vultures circled in the darkening sky. Bad omens everywhere.
I checked in with a fat woman smoking a menthol cigarette.
She gave me my key after I gave her a lot of money.
I went to my room located at the back of the hotel.
My room overlooked a park where children played on swings and jungle-jims and merry-go-rounds, and mothers talked in small groups watching their kids like hawks.
I watched this scene and felt tears spill from my eyes.
My heart broke inside me.
Broke into a million pieces and I knew that I would need to buy more supa-glue in order to put it back together again.
More tears spilled.
Then my left eye fell out.
I tried to pick it up but my hand, the one with three fingers, fell off.
My shoes fell from my feet.
My socks fell off.
My toes scattered like marbles.
My nipples fell off.
My kneecaps fell off.
I picked up the telephone with my one good hand.
I pressed one for reception.
“Please!” I screamed, “You gotta help me. I’m falling to pieces. I need all the supa-glue you can find. Please, I’m begging you! I’ll pay anything. Just bring me supa-glue!”
I could hear the fat woman smoking her shit-smelling menthol cigarette.
“Well…okay then.” She said, and hung up.

Thirty minutes later there was a knock at the door.
I crawled over (my feet had fallen off, as had one leg below the knee – or where the knee used to be) and called out.
“Please leave the glue just inside my door. Don’t try to look at me!”
I unlocked the door, after turning off the light, and hid behind the door.
The fat woman wheeled in a wheelbarrow. Placed it down on the floor and left.
“Thank you! God bless you!” I yelled to her, just before my tongue fell out.
Then I locked the door and turned on the light.
Piled on the wheelbarrow were twenty industrial sized buckets of supa-glue.
I began carrying each bucket into the bathroom. Crawling. Sometimes pushing the buckets, sometimes pulling them.
I had to do twenty trips.
Each time I lost more of myself.
My arse cheeks fell off.
My chin fell off.
My moles fell off.
My armpits fell off.
My cock fell off and I put it in my tongue-less mouth so that I would not lose it.
Finally I had all the buckets in the bathroom.
I poured all the buckets into the bathtub.
The glue came about half way up the sides.
Next I crawled around the room picking up all the pieces of myself.
I put them all inside the bathtub as well.
Finally I crawled into the glue bath.
I began putting the pieces of myself back together.
But it was like a really difficult jigsaw puzzle.
I couldn’t figure out where all the pieces went.
Nothing made sense.
I tried and I tried.
But the exhaustion was too much.
I couldn’t help myself.
I fell asleep in the warm glue.

I never did wake up.
I guess it was just my time to go.
As I mentioned, I had been falling to pieces for such a long time I don’t think there was anything I could do to stop it. I mean I tried. I never gave up until the end, when I just couldn’t fight it anymore.
I just had to sink into the glue.
It was nice to know that some people missed me.
I wish I had have known that when I was still around.
Maybe that could have helped in some way.
Maybe that could have made it easier.
I don’t know.
And I guess, now, I never will.
My obituary read:
Dead.
Will be missed by children Larry and Sarah and by ex-wife Laura.
Beloved son of James and Mary.
Victim of a freak glue accident.

I guess the old children’s nursery rhyme was true.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.



THE END.