Written by 1:30 am Miscellania

Halley’s comet

Phillip sat squirming on the edge of the plastic chair. He was finding patterns in the cream colored linoleum that was flecked with brown marks that gave it the effect of something between wood grain and marble. In the markings he saw faces, long nosed men with bouffant hair-dos and grimacing goblins with fat chins. He also saw hills, and trees, some mythical animals and the occasional long neck of a giraffe or the boxy smudgy shape of a dog. When he bored of that he began trying to find duplicate tiles, tiles that were marked in the same way. There seemed to be a pattern to the way the tiles were laid. He followed the black lines between the tiles pretending that they were highways through an endless stretch of Nebraska prairie. He remembered riding in the back of his parents Suburban through the long trip from Omaha to Yellowstone they had taken last summer. He remembered the endless corn fields, wheat fields and fields of some other long wispy grain that stretched out under the hot Nebraskan sun for miles and miles. And then suddenly nothing appeared. The corn was replaced with dirt and the occasional red butte that shot out of the ground in protest.

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