In a nightmare Jimmy Frank was being mauled by a tiger. When he awoke he could still see his guts trailing from his abdominal region like wind streamers.

“Holy Fuck!” Jimmy sat at the edge of the bed and rubbed his stomach. He grabbed for the cigarette pack on his nightstand, took one, and lit up.

Through a haze of smoke he looked at the clock.

“Holy fuck!”

Jimmy Frank was late for work. Almost by an hour. He was going to catch hell.

He didn’t bother making any coffee either, and his head was already starting to hurt. There would be plenty of shit coffee at work, but first he had to get there. Jimmy looked at the clock again. Shit shit.

He hopped on the bus just outside his apartment. It was brimming with the usual miscreants, but it was usually the little old ladies who always looked like they were afraid of getting beaten that pissed him off the most.

Suddenly, Jimmy remembered the dream with the tiger in great detail. How long had he been running from that tiger before it finally caught up with him?

His stomach hurt just thinking about it.

Jimmy, putting on his headphones, crawled down inside his little womb-bubble of opposition. King Crimson’s Islands, effectively isolating him, made him desire the exact opposite . . . to break out . . . to scream and flit in the aisle. It was a brief compulsion.

The faces around him, accentuated by the bottom heavy pulse of the music, began to take on an almost alien semblance and it didn’t seem like there would ever be anyway to reach them.

Jimmy, looking out the window, watched the Seattle landscape roll past. It paused every couple minutes to let a couple aliens on, a couple off. He didn’t bother looking at these new specimens.

Sometimes vivid dreams the night before made one feel slightly askew.

Maybe I’m the alien.

Jimmy was so absorbed in his own thoughts that he’d almost missed his stop. He found this to be very symbolic, like there was something in the air working against him; something that was making the universe seem irrevocably unlivable. By no means did he exist by that particular credence, but for now he felt it just the same.

Jimmy thanked the bus driver like he did every day and got off, and just like every day, he lit a cigarette within seconds of his feet slapping the pavement.

Digging his hands deep into his pockets, Jimmy sauntered along the sidewalk. He continued to listen to Crimson, and he did not hurry. Even though he was late by well over an hour the notion of hurrying had left him. Funny. The only thing that prompted him to press on at all was his powerful lust for coffee.

Jackie’s was only four blocks away, but it took Jimmy nearly ten minutes to get there.

His eyes winced against the sun, which was rare in March. People in Seattle were like fucking moles in the winter, only coming out to scurry off to their jobs and back. It was pretty strange behavior now that he thought about it.

He threw his cigarette butt through a drain grill, taking the time to watch it fizz in sludge, the last strain of smoke worming back out through the rusted grill.

And the sun was warm on the back of his neck.

A cop screamed past, its siren wailing . . . and a fire truck after that.

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