Tez walked down the road in his dream. It was a slate-blue with little glimmers under the full moon. He had walked a long time but wasn’t tired. With a deep breath he panned the skies, the horizon and the undulating road beckoning him, ever forward. He walked on with hardly a sound around, just the minimal interchange between his boots and the tarmac. Tez woke up.

He angled his neck and back slightly and squinted at the alarm clock that lay beside his pillow. 

My clock lies 

beside my pillow.

It goes "tick tock"

but can it say "hello"?

Jumping out of bed to shake it off, lonely Tez pulled on his jeans and strode over to the half open window allowing his senses to explode. 

It was a fine day. Quiet, but for the sounds that would be heard on a typical Sunday afternoon, a dog’s bark here, the hum of an air-conditioner there, splashing in the pool beyond. 

Tez stretched his arm and back till the blunt cracking sound signified a start to the day’s business.

Refreshed and smarting pleasantly from the hot shower, he poured himself a glass of coffeemilk and sat by the window in the mid-afternoon sunshine. The cold milk cooled his insides even as the sun braised him lightly.

Tez looked out the window at the fragrant white sheets trying to grab the breeze in a sail, missing, holding, sliding, in other words, flapping about. He saw one loosen from the clothesline and hold on precariously, albeit rather lazily.

The satin sheet languorously falls

to rest in orgasm on the prickly grass.

Tez sat there with his glass of milk halfway to his lips and the fingers of the breeze frozen in his hair at mid-tousle as the white sheet broke and fell…languorously.

The doorbell rang. 

It startled Tez. Not so much out of his reverie as the fact that someone had actually found their way to his door, rung his doorbell, consciously, perhaps even had some business with him personally?

Tez strode over to the front door with long slow steps and peered out of the magic-eye. It didn’t get to be used much and was probably flibbering about with a sense of self-awareness as he looked through it.

It was the mailman! Now, Tez couldn’t conceal his astonishment at the goings-on anymore. The mailman! He struggled to create an attitude to deal with this situation, and after much debate at speeds-unbelievable he picked suspicion.

The mailman was getting impatient, he had many more summons to deliver. The door opened a crack and a suspicious eye under an arched eyebrow glared at him.

"Yee-ees?"

The mailman brusquely said, "Tez Waldendos"?, and tersely thrust a boring looking envelope into Tez’s reflexively outstretched hand without waiting for an answer and was two doors down before Tez could spit out "Who wants to know?".

With an inward sigh, he shut the door and tore open the envelope. Glancing at the cover he noticed it was from some association he had never heard of. Inside unfolded a printout (obviously a form letter he realized heart-a-sinking) with his name added in ink.

It was a summons. To appear in front of the local court to testify that the association was satisfactorily doing its job for its residents. After a bit of analysis-and-deduction, he realized it was an association of people, residents in this apartment complex who raised funds and used them for stuff like fixing leaky faucets and keeping the pathways doggy-doo free.

Bitterness not being a part of his makeup, it was all Tez could do to try and twist his lips into a wry smile. 

Wry smile, dry smile, 
a wizened, wise heart, a barren empty mind.

Tez walked over to his refrigerator while pondering if this meant that he was alive after all. "I mean", he thought," if my presence is required to validate something that is, like, normal and existent…". 

Shaking his head he opened the fridge door and got hurled back by an odorous assault. Now Tez was sure that he was alive. He purposefully went to the closet (like regular people!) and pulled out and put on his shirt. Took his keys off the fridge and headed out into the sunshine.

He walked across the grassy mound that spread out between the buildings, past the white sheet that smelled like grass and sunshine and perfumed detergent, clean, rivalling the sun as best a sheet could, past the kids on their cycles and the wafting voices of two old women, past the million individual objects that added up to a whole that didn’t pierce his understanding and rounded the corner into the marketplace.

The marketplace was buzzing with sounds of trade and gossip. There were fruitsellers in the corner, and butchers at the other end alongside chinaware and wooden knickknacks. Stationers and seamstresses breathed the same air as hairdressers and grocers. But Tez wanted fresh milk, interesting how he hadn’t noticed the stink in the morning, and he wanted some some hot bread and meat. Passing the fruitsellers, he wondered how it would look if the the fruits were all sprung up in the air by an invisible hand thumping the carts from below, the oranges and lemons tossed up, bouncing off each other, the peaches and pomogranets splatting and cleaving and spilling their insides as the plums burst into riotous purple over it all.

As he was staring at an event that wasn’t happening, Tez bumped into a group of men who were standing around talking as regular people are wont to do. He mumbled an apology, and caught one man stating that he too had got a summons from the court to testify about the association’s performance this past year. "I got one of those too!", Tez exclaimed involuntarily. "Oh, you did eh? Well looks like we all got to waste a few precious hours at the courthouse this week." . Tez gasped inwardly with amazement, he was actually engaged in a mundane conversation with a real man! It was incredible. He was about to say something in reply, but the conversation shifted to the weekend’s game. 

Tez hung about for a few seconds and then moved on to the sandwiches-n-dairy outlet when he realized the flukiness of the phenomenon he had just been a part of.

What gave them all that sense of purpose, that raison-d-etre, why did they never ask why , how did they deal with the nothingness of everyday life, their mundane concerns a mystery to Tez, their lack of fear at the ephemeral quality of human life, the urge to grasp the entire star-filled universe into his human-size palms unique to him…how did they be? He squinted down at his shoes, and found the answer.

My shoe isn’t blue, coz it do what it s’posed to.

Tez pressed ctrl-S on his keyboard, and sat back with a sigh. Not bad for a morning’s work. He took a printout, grabbed an apple and headed out to the park, where old Mrs. Timmons would be coming out to feed the ducks and Jerry Garcia would be floating in an invisible haze between the bunchy cotton clouds.