by Brian Willems
He wakes up. He reads. He hates it when he reads a book and in it there's someone reading a book, but the title of the book in the book isn't given.
He gets up and goes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth first thing. He spits, and mixed in with the clear spit and white toothpaste foam is something dark purple. The water is on and he watches it mix with what he has spit out, dilute the purple to blue, and carry it down the drain.
He brushed his teeth last night before going to bed and hasn't eaten anything since. He spits again. There is more purple. Dark purple. More than the first time he spit. He'd had some wine before going to sleep but white. He'd eaten couscous with carrots in it. The carrots had been fried with thyme and then boiled in water and soy sauce. Maybe soy sauce is purple. But it's not. It's brown. He spits again. Definitely purple. Blackish purple. Before the couscous he'd had pizza and before the pizza crunchy honey muesli. Nothing purple. Some raisins in the muesli, but that couldn't be it. There were only a few and quite a while ago, 24 hours at least. He turns off the water and plugs the drain in the sink. Then he spits again, high up on the side of the sink so that the spit can run down the sloped incline of the porcelain, stretching itself out into a dark purple snake. There are tiny bubbles in it that pop. He sets his toothbrush on the counter, bristles up. He puts both hands on the rim of the sink and bends down to examine what he has spit.
If someone came into the bathroom right then, they might think he was about to vomit. He was. Inside the spit there's a circus. He thinks he can see a circus. He thinks he sees a microbe with a dog doing an animal number. The microbe isn't doing much, letting the dog steal the show. The dog is walking on its front legs. In a circle. The microbe just turns with the dog, so that it is always facing it, as if it had an invisible line stretched out to the dog's wet nose, leading it slowly
around. Then the dog falters. It's a Maltese.
Its soaring but wobbling dog-butt wants to make contact with the ground again. The dog scrambles in the empty air with its hind legs, looking for some traction, trying to stay up in the air for another rotation around its microbe master. As the legs come down the Maltese tries
harder and harder to stay up. The microbe stops and so does the dog. The dog's legs touch the ground and the microbe remains motionless.
He, the guy who woke up and read and then spit out a circus, peers closer. His mouth is open, taking deep breaths. He is afraid he's going to lose it. The microbe takes a step away from the dog, one step back, and the dog just stays where it is, panting from the effort. Then the microbe runs up to the dog at an incredible speed, leaps off the ground and lands inside the dog's right
ear, right in the inner canal. The dog jumps straight up in the air, launching from the ground with all four legs at once. But when the dog lands, it does so on just its front two feet. It's the training. Then the dog makes two confident circles around the spot that once held the microbe before slowly, deliberately letting his backside touch the surface of the sink.
The dog looks around for the microbe, and, not seeing it, lies down. Then it sneezes, scaring the guy standing over the sink and watching it all, the guy who then, finally, in the middle of a deep suck of air, trying to remain both focused and sane, heaves all over the inside bowl of the sink. The circus is over. There is no purple in his heave. He is so relieved he coughs. Then he wonders if there will be other circuses. He'll need to brush his teeth again.
The title of the book he was reading was The Life of Kenneth Tynan.