Factotum

This may strike you as strange or perhaps even unseemly, I mean my speaking so frankly like this, but the story, the one in my imagination, was much more interesting before, when I was watching you through the blinds, before I came out to the sidewalk in my robe to ask you the nature and purpose of your behavior.

I had imagined your dog wasn’t in fact your dog, and that the dog had found you, and that the dog had convinced you through some form of non- or preverbal communication to pick through my curbside trash for scraps, for, say, a crust of pizza or perhaps a bone.

Before I came out here, actually, I was on my way to imagining the dog’s physical form was in fact a host for a floating sentience and this mysterious agent’s concern with my curbside trash was much more arcane and complex than casual observation might suggest. And you: You were a figure of much less consequence.

Carl Hansen Manks
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