Sandwiches

She was running inside a building. Not into it, as she was already inside. She had been frightened, and then she had been sheltered.

She had seen Math. Mathematics, in a human form: slender and sinister, an anthropomorphic stick bug. Memories, in that silhouette, a fearsome creature of the past. Her skin had felt sliced, as if plagued by a hundred protractors.

She did not know how she had come to enter this place. She could not recall a door, a window or any other sort of opening. She seemed to have just ‘been’ there. Having an extensive knowledge of different kinds of shelter, she knew that it just couldn’t be so. If she was inside the walls, she had to have gone through them somehow.

The floor was like Minneapolis in that it probably came from Minnesota. It had the nicest of album art somehow employed in an intricate tiling pattern. As if they were drenched in honey, the inwardly cold fluorescent ceiling lights managed a warm and sticky illumination. The doorframes were such that it would probably be difficult to get from room to room gracefully. She didn’t seem to care though, instead content to lie on the floor of the room she was in and weep.

“Weep,” she wept, “I am trapped in the Minneapolitan central headquarters of New York City. I miss my shelter. I cannot sleep here. I will die of sleep deprivation, and no one will see. I will become a piece of pretty album art encased in the floor. And even that can only last so long.”

As time progressed, lying became more comfortable and she began to adopt a more attractive position.

“Somebody come and paint me. I am lying here ever so attractively.”

Nobody came.

“I am so lonely. Even though I have made no effort to find a person to unlonelify myself, I know I am doomed to eternal solitude.”

She wasn’t. In every room besides the one she had occupied, there were people picnicking and being jolly.

She began to count the albums of the floor, the numbers sticking in her temple like toothpicks in cheese. It had been so long since she had counted anything, since quantity bore little significance to her. Numbers had always disagreed with her. So had people.

She had always felt like the bottom bread of a sandwich. When people peopled with her, she felt as if her only function was to keep everything from falling onto the plate. So that people didn’t get mustard all over their hands. But now that she was alone, she was the whole sandwich. It was depressing that it took complete isolation to make her any more than a single piece of bread. Other people could be sandwiches. Although some were revolting combinations of flavours and textures, they were an entire meal, sufficient to satisfy a famished gut.

“I want people to come in here with me and make me a sandwich. I want to be just like everyone but better. And I cannot accomplish it myself. All these years I tried valiantly notatall and it never did work and now I need help.”

Days passed. Picnic upon picnic was enjoyed without her presence. She became restless. She tried to avoid looking at the friendly doors on the walls. Trying to do this she had twisted her spine awkwardly and as such was in a foul mood. Evading the image of the exits became a skill.

“Skill, what a lovely spoonful of sauerkraut to add to myself”

In this strange building in New York, something happened. Doors appeared on the walls of the central room, the one room where no one picnicked. They were becoming rapidly rampant, filling every space available.

“It is slowly becoming impossible for me to ignore the possibility of leaving this place. But I won't. Someone has to come and retrieve me.”

She found herself staring at a door. She soon found herself opening it. She found herself climbing ungracefully into the room. She found her eyes flitting, triangling around the sights of the oasis she had entered. She lost herself.

A room full of picnickers. Sandwiches, all of them.