The exhaustion snaked through his life like an old stone fence that divided the good days from the bad. Each lean night another misshapen stone tumbled to the field where his sickness grazed.  He’d learned to take the daily punch in the nose from the alarm clock like a back alley scrapper but the cumulative effect as the sunrises piled upon him was difficult to hide.

He watched the meat bob past the office window. Great ragged chunks dressed in spice and marinade swirled through the broth that raced along the gutters. Among the butchered lot of them there were riddles unspoken that he couldn’t understand, but he had riddles that he savored too. They were  encrypted in the artistry of the killing floor. Another world made of  all of the invisible things crafted beneath their darkened porches when the lights went out. Rare and bloody. Seasoned like raw game.

 He had his  purging rituals. Hobbies, the people he worked with called them. The disfigured world beyond his office window stormed his apartment in the wee hours. It never felt as quaint as a hobby when the ideas twisted his wrists  or squeezed his larynx. It was a struggle to convince himself there was catharsis in it, that it was the productive response. Catharsis wasn’t the right word though, distraction or obsession were more honest. Neither as cleansing as catharsis, rather, they were different types of frustrations. They were frustrations that meant something. Whatever the configuration a knot was a knot.

Those people beyond the window looked so gleeful in their insignificance. He interrogated their walk and posture and glazed eyes for anyone whom might be a co-conspirator. Someone with which to commiserate, caffeinate and adjudicate the world. Not that he’d have chased them down if one walked by, but one day someone finally responded to his questions with one of their own.

Beyond the bone and gristle of the streets, a lone fluorescent light glowed in a window of the building opposite.  Half its floors were empty. The parade of the newly unemployed shoved free of wheezing companies had been common place for awhile. At first it had humbled him to see the boxes under their arms and the stutter step of those caught beneath the sun of an utterly changed world. It humbled him until he realized there would be fewer people in line at the coffee shop.

A potato shaped silhouette fluttered about the vacant space on the 6th floor.  A ghost in the hive free to dance her silent, anxious waltz. This sliver of mystery in such a naked, vulgar world electrified him. Her arms flailed with graceful panic and the stumble of delirium radiated danger. He inched forward in his chair. She kicked at the cubicle walls and threw her head back to bay at the sole light source. He felt small behind his desk, almost naive.

She collapsed to the floor, and fell from sight. He waited for a moment for her to rise but she did not. The stillness of the moment skittered up the back of his neck and he decided he’d seen enough. For all the meat on the streets below it was his first glimpse of how the sausage was made.