The Man and the Owl Person

 

 

The man gets off work from his job as an office worker in a factory for boiling potatoes at six in the evening every night and goes home to pet his dog and kiss his wife on the throat, but then he goes out the back door with the garbage and puts the bag of garbage into the garbage bin, and then he trots with the dog along a path through a meadow to the forest behind his house, where the owl person is waiting for him.

 

The man's name is Jim and his bedroom has a dresser with an alarm clock that rests on top of it, he has a pink toothbrush that he keeps in the medicine closet above the sink and his name written on it with a magic marker on tape, and he always has at least one carton of eggs that he keeps in the refrigerator, and these eggs are for him to eat and for him alone, which is unlike the bacon.

 

But at six in the morning what does Jim know? He knows that he'll be late and he doesn't have his brain, because the owl person is using it. He doesn't have his brain because every evening the owl person has been holding him down on the ground and performing liposuction on Jim's head; this was because the owl person was training to be a doctor named Doctor Owl and it also needed a brain to use, because the owl person's brain that it had been born with was incredibly foolish. And yet the owl person was smart or lucky enough to have been given the use of Jim to take his brain, and so the owl person would start a practice.

 

And at Doctor Owl's practice, the owl person would be the receptionist, the nurse, the doctor and the patient all at once, although there'd be more patients too, because the owl person would slink around the town and do things such as to whisper some perverted thoughts into people's ears, or else maybe interrupt them while on the telephone, or else the owl person would sit idly in a bar with a beer and pretend not to be listening to a conversation between a father and his daughter, and yet the owl person would be listening and would taken advantage of the information that was put forth; or the owl person would rent a room in an apartment, would get a dresser and an alarm just like Jim's, perhaps the owl person would also get a wife and name her Susan just for fun, and then the owl person would run screaming into the forest with a knife in its hand, because the owl person would be foolish once again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Justin Dobbs lives in Seattle. His writing has been published in Sleepingfish and he is co-editor with Blake Butler of Brain on Lynch (forthcoming 2009).