EVERYTHING I HELD DEAR

Pharaoh ants rambled over the monitor, cajoled by photonic documentation. The secretary blipped them with Kleenex, but they had invaded an interior panel, resolution matrixed inviolable, each candela perambulating itself. She killed one with the flat of her nail, riveting the insect to its own liminal image.

“I’m watching my program,” the bastard, her boss, lied, enticed by this quandary.

“Epizootic ooze trending for the feed,” I opined.

“I’m afraid I’ve missed,” the bastard began to lie, “your meaning,” he finished lying.

I had written extensively about The Colonoscopists for a dead website. “Dead” as in no longer available on the Wayback Machine. “Extensively” as in “in depth”, which was a joke a commenter got ratioed for making: another shallow bon mot featured on The Colonoscopy Quarterly. I was sub-tweeted for a meretricious lack of merit in miswording certain beatitudes of theirs. They indicated, with a series of DMs, that guys like me entailed a proctologist’s visit to find God.

The flight seemed like it had begun sometime before my disadvantageous birth. I was a pregnancy the plane terminated via self-harm. The guy in the aisle seat absconded with a wet wipe of mine. When I walked in, the head editor looked foreshortened by his wicker chair, as if he were a perturbed inlay of its rattan. He whooped one fat last dogma to the secretary, who had, doubtless, sidestepped an assault.

“How did they fit the LCD,” I groused, pained to learn of such a providential contingency regarding equipment at large, knits beknitted, 1920 x1080 pismire, bezels undead. I’d be next, a life siphoned between screen and display, the worldwide window more somatic a formicarium than ever…

“How can the ants be ejected? Purchase another monitor? Is their arrival by happenstance? Do either of you partake in cookies? Is she menstruating a diapason of syrup?”

He pointed at what I said, each sentence vitrifying midair. I followed his finger to the floor and felt the corpse of everything I held dear adhere to the parquetry. Registering my abhorrence, he handed me a card: Honorary Colonosocopist.