Breakfast was hard for Manny. He couldn’t get a hold of himself, particularly his arms. They kept falling off, and each time he reattached them they migrated steadily farther down his torso.
“What next?” he asked himself.
“Coffee,” he replied.
“Right. Yes. Good. Yes. We have none.”
“No! We get it from someone else.”
“Excellent,” he said. And then he walked out the door, only forgetting his keys, wallet, glasses, hair, nose, and shoes, one after the other, which he returned to with increasing slowness and frustration. By the end he was making noises like a cross kettle, which continued all the way down the street and up to the very doorway of the coffee store.
“I won’t say anything weird,” he told himself.
“Right. Be certain not to do that.”
“I will.”
“Keep it short and simple.”
“Right.”
“Do you need a moment?” asked the barista, who was wearing the face of someone earning the absolute hell out of their paycheque.
“I do.”
“No I don’t. One of those things please.”
“And a little too much sugar,” he added, with a friendly wink of his knee.
“Please.”
“Don’t even TALK to me without it! That is a joke I am telling you.”
The coffee was produced and very gently and very VERY casually placed on the counter. “Cash or card?”
“Wallet!” said Manny.
“Coming right up!” he replied.
“Here it is!” he finished, and dumped half a pocket on the counter, containing one wallet three dimes a ten-dollar bill an expired Blockbuster Video gift card and his arm.
***
“Work will be fine,” Manny told himself. “It’ll be fine. Just focus on the job in front of me.”
“But I didn’t get my coffee,” he mourned. “People will talk to me without my having had my coffee.”
“That’s alright, it’s a thing people say that doesn’t mean anything, don’t worry about it. And I think I said it wrong.”
“Did I?”
“I’m pretty sure we did.”
“How?”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t know.”
Manny hyperventilated for a minute or two then slapped himself around the torso head and limbs with some of his other pieces. “It’s okay,” he reminded himself. “It’s alright. It’s not the end of the world. Everyone messes up. There are people worse off than me. All we have to do is get through the day, and it’s a good day, a good job, a good thing we do, that we like, that we’re trained for. This is what our life is.”
“Move these boxes over to the back room,” said the shift supervisor.
“I don’t know how,” said Manny.
“Why?”
“I don’t know which boxes you mean when you say ‘those,’ because it seems obvious they could be the ones in this pile but I suspect I don’t understand the basic operations of this building and fear you refer to things that are common matter-of-fact knowledge that I have somehow completely avoided learning of. I don’t know which back room you refer to, since I can imagine half this building being back rooms and trying to deduce which room is most likely to be referred to requires knowledge of your psychology I do not possess and am terrified to guess at. I don’t know the last place the dolly was left in, and I’m sure that lacking this information is a sign of terrible and omnipresent flaws in my most basic psychology. I don’t know how to communicate any of these problems to you without you looking at me in ways that fill me with the most ancient fear of the deeply unknown.”
The shift supervisor looked at Manny.
“That is the way you are looking at me right now,” explained Manny, painting a big friendly smile across both of his wrists to show happiness and good intentions.
“I said too much and did too little.”
“Or said too little and did too much. Being terse and overzealous was the problem with the coffee.”
“No, it was definitely too much explaining and not enough action this time.”
“I’ll pick up a box and ask where he wants it.”
Manny picked up the box.
“Where do you want it?” he asked.
The shift supervisor fled.
“Wrong grip,” Manny said. “The opposable digits are on the HANDS, remember?”
“Oh NO.”
“That certainly didn’t help,” he added, “but I think the biggest problem there was that the digits are the things on the LIMBS.”
“What am I using then?”
“Ribs.”
“Oh NO, oh NO.”
***
Manny was having a great time.
“I am having a great time,” he told himself. “I am looking at this thing in my hand, and it has all the information in the world in it, and in my other hand I have a beverage, but NOT coffee, and that means I’m having a great time right now. I am simultaneously extroverting and introverting. I am mesoverting. My verting is medianalized. I am having a blast. People see me and want to be like me and be with me.”
“I maybe should be doing this at an establishment.”
“I wanted a quiet night in.”
“Then maybe I should be doing this at my home.”
“This is a compromise.”
“This is the parking lot of my workplace.”
Manny looked around.
“So it is, but so what? I have company AND privacy, and I share pre-existing interests with my peers.”
“Everyone has gone home but me and the shift supervisor.”
“He’s getting friends.”
“He’s calling the police.”
“Why? I’ve done nothing wrong. Is picking things up with your ribs a crime?”
“I don’t think it’s a crime, but I think it’s bad if you drink in the company parking lot.”
“I brought this beverage on my own and made it myself from myself.”
“Nonetheless.”
“Fine, fine, fine.” Manny’s shoulders slumped. “Final grade?”
“I think two out of five.”
“Be fair!” scolded Manny, ducking his head down and scowling.
“Two out of six then. More room for improvement.”
“That’s right. That’s right. That’s right,” Manny reckoned. One shoulder slumped too far and fell off altogether. “I’ve got time, right?”
“Nothing but.”
“Same time tomorrow morning?”
“And don’t stay up all night.”
Manny sighed and broke apart into his constituent fauna for the evening. “Geez,” he muttered to himself as he skulked back into the woods on hundreds and thousands and pairs and dozens and zeroes of little legs. “Thanks, MOM.”