Tuesday Is a Hat

On Tuesday, I became a hat.

Not metaphorically. A literal hat. Perched on the head of a bureaucrat named Dennis who worked in an office made entirely of discarded to-do lists and soup labels. He didn’t notice me at first. That’s the trick to being a good hat—low profile, no sudden existential crises.

Around noon, Dennis spilled coffee on his pants and shouted, “DEBORAH! THE SPREADSHEETS ARE BLEEDING AGAIN!”
I whispered, “You should try chamomile.”
He screamed. Understandable.

I dismounted his head like a gentleman, landed in a potted fern, and took inventory:

• Sanity: misplaced

• Identity: fluid

• Toes: still mine

• Carl: absent

• Gary the worm: singing

Ah, Gary. He lived in a peach in my pocket and had the voice of a haunted clarinet. Today he sang an aria about bees who became lawyers. I wept. It was beautiful. Or maybe I had juice in my eye.

I stepped outside and reality reset.

The street was upside down, the buildings were whispering, and every third person wore a mask that looked suspiciously like me. One of them waved.

Grizly was waiting in the fountain, soaking wet and unapologetically void.
“They changed the rules,” he said.
“Which rules?” I asked.
“All of them,” he replied, and offered me a pineapple that whispered state secrets.

I didn’t eat it. I’m on a low-government-diet.

Carl finally arrived, wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard that said “Observations of the Delusional, Vol. 17.” I was the only entry.

“You’re scheduled for a lecture on underwater origami in fifteen minutes,” he informed me.

“But I’m a hat,” I reminded him.

Carl adjusted his glasses. “Not today. Today you’re a professor of whispers and misplaced conclusions.”

Fine.

We walked sideways into the subway. The train ran on feelings and unpaid parking tickets. I took a seat between a cactus in a business suit and an old woman knitting a pair of time-traveling socks.

I gave my lecture to a room full of frogs in mortarboards. They took notes. One wept.

Afterward, I floated home, as one does, through the cracks in the pavement and the corridors of my own skull.

When I got back to the couch (which was now a glacier), my cat said, “You did well today.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
Then the couch melted and I dreamed myself awake.