People had always regarded him as weird.
The man looked down from his third-floor window counting the brightly coloured gnomes in his neighbour’s back garden. This, in itself, would be of no consequence, but the fact that this was done at least twice a day, was. He was a man who lived mainly in the past, trapped in his origins, beginnings that, although quite bizarre, brought him to where he was. He slipped into one of his regular yet sudden flashbacks and remembered how as a kid he wanted to wear his cap backwards like all the other kids, but he couldn’t because to do it always gave him nosebleeds. That, and how he was forever getting mysterious rashes.
As he stands staring out, he reflects on his father’s preoccupation with picking hairs off any bars of soap he found in the bathroom. How he liked to do it in private, even when others needed to use the toilet. In his head he could hear the knocking. He didn’t find the sound at all unpleasant.
He reflected on the fact that so many times he would open his school lunch box, only to find it empty, and how his mother found the prank so incredibly funny. He thought about how she took great pleasure in getting brain freeze by swallowing ice cubes, and how she would sort the mail by smelling each letter for several moments before opening them.
Then, there was the time his father tinkered with his equipment and managed to play the National Geographic’s sleep-inducing video titled ‘Rain Forest’ backwards, with sound. He remembers the pungent cloud of opium smoke that often drifted throughout the house, and how fervently his father had worked on his treatise on molecular structures and how he frequently referred to the topic, despite it making no sense, as comparable to the business of stuffing scarecrows.
He ruminated on how his mother, after one of the many blazing rows with his father, would get her revenge by lighting up a cigar, also, her frequent seizures that came on whenever her mood ring turned blue, together with her randomly selecting books, removing them from the study, piling them up on the back lawn and setting them alight.
Of course. There was his father’s obsession with the coming of the new world order, his hatred of queuing like a sheep to book in for a flight, within an airport’s silly bollard and rope chicanes, and his habit of accumulating his toenail clippings in a large jar under his desk.
These parents, now passed away, together with the fact that he had no brothers or sisters, meant that the apparent madness ended there, with him.
He glanced at the clock. He would don his dress suit and call for a taxi. He would arrive at the concert hall in plenty of time. He would sit at the incredibly expensive Steinway piano long before the curtain rose. He would enthral the audience with a rendition of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D major, before slipping away through the rear exit to walk the six blocks home.
This would be time enough to return to his ruminations about lunch boxes, scarecrows, soap hairs, and the rest.
He focused again on the garden below. He would have just enough time, while there was still sufficient light, to count them again.
Reasonable enough; yet, people had always regarded him as weird.