Only two weeks of doing without and he was doing fine.

Well. His mind was moving in a strange pattern. Not so much plaid as paisley. Curlicued, flowered, dizzied. All of the hallways led to the same room, a room with a pillar and its glistening tip at the center, like that episode of The Avengers. Maybe it was the fumes from the shower cleaner.

Well, and his hormones were holding him hostage. But you can’t meet their demands. If you do, they’ll increase their demands. You die fighting or you die running. Also there were some tingles. Some aching. Some tension. When someone touched him. When he moved the right way. When he woke up in the morning. When he was cleaning the shower naked.

That was to expected though, with all the rubbing and bucking and sweating. The yellowish stains on the shower were shaped like streams, rivers, ponds – who was he to try and clean up nature? Better to paint stain over stain over stain until any nostalgia for the white canvas was safely moot. No. That was not higher logic.

And what a dirty window. It looked like ghosts having an eraser fight. The instructions on the container didn’t say anything about not using it on windows, but that could be because he didn’t read the instructions on the container. The window was clear on top and blurry on bottom, which made sense; as much as a window in a shower can make sense. Somehow the cleaner made the clear part clearer and the blurry part blurrier.

Two weeks or not, he was not doing fine with doing without.

But when he finished, he could see the rooftop of his neighbor’s house. There was a flaky frost all over it, but it didn’t seem to have just appeared, like it normally does; it seemed to have fallen from the sky.