Morning

Having once awoken, Jonathan could only lie in bed for so long.  That had always been the way; his internal alarm clock was a savage taskmaster.  Twisting over, the moist, slightly too hot sheets peeling from his body like sunburnt skin, he focused on the clock beside the bed.  Odd.  It was earlier that it should have been.  But still.  He swung his legs over the edge.  The air in the bedroom was cool, but unmoving.  That was why the bedding was too hot, the pillow damp where his head had lain, why his chest hurt.  Perhaps not.  

Looking down, Jonathan saw that he was massaging the spot where the phantom pain lay and forced his hand to stop, to come rest on his thigh and be still.  He breathed in the unmoving air and, though it was too early to do so, forced himself to stand up.  He could lie in bed as long as he wanted.  He could do, anything at all.  

Half the bedding was already straight so Jonathan pulled his disarranged portion into a shambling sort of alignment and stumped from the room.  There were slippers stacked behind the door, the left side one always on top, so that he could put them on correctly in the dark, but unless it was during those two weeks of the year where it was really cold- cold as far as Floridians knew- he didn’t bother.  There were two different robes as well, hanging limply from a hook he had fashioned out of a recycled shelf bracket and fixed to the back of the door; one for the first eleven and a half months of the year, the other to go with the slippers.  Leaving them both be, Jonathan traversed the short hallway naked, climbed down the three steps, and passed in front of the window, his hand trailing unconsciously along the bottom of the glass.  A tiny ridge there bumped over his finger, catching for a moment on the small scar.

With the kitchen lights turned as dim as the switch would allow, Jonathan assembled his coffee, gently tapping the unit as the whirring burrs ground, so that the oily beans would not Jenga in the hopper.  It was a much finer machine than he would ever have bought for himself and he was never harsh with it, cleaning when the little light came on and emptying the reservoir the moment the sign floated into view.  Jonathan always put everything away properly before he allowed himself to drink the coffee, too, but that was just, who he was; there was nothing special in that.

 Arranging five, no, six, saltine crackers, like daisy petals, around the cup and the black saucer, Jonathan returned to the window.  A hardback chair was already there, pushed back so that he would not stumble over it in the dark.  It would never have been allowed to remain in that place before, but to him it made sense; why tote the thing back and forth?  

He did not settle into it but, like a visitor, a stranger in a strange place, sat straight and stiff, holding the black saucer on his knee.  There was no butter on the crackers, but sometimes whole days went by now when he didn’t think about butter.

It was still very early, but that particular shade of light which heralded a Florida sunrise, deep tangerine emboldened by candy apple, was niggling coquettishly on the minutia.  It was all on the other side of the glass, in wet garbage can handles and the off-color edges of palm fronds, among the infinite white marble chips in the neighbor's drive.  

Reaching across the gap, deliberately now, Jonathan touched the crack in the windowpane; his hand had found it by cruel habit before.  He let the ridges of his fingerprint slip over, one by one, wondering if it would cut him again.  He did not think the crack had gotten any worse lately.  In the beginning, he had considered marking the furthermost tip of its questing dagger point with black marker, but something inside had rebelled at the idea; quantifying the damage, knowing exactly how much worse things had grown during the night, charting it.  

The lawn company the HOA hired to cut the grass was far too liberal with their safety guards and something, a rock perhaps, or chunk of mulched palm, had struck the window from the outside while Jonathan had been busy doing other things, minding his own affairs.

For a moment, his mouth began to tighten, in that way he had grown so used to, but this time he was able to master the quiver, to sip his coffee and put it back down without disarranging the crackers.  

The sun's light was illuminating the grass now, making each blade distinct.  There were no wild flowers.  It warmed the insides of cars- unwelcomed service- and began to lick up the heavy, omnipresent dew.

Only Jonathan was awake and about, so only he saw, slowly meting out crackers to coffee, as the sun gradually established itself in the sky.  How perfectly round it was, how… eternal and, somehow, in that very unending, vast, passivity, in a way he could not understand, could not even articulate to himself, how very just.  

Jonathan placed the empty cup back on the saucer.  He would take it right to the kitchen and clean it.  One had to keep on top of the little things.  He might as well do it now, in fact.  One had to do something.  But.  He didn’t really want to.  Perhaps, that time was finally over.  The time of little distractions.  The time of minutia.

At the thought his thumb jumped automatically to the tiny scar on his finger and his mouth puckered, because he had forgotten to think about it yet that day.

He rose anyway, because, no matter what, one could not sit in a chair all day.  One could do whatever one wished, but he would not allow himself to do that.

As Jonathan shifted, garnering his strength, halfway between sitting and rising, the niggling sun found the altered dimension within the broken window, the jarring, unplanned and unplannable line which now existed inside the smooth regularity of the windows two planes, and its fresh light ran along the cracks unmeasurable bias, flashing down its length in a rosy color like fresh strawberries, sparkling off the myriad flaws.

‘If I were to push, right there,’ thought Jonathan, looking at the brutal epicenter, ‘it would shatter.  Everything would just... come undone.’

He considered doing so, for a numb moment, but then continued to rise, slowly, like the sun.