a thirty fifth story...'tommy'

Tommy was in an unbelievably bad mood.

He had gotten out the wrong side of bed alright!

Brushing his teeth, he scowled at his reflection in the mirror; eating his breakfast he took savage bites of his morning toast; leaving the house to go to work he aimed a furious kick at his next door neighbour’s cat; standing at the bus stop he felt a murderous desire to kill.

To Tommy’s right there was a tall, immaculately dressed woman with a pink umbrella.  Tommy wanted to ram the pink umbrella down her throat.  To Tommy’s left there was a short, squat man, dressed in painting and decorating overalls, carrying a step ladder.  Tommy wanted to bash in his skull. 

And then it rained – Tommy wanted to go to the weatherman’s house, grab him by the scruff of the neck and drown him violently in his own toilet bowl. 

Tommy looked at his stupid, dumb watch.

The bus was late.

Tommy hoped the bus driver had been involved in a horrific motorway pile up.

~

When Tommy finally made it into the office, his boss came over to his desk to remonstrate with him for being late.  Tommy apologised, but what he really wanted to do was staple gun his boss’ mouth shut. 

Standing around the coffee machine were a few of Tommy’s female co-workers wittering on and on and on and on.  Tommy couldn’t concentrate.  He had a good mind to take his scissors and cut each one of them a new arsehole. 

While he was contemplating this, the telephone rang.  Tommy answered, grouchily.  ‘Yello, yello, is that Mister Tommy?’ Some poor fellow in India had chosen the wrong moment to call.  ‘No, it isn’t’, replied Tommy curtly and slammed down the receiver.

‘Bought your lunch with you, today?’, asked Carl, looking up cheerily from the workstation opposite.  Tommy hadn’t.  Carl was an imbecile, a Jolly Grapes.  Carl deserved to die a slow and painful death – perhaps eaten alive by termites.

Yummy!

~

When Tommy’s lunch hour came around, Tommy hadn’t lost any of his ire.  The world was nothing but a small, round and wet good-for-sod-all piece of rock in the middle of a great, and unimaginably dull, solar system.  Moreover, the good-for-sod-all piece of rock was full of human beings – largely hairless descendants of monkeys, with decidedly less intelligence or appeal..

..Tommy went into the local branch of Greggs. 

He walked aggressively up to the till and asked one of the monkey progeny for a Tuna Cress Sandwich.  What he really wanted to do was bake the monkey progeny in a bread oven until burned to a cinder. 

Presently, the monkey progeny gave Tommy his Tuna Cress Sandwich, and said: ‘Have A Nice Day’.  Frowning, Tommy walked a couple of blocks to the municipal park where he sometimes ate his lunch.

He sat on a municipal park bench and watched monkey progeny exercising their dogs. 

Tommy fumed some more!

~

The remains of the day passed slowly. 

Very slowly.

Tommy wanted to scythe down Old Father Time and chop him up into little bits.