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Scrod Montague awoke from troubled dreams, hair whorled and crenulated; dressed in a flannel nightgown, slippers, red with blue tassels, and a night-hat. Before bed he had been reading Kafka’s ‘The Investigations of a Dog’, feeling a close kinship with animals, like one of Darwin’s miscreants, a feeble yowling pedigree without a tail. He rubbed the palms of his hands together, flails of dirt and grime flaking like cows’ dung, and lit a half-smoked cigarette, the selfsame one he had snubbed out before retiring the night before. He reached for his ‘Collected Short Stories of Kafka’, which sat on the night table beside his bed, which was pillared on stilts to prevent monsters and ghouls from arresting his sleep, and opened the book to the story ‘In the Penal Colony’ and began to read, his voice coffined with spittle and blackness. His back ached, as did the dice in his neck, so he shifted his weight, careful not to upset the stilts, and readjusted the book to fit more propitiously on the fop of his lap, the creases and folds in his flannel nightgown a barrow of dirt, grime and cows’ dung. It dawned on him, as most things did, that perhaps he had never awakened, but was still asleep, dreaming dreams and rubbing his ankles against one another, flails of dirt, grime and cow’s dung collecting at the bottom of his bed linen, a dog’s tail sticking out from beneath the covers, his hair whorled and crenulated like bleached heather, last night’s cigarette smouldering in the ashtray, a ghoul tugging at the leg of his nightgown, Kafka working the stilts free of the bedstead, a dog bawling in the closet, it’s tail caught in the doorframe. He never awoke, but never; he was abed in the solipsism of his thoughts, hair whorled and crenulated…
