I’ve been caught up in so many routine errands of living that somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking about things that don’t have actual dimensions. This afternoon, though, I’ve found myself pulling together impressions of the past 36 hours or so and winding up in a territory such as what one would find in a Stephen King novel.

I have the distinct sense that I have seen, if not full-blown evil, than what I find myself calling a varmint – a varmint acting and shaped like a human, but with a badness coming through as a cloud that might at any moment coalesce into a nightmarish miasma. It is a intuitive suggestion that what you know is too awful to be real  is, indeed, real and you know fear is coming. And that “indeed” back there in that sentence, well, it is more of a breathless OH MY GOD.

I am very aware of standing at a sidewalk cafe, cup in hand, with the sun warming both air and the pavement just beyond the shade of the awning, watching normal things go by – actions that happen everyday and never trigger a thought.  And then, across the scene one car passes and you see the hunching driver as a hunching blob that is maybe the essence of the wolf that ate a grandma.

You know that part about, “But  your ears are so big” and so forth? Well, maybe it is the individual features. The mouth, perhaps. The mouth that is just a little bit different in every way from an average feature, a normal feature. Not that there is disfigurement or malformation, just the perception that it is straining to hold steady the lines of the plump upper lip before a giant maw opens.

Only it is not a Stephen King horror story; it is actually something real, but capable of causing great distress. Such an odd feeling. I’ve seen people I’ve thought looked mean, cruel, sharp, testy, but to have a visual memory of one who looks blurred and ominous is unsettling.

Is this what becomes of the things that skulk under a child’s bed, that go bump in the night? Well, for Stephen King, it made him a lot of money; I’m afraid there may be other outcomes. Breaking even might seem like a big win, come to think of it.