I awoke on Saturday from my early afternoon nap to the sound of frantic scurrying around upstairs. The sunlight pierced through the half drawn curtains in my room, indicating that the good weather was on this side of the world again. The days were getting longer and the sun made a point of hanging around outside the house. A welcome change. I shifted my weight from the left side of my body to the other and tried to regress back to a slumber, discounting the sounds that had released me from my repose.

Then I heard it again. The same scuttling, but this time being carried down the staircase, accompanied with what sounded like the pugnacious clamouring of one of my housemates, BWG. The sounds became louder. I definitely heard two pairs of feet moving swiftly through the kitchen and that was when everything came within audible distance. BWG was yelling, that was for sure. I wiped a good quantity of the Sandman’s dust from my eyes and brushed my ears as if to optimally warm them like they were transistors being prepped for the reception of an important signal emanating from the kitchen area. “Get out! Get out!” The tone in BWG’s voice indicated a sense of immediacy, which in my drowsy state, sounded very much like his speech was peppered with hostility. I heard my other housemate, Sav, reply with a muffle or two, which was met by BWG’s bellowing of “Get out! Get out now! I don’t care what you do. Go lie down in the middle of the road!”

At first my mind decided to wander towards the possibility that the house was on fire and that we had to evacuate, taking our most sentimental/expensive possessions with us. Luckily my room is on the ground floor, so without posing any real danger to myself, I could make a few trips to remove most of my belongings from the inferno. In that momentary juncture, I had already set in my mind the pieces I’d save from the fire first. I’m of the mind that everything material is replaceable, but it makes sense to give priority to the objects our memories are most attached to no matter how trivial they are to the rest of the world.

Even in my sleep-induced stupor a conflagrant roof was only a split-second possibility because my housemates’ cries would have been drowned out by the shrill offerings of the fire alarms in the house, one of which resides just outside my bedroom door. From experience, leaving the kitchen door ajar with sausages sizzling in a pan had been enough to set our smoke detectors wailing, so it dawned on me almost immediately that the chances of a fire going down at that moment was extremely unlikely. Besides, in the event of a fire, why would BWG ask Sav to go lie down in the middle of the road? Oh, well I guess Sav could have been the thing that had been set alight (Note: When on fire, the first thing to do is fight the temptation to continue running and screaming all the slurs in your personal lexicon. The best protocol is actually to simply stop, drop to the ground and roll over the inflamed portions on your person. This is the most efficient means of extinguishing the flames, second to being incarcerated in water, sand or foam. Oh, and you obviously wouldn’t do that if you were standing in a shallow lake of petrol).

So, no chances of fire. The only plausible scenario then was that the brown had finally hit the fan and my two housemates had finally stepped over each other’s lines of dwindling tolerance for each other. In the heat of a disagreement, I often liken the two to a married couple. There are no real hard feelings by the conclusion and despite their differences, they can get along for the sake of the children, or something. I guess it’s just interesting for me to look in from the outside and see them battle over which of them gets to wear the pants that day. With the proverbial faeces splattered against the rotating blades, I had visions of BWG wielding a rolling pin, lambasting a bloodied Sav in mid-flight down the stairs before chasing him into the street, painting in claret a picture of Sav’s demise in full view of the shocked neighbours. It would be one of those clichéd moments like in the movies where mothers would stare open-jawed, covering their mouths with one hand and their child’s innocent eyes with the other.

Nothing was really making sense and as I began the long arduous process of tightening my abdominals and sitting up in bed, Sav knocked on my door, simultaneously bursting in. Upon meeting my eyes, I saw he was not reduced to a bloodied pulp nor was he nursing any modifications to his skull. He was gushing red from no orifice nor clutching any potentially escaping organs. He was instead, grinning as though he had been under the tutelage of one particular Cheshire Cat. I was expecting BWG to stagger into my room at that point with a knife handle protruding from his chest, but that didn’t happen either. What happened was Sav joyously proclaiming “The ice cream van is here! The ice cream van is here!” and asking me if I wanted anything. I declined and shortly after that, a pristine BWG enters my room and asks me in his own unique way if I wanted anything from the ice cream van. After expelling the remnants of morning stars from my eyes, I decided on a cone with a chocolate Flake. With our fresh dairy purchases we chatted for a while in the warmth of our non-blood soaked kitchen and after that I went back to bed. For the time that I was under the covers, I managed to find all the sleep I lost during the previous week. It was a good discovery.