What a Day

There was a chill in Blanket Cobb's bones as he set up his crafts table. Quite like an omen, Cobb thought as he watched slush form on the filthy sidewalks from his living room. Slush had a habit of creeping into Cobb's aura, infiltrating his flesh, penetrating his bones. Cobb preferred summer and sushi to winter and the cold bones that came with it.
The crafts table consisted of some acryllic paint tubes, encrusted with years worth of dried paint and artist's tears, and some wooden figurines Cobb had scavenged from the dumpster down the street. Next to a slightly rotten nativity scene, another Jesus scrutinized his baby self in the manger next to his "virgin" mother. Cobb started with a tube of bright, scarlet paint. He painted a large "A" on the Virgin Mary's head. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. Jesus was crying crimson blood. This is very stressful, Cobb thought. I will take a break to look out the window.
He turned his head to the window and glimpsed a woman on the street below wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, a surgical mask and many pieces of jewelry featuring the Evil Eye. Cobb was familiar with the Evil Eye; he knew it's power and respected those who wore it. He opened the window an inch and shouted down to the woman, "Oy." The woman looked up and her eyes spoke of unspeakable horrors. Cobb could not be one hundred percent sure, but he sensed a mysterious, Geisha-like smile underneath the mask that covered her nose and mouth. A new chill entered Cobb's bones, traveled to his tummy and provoked butterfly-like flutterings.
He shut the window and got back to working on his Post-Modern Nativity Scene, where Jesus still cried blood and Mary was exposed as the adultress Cobb always knew she was.

Dreams of Japan

As Cobb dreamed sweet, sensual dreams of Geishas in kimonos and eel sushi, a torrential downpour pummeled the dirty streets and buildings of Watershed heights. The rain was incorporated into his dreams as fish falling from the sky, and when the fish turned into people he had glimpsed before in his dreams or perhaps another lifetime, he awoke, with a gray aura fogging up his field of vision. The clock on his bedside table read 7:30; he had been sleeping for only 20 minutes. Cobb attempted to fall back asleep, but a penetrating siren pierced his Japanese fantasies and he reluctantly crawled out of bed. Blanket Cobb was a big sleeper.
But his bonsai trees whispered things to him as he paced back and forth across his apartment, and he found this disquieting, and wanted to go somewhere. "Shizukesa shizukesa," they said, "Bantan sumashu."
"Stop it," Blanket Cobb said. "I'm leaving, so just shut up."
It was still pouring as he walked outside and down the street towards the park. He passed a teen mom and some crows that were clustered around a rotting piece of meat. The teen mom made a weird face as she passed the crows, and Blanket Cobb felt slightly disgusted with the whole scene, and the world in general. He wished he was Japanese or at least not in the prime of his life and living like he did.

Cobb Steps Out

Blanket Cobb stepped out. He stepped out onto the street to get some noodles for dinner, and as he was stepping, his foot landed in a puddle of vomit underneath the Watershed Heights apartment building. "Damn," Blanket Cobb said. The throw-up was pink and reminded him of a coconut-covered snowball dessert treat. "Yum," Blanket Cobb said to himself, reminded of his childhood spent gorging himself on such tasty num-nums. He hurried to the noodle vendor and bought a gigantic box of Pho-Nom-Chum, and then he sat down on a bench and enjoyed his meal. Cobb remembered the large bird that had visited him that morning, and spent some time pondering upon that event before he got up and headed back home.
Blanket had placed an order several weeks earlier for a bonsai collectors magazine, and he was pleased to find that it had arrived in his mailbox sometime that day. The cover featured a beautiful Japanese garden, in which mysterious geisha were hidden behind various small trees and exotic plants. The geisha all wore unreadable expressions behind their freakishly white faces, and Cobb found that he was more than enthralled by this. He imagined finding a geisha in his mailbox instead of the magazine, a geisha he would take up to his apartment and tell all about the joys of bonsai and miniature figurine painting, which was another one of his hobbies. She would be very petite and confide in him her memoirs of a childhood spent in a poor fishing village before she was discovered and turned into a high class prostitute. They would become best friends, and then she would whisk him away to Japan on a dragon and they would live together forever in a Japanese palace with a garden like the one on the cover of "Bonsai World Weekly."
Cobb would have enjoyed expanding on this fantasy, but his feet smelled like barf, so he zoomed upstairs to take off his shoes and relax with his new reading material.

Blanket Cobb

Blanket Cobb woke up on a Sunday morning to a loud hooting noise. The noise was extremely obnoxious and the opposite of every cute hooting sound he had ever heard from nice little owls. It was coming from across the room, so he got out of his bed and shuffled across the floor of his bedroom to the window that looked out onto Sam Street. A large, prehistoric-looking bird with a bright orange beak stared back at him from its perch on the windowsill outside. Blanket Cobb banged on the glass with his fist. The bird glared at him and let out another long hoot before spreading it's wings and gliding down the street into the crusty fountain at the intersection of Sam, Maple, and Calloway. Cobb watched the animal flap around in the dirty water for a couple of minutes before he got back into bed and went to sleep for the rest of the day. When he awoke again it was almost six o clock and the air in his apartment smelled like stale dirt, so he cracked the one and only window and walked downstairs to pick up some food across the street.
Blanket was not a Watershed Heights native. He had arrived in the neighborhood to take care of his cancer and bed-sore ridden mother, and he ended up staying to collect her social security check that still came every month despite the fact that she had been rotting underground for several years now.