You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
An evil equine stealing my soul.
I walk into the rest room of the upscale restaurant.
The music is playing and seems extraordinarily loud. It is reverberating off my ear drums, perhaps because the floor is tile and the counter granite. The music pours down from the ceiling like a million super balls being cooked on a stove top.
A man is using the only urinal, so I enter the stall.
I close the door and step up.
There on the wall above the toilet is a large painting of a horse.
The horse eye is tall, brown, regal.
The stallion is wearing a riding saddle and has a gold bit in its mouth.
The horse is standing in the English Countryside, the leaves turning orange and yellow behind it.
There is a small dog below the stallion, in mid jump, seemingly in mid bark.
The dog is playful, the horse unconcerned, too big, too regal to care about a lowly dog.
The horse is standing at attention, looking at something beyond the painting with great curiosity.
I unfasten my zipper and take a comfortable stance.
I exhale and stare at the painting.
For some reason, I feel odd, like someone else is in the stall with me.
I look around. The music is loud, but I can tell the other customer has left the room.
I am alone.
I resituate myself and try to relax, but the feeling is uneasy, as if there is a peeping tom peering at me from under the stall door.
I look down and see nothing but clean tile.
What an odd sensation.
I concentrate.
I gaze again at the regal horse that is 3 feet long in the picture over the toilet.
That’s when I see the eye.
The big, bulging, equine horse eye.
It is pronounced, and penetrating. Do I dare say evil?
The painting of the horse is very realistic.
The mane, the muscles, the tail that stands at attention.
But that eye.
It’s as if it was photo shopped from a serial killer and put on the horse.
Is that Charles Manson’s eye placed on a horse?
The eye is sinister, probing, protruding from the horse’s elegant face. It is somehow trying to reach into my soul and steal my purpose.
I stare at the Charles Manson Equine Eye. It is eery like an open coffin in a graveyard.
It seems to haunt me with an aggressive stare that makes insouciant urination more of a mental challenge than it should be.
“Quit staring at me, you damned evil horse,” I whisper under my breath, readjusting my position.
I try and concentrate on the smooth jazz filtering into the bathroom from the speakers dangling in the corners.
I close my eyes and concentrate on the music. I imagine a water fall surrounded by daffodils and butterflies.
It doesn’t work. I can feel the eye probing me like an alien from another galaxy.
I can’t stand it.
I open my eyes and I stare at the painting.
“What?” I say out loud. “What do you want?”
The eye is brown and bulbous and there is a sliver of white on the edge.
It looks like a horse eye, but it also looks like a demon eye.
It’s as if the artist was drugged and homicidal zombies gouged out the horse eye in his painting, replacing it with a spawn of evil.
I wonder if the horse eye is a window into another world.
Is this the way the demons keep tabs on this dimension? Do they watch this place through the evil eye portal of an otherwise innocuous horse painting?
I put my hand up to block the eye from my vision.
I feel it’s equine, evil, ocular power trying to infiltrate my being.
I mentally gather myself. I surround my thoughts with a force field and block the demonic equine eye.
Like the flying monkeys in the wizard of OZ, the eye tries to surround me, snatch up my soul.
But I am mentally prepared and impervious to its gaze.
I ward off the evil zombie spirits and do my business.
In my brain I hear a battle between good and evil set to the soothing sound of fusion jazz.
I zip up and stare at the Equine Eye pulsing out of the horse’s painted face.
“Screw you,” I say angrily.
I exit the stall.
A man is at the sink.
He looks at me oddly.
“What?”
I smile.
“nothing.”
He leaves.
I wash my hands and stare in the mirror.
I check myself for signs of demonic possession. I look good. I splash some water on my face to get my senses back on track.
I open the door, stop and look back at the stall.
I feel like hanging a sign on the stall.
“Warning: Zombie Horse Eye. Pee at your own discretion.”
I feel like telling a manager.
“Can you please remove that horse picture from the stall. It is stealing my soul while my pants are unfastened.”
I do neither.
I walk back to the table, all the while thinking about the equine voo doo eye.
What a perfect, innocuous place for a dimensional doorway I think to myself. An unassuming men’s room in an upscale restaurant.
I take a deep breath. I feel no satanic possession or lingering effects from the equine invasion of privacy.
Woo Hoo. Another demonic free Saturday Night.
life’s crazy™