Philip Black awoke this particular morning as many of his generation did: on his front lawn. This was not entirely peculiar, as he vaguely remembered falling from his car– also parked on the lawn, door open, interior lights now dead– and onto the grass with vodka on his breath and blood on his forehead. This was all accounted for, and Philip woke, wiping dirt from his face as he went, with a sardonic smile. Still reeling from what he could only assume had been a fun night, he rolled onto his back and attempted to get his bearings. The now-cracked luminescent face of his cheap Casio wrist watch struggled to read “5:30 AM” through the tangled spiderweb of cracks, acid green on its otherwise smooth surface. Yep, thought Philip, this all makes sense to me. I know how I got here: by car. I know what I must’ve been doing until just now: drinking to die. It all adds up. Not even the least bit peculiar. The morning itself, he noticed, wasn’t anything truly spectacular; the San Francisco skyline, usually a glowing, monolithic wonder in the fog-addled sunrise, was more low lit and unbecoming than usual, which was nice, since bright light was something, Philip thought, that almost never helps with a hangover.
The sudden onset of the spins caused Philip to groan and, grasping his forehead with one hand, he rolled back onto his face, letting his other hand swing limply in a slow arc, coming to rest squarely on the calf of someone else’s leg. This leg was nearly bare, except for the thin, figure-tracing diamonds of acid green fishnet stocking that adorned it. Decidedly, the leg was not his own.
Needless to say, it took Philip in all his euphoric incapacity a couple of minutes to fully grasp what had just happened. Still perplexed and face down in the muddy tire tracks that now constituted his front lawn, he addressed the leg as best he could from his position, murmuring slurredly into the lawn, “Whose leg are you?” No reply, he thought, as is customary for a leg. Having given up on speech, he groped around for a second leg, perhaps one that would speak back. Venturing up from the calf to the thigh, however, he found that the leg ended in a brutal stump where it should have met it’s owner’s hips.
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