2@9*hAT

Nights are cold, thought the man in the hat, cold with worry and fretting. Wrapped like a sausage in tripe, the man in the hat slept the sleep of the sleepless and troubled. An embolism, he thought, perhaps I have an aneurysm waiting to implode in the tomb of my head, blood pudding, a foul tureen or consommé. Too much dog meat, he thought, sinewy and undercooked. The pressure was assuming a life of its own, pushing in on the walls of his skullcap, inching its way into the viscera of his mentality. Soon, so he thought, his thoughts would be a scrabble of misnomers and tropisms, improper spelling and grammar, a catalogue of misjudgments and folly. His hat, yes my hat, that is all that’s preventing me from falling in on myself, collapsing into myself, my innerness, he thought. A tropism of hats, some with tassels and baubles, and others with felt liners and calfskin outers. He recalled, against his better judgment, a woman he knew whose father forced her to eat blood pudding and headcheese for breakfast, a placental mush stirred bloodied with a fork, wingtips of blood and gruel discolouring her face, a clownish smile gone terribly wrong