Day 2-Bird Bath At 9:30 this morning I woke up and drank an entire pot of coffee, right from the pot. In the shower I had to sit down to wash my hair. When the last of the soap and shampoo had been rinsed I sat there for a while and let my mind wander as the steam drifted around me. I thought about my favorite reality TV show and how I hoped Kimmy would win the next challenge because she was just so cool and she hadn’t done well last week in the “give the squirming chimpanzee a haircut” challenge worth 30 moneydollar points. She had cut the back of her monkey’s head and been disqualified and therefore forced to take out the trash back at the condo, a job that signified “you better step it up next week if you want to be America’s next jammin’ hairstylist”. She just wasn’t focused on that squirming monkey, but it wasn’t her fault because Tad, her boyfriend back home was being really weird on the phone and like half missing her and half not even caring about what she was saying which really got me mad because Kimmy deserves better than that. Then the water stated to get too hot, so I got out. Now dry and dressed and still feeling the caffeine I headed out my apartment door to the staircase where I heard the echo of two people having a conversation. I walked to the top of the staircase where I noticed that it wasn’t there anymore. In its place, lodged in the wall of the building was an enormous smoldering rock and two men were leaning out of their doorway staring at it. One of them poked it with the handle end of a mop. He chipped off a piece of the boulder and it slid down into the vast expanse of twisted wood and charred debris, tapping off of the sides of planks and posts until it landed with a thud four stories down. I asked them what happened and they both shrugged, and the guy with the mop went back to poking. Outside it was raining and the drainage pipe looked slippery, but I managed to get a good grip and scale down the side of the building. When I finally got to the bottom I plopped down and found myself in a small courtyard sectioned off from the street and the alley by a small stone wall covered in tall hedges. In the middle of the space a stone bird bath lay on its side collecting rainwater in its grooves and cracks. It was an ornate thing with specific stone patterns, and jutting from what would have been the top of the sculpture, had the thing been upright, was a delicate stone bird half stuck in the mud. I suddenly felt compelled to fix the thing, and, after jumping a few times to peer over the hedges and make sure I was alone, I stood the sculpture upright and wiped off some of the mud with my hand. I stood there admiring it for a moment. Suddenly there was a rumbling noise and then a flash of blue light and I found myself face to face with a sort of ethereal floating someone. I asked him what he was and he told me he was a ghost and I believed him. He told me that this was his weird little courtyard (though he put it more eloquently) and if I would please return his sparrow latrine to it’s proper resting place that he’d be much obliged and never bother me again, not even in my dreams. The last part creeped me out, but I figured he was a nice enough ghost and that he must have had a good reason to keep the thing on its side. Then he said yes, it’s because I slipped and hit my head on it and it killed me. And I thought he can read my mind? And he said yes. And so, trying not to imagine the ghost slipping in his courtyard and killing himself on his own bird bath, I repositioned it just as it had been, the stone sparrow beak down in the mud. It isn’t a sparrow, he said, and disappeared.