Welcome back to Kansas.

I lay there awake, and Sheba comes to the side of my mattress again, sensing that I am not going back to sleep. She curls into a ball on the floor by the edge of my mattress, and I let my hand slide off onto her head as it rests on her paws. I sit there staring at the white cracked ceiling of my darkened room.

She knows she’s stupid, but doesn’t care because she has you to do the important thinking for her.

I sit up and drop my feet the full seven inches to the economically favorable carpet of my room, feeling the cool cement underneath push back against the warmth of the bottoms of my feet. I can hear Sheba getting up and feel her excitement as she shoves past me to get to the door, wagging her tail in anticipation of hanging out with me upstairs.

I open the door, and the moment it is wide enough to accommodate one black collie-lab mix she wedges her head through and runs noisily upstairs past her bowl of water to drink loudly out of my toilet. I resist the urge to scold her.

More like her toilet, she uses it more than you do.

I sit down on the dilapidated couch that is the centerpiece of my apartment and flip on the TV. I glance at the clock, its four am. Sheba comes out of my bathroom, strolls over to the couch and sits down and looks at me.  She starts panting. Delicious toilet water drips from her mouth and hanging tongue in a sporadic waterfall of diluted saliva.

She drools some of the cold syrup on the top of my right thigh and I shove her away. She pads a few feet off to the side of the couch and sits, and pants, and thumps her tail between the carpet and her foot, looking at me just like she always does.

That was a bad one.

I turn the television to channel six or seven or eleven, keeping the volume low, reading the subtitles so as not to wake the sleeping rooms below,

Left to right, left to right.

Before I even know it, I’m walking back down the hallway, searching for my room, chasing after something real, something unnecessary.

Sheba is there, a silent wisp of darkness on the blood red floor. She trails behind me, making sure I don’t get lost.