Last night, as I was getting the bed ready (I sleep on a futon),
Jonathan was standing by my bedroom door. Right inside of my door is
an alarm panel to a long-since disconnected alarm. The panel is
entirely defunct now.
As I was pulling the bed out to put the undersheet on it, I heard
Jonathan saying in a weak, whiney voice, "I can't reach the button."
I looked over at him, and he was feigning that his arm wouldn't reach
to the alarm panel. I said, "What the hell are you doing?"
He smiled and said, "It says, 'Test Weekly.'"
I have to admit, his humour is on calibre with mine.
I made the bed and actually got a decent night's sleep.
At about 4 in the morning, I heard Marcus say, "Crayons."
I rolled over to face him, still in a sleep stupor. "Wha?"
"Crayons. I smell crayons."
I couldn't smell anything, but I wear a CPAP mask at night, and the
filter on that thing is pretty good. I rarely smell things in the room
unless they are very strong.
I lifted the mask and took a whiff. Yup. Burning crayons. Apparently,
my roommate had turned on the heater, and since it had not been on
since before I moved in, it had the smell of burning crayons.
It's odd, to me, that it smelled that way. Usually when a heater turns
on that has been inactive for a while, it smells like burning dust to
me, not the waxy crayon smell, but this did, in fact, smell like
crayons.
I replied, "It's the heater," then put my mask back on and tried to go
back to sleep.
And then it dawned on me: how in the hell did Marcus smell it before I
smelled it? I mean, assuming that Marcus doesn't actually exist and is
a product of my mind, how did he know?
