Harold avoided open spaces. Objects from the sky, brisk winds, fast, strong animals, stampeding crowds could kill you in open spaces.
Harold traveled in the anorexic light of night, scurrying through narrow streets and alleys, avoiding wide avenues. The less quantity one had to confront, the fewer possibilities that might develop. Possibilities meant choice — and choice meant stress to Harold.
His three rooms were narrow, his bathroom tiny, his pet a small dog with its ribs showing. His few friends had thin lips, miniscule ear and nose canals, constricted political views, and malnourished spiritual beliefs. The occasional women he dated had narrow openings. Sex was hard. That was okay; Harold felt sex should be hard.
He detested the sheer size of the world, wishing for shrinkage like that of the glaciers. Eliminate all that was sprawling, unwieldy, sloppy, and difficult to control and clean. Harold craved cleanliness. He owned a thin duster that reached into his hundreds of crevices and wiped away his thin dust on his thin furniture residing atop his thin carpet.
He wished outer space itself were so thin it would choke off comets, meteors, asteroids, starlight. He despised gargantuan black holes which seemed impossible to clean. He fantasized an emaciated universe.
Harold wanted his sub-atomic particles to slim down so he himself would become thinner, fitting into sewer grates, pipes, birdhouses, knotholes in thin trees. Ultimately, he wanted to be thin as a kite string so he could launch fragile paper into a limited sky of thin clouds, a sky devoid of those clumsy cumulus beasts.
He wanted to die so thin his coffin could double as a pencil holder.
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