The man couldn’t feel his phone. It was neither in the breast pocket of his checkered button-down shirt, within the slim puffed jacket, nor in either quadrant of his thin khaki pants. He swayed hanging on to the metal pole and looked to the others in the train car, who kept their eyes elsewhere.

The phone had an attached wallet, which he won at a holiday office party a few months before, and so the phone contained all his important items as well—an ID that told who he was, credit cards which told how much he could spend, and health insurance cards which told how much he could spend (doctor).

Was it lost? Stolen? The passengers’ eyes harbored nothing. The sunlight streaming in from the dusty city outside told him nothing.

A shaved bald man sat below him, tattooed but wearing the same stainless steel wedding band he did. “Have you seen—” our man started to the stranger, but his larynx felt too dusty to finish the sentence. The sun glinted off all the stainless steel rings on all the other men in the train car, creating twelve painful points of light. The man lost his grip on the pole.

The train continued to rumble on its rusted beams through its pre-destined snake into the city. Two British tourists looked up from the sidewalk below at the crumbling joints, droplets raining into their eyes. Over the scraping, one said to the other, “They don’t take very good care of their things, do they?”

The man crawled down the length of the car. It was slow going, since his arms seemed to lose their bones by the second, feeling thin and crinkly. He grabbed at the edges of the seats near calm and meaty thighs, but wasn’t sure what to do from there. He wasn’t sure if any of these people would help him up. After all, had he ever helped them?

If he could keep a cool head and get downtown, maybe he could get into a more problem-solving state of mind. He slapped one bendy arm behind his ear to start the process but only felt something soft and leady. He grabbed at his nose but that too was charcoal scribbles starting to extend beyond the boundaries of where the face politely should be. Sharp hairs, thankfully, stayed rooted at attention along the Adam’s apple, but it was only a matter of time before the ranks grew restless.

A passenger at the far end of the car, sequestered in his semi-private seat, began to play music from a speaker, too distorted for lyrics. A woman who covered herself sleepily in bags a few seats away enjoyed the rumbling beat, actually.

By the time the train got to his stop, amid the cold plate glass sense of familiarity extra buildings always gave him, our man was in a bad way. The blood had stopped traveling in the usual numerous little capillaries and instead settled flat in him like a glass of water, sloshing to one side of his horizontal body when the train braked. When the doors shivered open, he grabbed at the planks of wood on the platform to hoist himself out, pulling himself along using their narrow gaps.

(The neck hairs used this opportunity to desert, jumping freely into the big city, signing leases to boxy luxury apartment units shortly thereafter.)

The man, for reasons he could not discern, split two of the planks apart, fished out a marmot-sized rat from below, and placed him in the breast pocket of his checkered shirt. This allowed him the strength to sway dangerously to his feet. The warm rat peeked out of the pocket and clung on to its seam with pink-fingered paws.

What was left of the man clattered down the narrow steps on to the sidewalk but unfortunately his pants exploded on impact into the thousand threads they were made from. 

(Those threads also began an even longer and wormier journey. They inched across the plains, the mountains, and stopped in a thousand very sad dive bars, sure the Pacific lay beyond it all, and beyond that lands they hoped was the home listed on their tag.) 

The man’s genitals hung exposed and untransformed, of course, limp and chicken-like. This was on a Monday, on top of everything.

He tried to open the door to the closest business, a Dunkin’, but couldn’t get a hold of the handle, on account of his arms and legs now being party streamers. Someone leaving held the door open for him. Our man left festive pink and yellow strips of paper in his wake. 

(The stainless steel wedding band had rolled off the party streamer arm for another man to find and wear before he got on the train.)

He came up to the counter. “Do you have a phone?” his voice wheezed, approximately the sound of an escalator.

“Uh,” the cashier said, feeling her pockets.

The man just now had the thought that he didn’t know the phone number for his banks off the top of his amorphous head. He laughed and tapped the rat with a crinkle. The rat’s tummy jiggled. 

The man felt the warmth of this small rat, concentrated on that warmth with the cells he had left, the smallness, the richness of it.

Then, the parts of his body that were neither scribble, nor streamer, nor genital, dissolved into a mist that resembled a cloud of cherry vape. The checkered shirt floated to the ground. The rat found his way out of the shirt and into the kitchen to inspect what might lay behind the toaster ovens.

Everyone else was on break while it was slow, so the cashier at least had the place to herself to breathe out a “What the fuck?” Then she keyed in a number to the storage closet and got out a mop.

A couple people from corporate had been watching her through the security cameras to make sure she wasn’t leaning or sitting down or whatever, and they thought the image of a strung-out squiggly man was kind of intriguing. They Slacked each other about it for a couple of hours. Months later they ran a six-week promotion—if you saw an effigy of Squiggly in one of their participating locations, took a picture of it, and uploaded it into their mobile app, you could earn 100 bonus points in their loyalty program, which is almost enough for free hash browns. When the promotion was over, Dunkin’ employees across the country were relieved they didn’t have to keep that large floppy doll in what little storage space they had anymore.