text: The man put the wine glasses away. He put them away in the one windowed cabinet in the kitchen. They were fine wine glasses, hand crafted and pleasing to look at through the cabinet window. It seemed to him that there was a space for each wine glass in among the other fine glass objects in the cabinet. Though, as he took each wine glass from the mat on which it had finished drying and placed it in the windowed cabinet, the wine glasses did not look as if they would all fit in the space together. But they had fit in that space before and so would fit again, this is what he told himself. There were twelve wine glasses drying on the mat when he came downstairs to put them away; now there were two wine glasses on the mat. As he took up the remaining wine glasses he could not help but notice how large his hands were, he was a post-pubescent male, and yet he seemed to have grown miraculously if only by inches since the last time he looked at his hands. He knew what people said about people with big hands and he smiled. He strode over to the cabinet and placed one of the remaining wine glasses inside. Gazing through the cabinet window he realized that the final wine glass would not fit inside. He had to try anyways, this was how he was. There was no defined space for the final wine glass and so he really had to force it into the cabinet. The other wine glasses behaved irregularly as he forced this last one in; they began to bounce around. Despite the bouncing, the last wine glass found its way into the cabinet after a period of time he could not measure. As he shut the cabinet door it came open again. He slammed the cabinet door closed and it shut most of the way. This was good enough for him. He felt he had been doing this for far too long. The man went upstairs. He could not stop thinking about the cabinet, slightly open thanks to his boneheaded placement of the final wine glass. He did not want the wine glass to think that the cabinet door being slightly ajar was the wine glass’s fault. He went downstairs. He took out the misplaced wine glass and set it on the drying mat; he took out a second wine glass and set it upon the drying mat; in doing this he impressed upon himself the idea that he was not chasing perfection; he would leave perfection to the perfectionists, this was an obvious observation. He looked at the two wine glasses on the drying mat and allowed that, if a person were to see these wine glasses, they could work out where the wine glasses should be placed and would come upon the dilemma with which he was currently faced. He decided to take a third wine glass out and a fourth and so on until there were eleven wine glasses on the mat and one in the windowed cabinet. The man stared at the fridge in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and bathed in its glow; his eye was caught by a bottle full of red liquid. On the front of the bottle he read: *Cabernet Sauvignon.* And on the back: *This is copy. This copy is written, like newsprint, to be easily comprehendible. This copy will tell you that, should you decide to drink the Cabernet Sauvignon in this bottle you will taste ‘hints of chocolate and coffee’. This is a lie, but you will tell your drinking partners you taste these hints. No matter if they taste the hints of coffee and chocolate or not they will tell you the same. You will have fun agreeing with each other and believe you have come closer to one another in this moment. If you are alone you may lie to yourself and make believe that you have tasted these hints as well, this lie will justify your purchase. Go ahead, drink.* He agreed with what he read. The man put the wine in the remaining wine glass which he took from the windowed cabinet. He drank. He kept drinking. He drank a lot more. He finished the bottle. He did not remember what happened next. He was walking around the kitchen moaning. His head hurt. He went to sleep. He woke up and there was a pain in his right eye. The man decided to visit the optometrist. The optometrist was booked up until next week. He thought: damn, and went home. He sat down inside his house and thought about the pain in his right eye. He needed to fix this. He went back to the optometrist and made an appointment with a secretary. He did not know why he had not done this before. He blamed the wine he drank. It was Tuesday. The man went back the following Wednesday, the pain had become worse but not so much worse that he was considering anything drastic, but almost. He talked to the optometrist. The optometrist was concerned. He put him through some tests. Can you read the first line and so on. Can you read this small bible text and so on. Can you see with a spoon over and so on. He did not perform well in these tests. The optometrist poured eye drops in his eyes, they stung. The man went into the waiting room to wait for the drops to work. He felt his eyes become bigger in his head, he felt that this was not what was supposed to happen. He returned to the optometrist’s office. The optometrist looked into his eyes. His face felt flush. The optometrist’s face contorted again and again. The man felt this was not a good sign. Your eyes are supposed to dilate, but not like that, the optometrist said. He thought: oh, shit, in his head and then exclaimed it aloud. Well, said the optometrist, don’t be frightened, I haven’t seen this happen before but I’m sure I can figure something out. The optometrist left his office to deliberate. The optometrist was gone for what felt to the the man like hours, though he knew this to be impossible, nearly. The man had an -ism of some sort. The optometrist gave him a prescription. The man purchased expensive eye glasses for money and went home cursing in his head or aloud, he was not sure. The fucking glasses would arrive at his door the next day, after the payment was processed. The man was told not to strain his eyes for a few hours. Unable to watch television his attention was drawn toward other stuff. His bathroom wall seemed interesting when he was pissing but he felt he could not stare too long at it for fear of any strain. After he finished up in the bathroom he went to wash his hands in the kitchen sink because the bathroom sink was ‘flimsy’. Someone had said this to him once when over at his ‘place’. As he was washing his hands he found himself gazing at the stained wine glass and empty bottle and set about cleaning them both. The wine glass was easy to clean, a quick rinse. The bottle, on the other hand, required concentration, as the bottle was filled with water and emptied *ad infinitum*. The remaining red droplets were all turned clear after the vigorous cleansing of the bottle. The man felt pleased. He thought about walking to the liquor store and getting some money for the bottle. He did not capitalize on this thought and instead found himself wishing for a way to cram the clean wine glass into the windowed cabinet along with the others which were sitting on the drying mat. He began puzzling over ways to do this while still remembering that he was not seeking perfection of any sort, at least not yet. The man did not want to look back while dying and, realizing that he had left the wine glasses out on a drying mat, just die. The man tried one more time to place the wine glasses in the windowed cabinet. He grasped the wine glasses, always in his right hand, and forced them inside the cabinet, the glasses took to bouncing once more. He withdrew from the cabinet, final glass in hand, and cursed and cursed and cursed himself, his wine glasses, his place, his -ism and the glasses he needed which would perhaps fix it. He worked himself into such a rage that he confusedly slammed his right hand down on his kitchen counter. The man had been holding the wine glass by its neck and in slamming it down had shattered its base in such a way that it nearly dissolved. The man panicked, for these were expensive wine glasses that cost money. The man had not noticed the glass skittering at speed across the floor after shattering and stopping where it had stopped on the floor. He did not believe the glass had truly dissolved, he was not stupid. The blood had not had a chance to coagulate. It was still spurting in huge quantities from beneath him after his first step. The man slid across the kitchen floor as he was in a rush to find a pair of slippers to cover his bare feet. In sliding, the glass on the kitchen floor made contact with his feet repeatedly, slicing the soft skin on which he stepped. The glass had spread farther across the floor than the man anticipated, perhaps due to the glass’s quality. The man’s slippers were located down some stairs not far outside of his kitchen. By the time the man had painfully descended these stairs his feet were bleeding like an animals’. The man put on his slippers and his feet slid around inside them. He made slow movements to attain his vacuum and hauled it to the kitchen where he plugged it into an outlet. The vacuum cord was very long like a snake is long and the man seemed aware of this as he started the vacuum. The blood thickened while the man was vacuuming, his feet seemed to come apart from the slippers with each step he took while cleaning. It became harder and harder to move as the blood got harder and harder beneath him. Minutes later the man’s feet were more stuck to the floor than not. The man found his feet numbed and was unable to tell, based on the quantity of glass, how much he had really vacuumed. The anaconda-cord had come to rest, in the man’s cleaning, right in front of his slipper-covered feet. The man’s next step, laboured and slow, placed his slippered left foot just underneath the vacuum cord. As he vacuumed some surrounding glass he took another step which placed his right foot over the cord. The man then began to step with his left foot and, as the skin stuck to the blood at the bottom of the slipper separated, he felt weighed down and fell forward onto the kitchen floor. The man became as a piece of meat. The butcher the floor, the cleaver the glass. The man had fallen onto what seemed to him to be the epicentre, where shards of varying size had exploded out from the shattered base. His head had landed squarely in an area with no glass so that his skull felt the full impact of the fall, leaving a dent in the tile, a sort of bowl which the contents of his head filled. All around him the glass attached to his body, so that as he rolled around limp and dumb, blind and trying to assess himself physically, he was in a sort of pain he had not yet experienced. The glass behaved in a certain way as the man rolled around on the floor, going out from its center and coming back countless times. The glass carved and sliced and ripped and tore away at every facet of his body. His throat was torn open and his vocal cords made a sound which had never been produced or heard by the man. The man was very soft spoken anyway. The glass took to his legs, his stomach, his arms, his clothing was in disrepair, shredded to bits. In the end, nearly unfeeling, his body settled, back side down, so that his head rested facing upwards, staring at the ceiling, Unable to move or make a sound of any kind, the man’s blood soaked the tile of his personal abattoir and slowly overflowed the bowl which his head had made, spilling out and covering much of his kitchen floor. The days passed and, on Friday, there was a knock at the man’s door. It was the optometrist. He had good news, he had not diagnosed the man properly, his eyes had become bigger in his head not because of any -ism, but because the eye drops were defective, his vision was completely fine, the man did not need any expensive glasses. The optometrist had brought some Merlot over, to celebrate. \ Thanks for reading, and thanks for any feedback.