Rhinoceros 29
It was so early that Sunday morning that the birds were bleary eyed still, flowers remained glumly enclosed, and Alan, though awake, could contemplate dozing off again, and perhaps resuming his recurring dream, the same mysterious labyrinth of a school, the corridors previously unvisited, mysterious doors, further inducements to be late to his own classroom. The sound of a sliding door belonging to some kind of van, muffled voices, footsteps, only mildly nudged at his curiosity. he was in the midst of a city, cities are always awake, business goes on, scrap metal merchants drive around in vans, now, in the early hours. And so on.
It seemed he was asleep again, listening to footsteps in a stairwell, a scratching at a door, a pause while some hidden force gathered its resources in order to act. The still storm's eye before locomotion, the plunge of a detonator briefly anticipating the explosion, the gun at the starting block. He thought he was dreaming of an event yet to happen, a rhinoceros hoofing the dust with an eye on the target.
Whether he was awake or not became a moot point as a mighty crack of wood tore his thoughts from his slumber and sent his senses into a fearsome cardiac overdrive.
