Tanny and Me

One day I ate some stale crackers.
The next day I had some more stale crackers along with some cheese doodles.
The next day I didn't have anything, just sort of rolled around a bit between sleeps.
Wasn't feeling too good the day after that. Had a headache and a fever. I went swimming in the marsh outside my shack, just floating actually, didn't feel too good but was better than lying indoors. It was still summer, the water was warm and soothing but the salty smell and taste started to give me yet another headache. I ate some oysters and kelp that I found stuck to the side of my porch.
I scraped my foot climbing back into my shack. Some barnacle-particles were stuck in my tender instep.
After that a few days went by before I was willing to leave the house. I stayed in bed and lived on a bottle of cough syrup and some hard licorice that I found on my bed stand. That was a pretty good day actually, finding the licorice really cheered me up.
My friend Tanny payed me a visit late one night (wasn't sure how much time passed since the licorice -- stopped keeping track). He wouldn't say what he wanted and just sat in a chair in a corner of my room.
I didn't hear him come in and didn't even notice his presence until I struck a match. I woke up from a dream (something about snakes in the Elymus mollis) . I squirmed around my bed looking for the matches that I knew I had folded into a secret pocket in the bed sheet.

Striking a match after a troubled dream is a good way to clear the head, it's become a ritual of mine to just peer around and get a good look of my room whenever I have one of these dreams, but this time the light revealed Tanny unexpectedly sitting in the corner looking at me.

I saw him through the narrow bars of my foot board

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For some reason I wasn't really startled, but I wasn't curious either, I was still thinking about snakes when I started to ask questions. I don't even remember the words, but it didn't really matter because he just kept staring at me. I invited him to spend the night in the chair or on the floor or where he would and went back to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning my friend had apparently left, but I found his canoe still on my porch. I thought: maybe he decided to swim home.