Sanity is just a suggestion, like pants.

The crow of the neighbor's slanted, one eyed cockerel startled me awake. It was painstakingly bright. My scrambling to liberate myself from the sinews of the blanket covers made of locks of pony hair intertwined with grass proved indifferent when I gave up and opted to just roll off the bed, covers and all.

I checked my makeshift watch fashioned out of palm leaves, a coconut husk and an irate lizard which sang show tunes when awoken giving off the impression that it was abused (because only show tune singing lizards were abused) to see whether my attempt of jumping out of bed was necessary.

I squeezed it's bespectacled snout making it fumble the horn-rimmed glasses off of it to check the time.

Depending on the tune of Speed racer that morning and having it hum absentmindedly suggested it was still early. If the humming was any indication, probably 6 a.m early.

I was awoken at 6 a.m. I wasn't supposed to be awake before 8. What kind of world do we live in that allows a person to be awoken at 6 a.m by the banshee-like shriek of a male cockerel in a dignified housing area. Matter of fact, what self-respecting person would keep a roost in the backyard of their three-storey urban abode in a densely populated urban environment.

It all culminates in the bowels of their upbringing. Where children are allowed to wander the streets at 12 midnight in search of frogs and the parents allow this thinking that their children are safe beneath the watchful eyes of god, their neighborhood night watch-men and Oprah when she stated in her shows, "children need their freedom".

It doesn't matter where they are, as long as they come home. What happens when they don't come home?

What happens when the silence of the night is pierced by the anguished scream of a mother who was informed that her child had died. Drowned in the dark abyss of the septic pool behind their house.

How now brown cow?