#2 - The Circus Is In Town

Nathan woke up in bed, the smell of the alcohol of the previous night passing over into his room. The boss hadn't even begun clean-up and it was already midday. He shambled out of bed, his head fuzzy, but not like a normal hangover. There was a small pillbox on the floor, and when he looked, he saw it didn't have any label on it. He heard the front door shut. He walked out, seeing the boss going over to the closet for the cleaning supplies.

"Some kind of a rowdy dow last night?" he asked, grabbing a large glass and filling it with ice.
"Didn't you watch the St. --- news last night? Mayor Damien won his second term. He decided to hold the celebratory party here."
"Oh," he said, before mumbling almost incoherently: "way to shove your victory up my-"
Supposing his tenant's agitation, he pulled a check from his pocket. "I'm not gonna complain, since I got $100,000 from it all."
"You're bluffing."
He brought the check over, handing it to the groggy quit. In strong blue ink, it did say as clear as day, $100,000, stretching the whole of a wiggly bottom line.
"I suppose going into politics does get some people somewhere," he grabbed the check back and began sweeping the floors, taking up glass shards from the ground.

Nathan, though his legs sore, took a walk out on the town. It was silent, the air cool and light ever since the last heavy storm. There was still derbies from fallen tress, their branches all over the streets and their trunks fallen over here and there onto houses or businesses. There was currently an alert out for some wild animals that had gotten loose from a circus ring master. The matter didn't mean much at all for him, though since in his state, he wouldn't mind being mauled up.

He slipped his steps time and time again, and whenever he tried to say salutations to the rare fellow pedestrian, they looked at him funny with a furrowed brow, or they asked slurred 'what?' and he carried on. His head was light, and his feet quick, but it seemed everything was immensely slow.

At some point his vision faded and then came back, with him walking still on some street he didn't know. He saw that he had a friend, a little shorter than he but not by that much.

"You know, I live a simple life," the friend said.
"I like things to be simple," boomed Nathan proudly.
"You should've heeded her warning when she told you."
"She didn't know jack about how to run an election!" he sermoned.
"You knew you wouldn't win," the friend patted his shoulder. The companion seemed to be very large and orange, and seemed to have some kind of a short muzzle of a lion, and black stripes all across it's body.
"You look funny. Besides, we could make! it! We did make it!" he shouted at his fellow, and laughed as if his friend was the one with it all wrong.
"So you had to do something horrible."
He stopped, still as stone, and it seemed that his friend slowly drifted away down the street.