Day Three-Seventy-Two: And then came the stripping

WELL. I was… thoroughly… humiliated. Today. And chilled.

After several long and quiet hours of play with Grayson yesterday, I went to bed early and slept dreamlessly the entire night. It's pretty rare for me not to have at least one dream, and in this case it felt oddly pleasant. I don't miss random images zapping my brain.

I was not awoken, as I usually am, by Libby moving next to me in bed. Or by a punch in the arm from her. For once Libby didn't have to rouse me at all; something quite different did the job. A sensation, a touch, a faint, unpleasant tingle just under my armpit. Most men would call it an itch.

It started small, a thing of little to no consequence. My eyes slipped open, noting the disturbance, and my arm did its work. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Subtle relief flooded into my skin, and I braced myself to return to a sleep that I'd barely even left behind.

But the relief did not last. The moment I removed my fingers, the itch began again. So I scratched, a little more attentively, still not the least bit alarmed. Sleep.

Itch.

The average itch, one brought on by everyday phenomena, should last no longer than a few seconds. It begins, you scratch, it goes away. For an itch to continue in this manner it must be caused by something else, something worse than a minor epidermal disturbance. (Learned that word readin' a book the other day, I did.) As this itch continued to do its thing and I was driven further from sleep, I swiftly concluded that something else was to blame.

I scratched. There was relief, but only so long as I continued to scratch. The second I stopped, the itch began again. Soon the itch was a tiny raging fire in my left pit, an incessant blaze of irritation that demanded constant attention and punished me for not delivering. Failing to attend to it was not an option.

Then my other pit began to itch. 

I scratched it too. It didn't even start off as a slight irritation; it flared to life with the same power as the first itch, prompting me to shriek. This woke up Libby, who whacked me in the face and went back to sleep… but only for a few minutes. I was scratching so vigorously at my armpits that she couldn't fail to notice, and after three more whacks she adopted sincere wifely concern. We both know I don't need to be reminded not to be stupid four times in a row. That's a marital standard.

My left foot began to itch.

I rolled out of bed and onto the floor, howling. My cries of miserable irritation woke more people, and they formed a small crowd around me, some laughing, some asking Libby questions, yet others trying to diagnose my weird ailment. "It must be the product of a dream," one noble offered, which Morris countered with "No, no, it's a bug infestation in his bits. M'dad told me that you gotta smear yourself with glue when that happens. Yep, m'dad said that."

My shoulders flared up. Then my other foot. Then my belly. Soon I was frantically ordering people to scratch their mayor in the name of democracy, whatever that means. Five volunteers, including Libby, bent over me and vigorously rubbed at my blotchy red skin - but that still wasn't enough.

My thinger started to itch.

Nobody would scratch my thinger. I'm dumb, but I'm not dumb enough to ask anyone to do that. Everyone 'round me wasn't doing enough to help me anyway, so in a fit of utter madness I bolted to my feet and ran from the pub, screaming, waving my hands and tearing off my pyjamas. Not ten paces from the front of the pub I was butt naked and flailing, carving a furious path as I ground every inch of my skin up against cool, blissful, rough snow. 

The itching did not abate for some time. To me it felt like an eternity. To everyone else - particularly Grylock, who for some reason kept track of time while he howled laughter - it was ten minutes. Ten minutes of wriggling through the snow and yelping out my displeasure.

Then it stopped. As abruptly as it had come, the itching halted. I passed out from the sheer pleasure of release, having never felt so good in my entire life. I assume that's how my constituents found me, sleeping in the snow, smiling wider than is probably possible for a human mouth.

I woke up back in bed, shortly before lunch. Everybody was going about their duties. The only person in the room was Grayson, sitting on a windowsill and reading. When he saw me awake, he smiled and waved.

"Well," he said, "that was fun, wasn't it?"

…

Not only can my son use weird magic, he's also a dick.

We spent the rest of the day drawing a big circle in the snow, surrounding Pubton. Grayson, at least, had fun.

Sincerely,

Dragomir the Raw - seriously, my skin aches from all the scratching