147

A Story by Marlowe147

Read it and find out.

Sleeping through the night is becoming harder and harder. I can’t help but notice the paint on the ceiling cracking, outwards from the center, like a spider’s webbed bed. With no ladder or furniture or any extension to aid, it is well out of reach. Not that I have means of fixing. I try to forget this. This trivial matter. But it doesn’t ever really leave.

There will be instances where not a thought is in my head and I’ll be staring at outside happenings, and it will be there. It comes boiling like cauldron steel. It comes rushing like water of a breaking dam. It is never far.

Most nights I hear scratching at my withered door and, with the scratching, comes a vigorous stench, an unbearable aroma of milky pesticide. Once I saw a rodent scamper by and around the bathroom corner out of sight. A short time later small jaunts of dark spread the length of the room. Electric current surges, fading light, and then normalcy.

The light fixture loosens occasionally and, because I reside on the 7^th floor, the peak of Les Fermin, rain trickles down the cable and the burning bulb and it stains the littered floor.

Each time I wake to the same dripping box and I feel my soul rip itself from flesh as it escapes down the twisting metal stairs of the fireway. Fear and all feelings that come with it drips out of me each step I take, counted three by the marked sidewalk cut. I want to confess, and get out of the way now, the prospect of dealing with people scares me beyond any feasible thing. Anything. I recede in stride nearing the one traditionally beaten corner. At the corner there are five filthy pigs conversing and eating their scum breakfast of sugar-trenched donuts and sunken lagoon coffee. I know that they’re after my heart or gallbladder, or perhaps the rotted brain of me.

Today they aren’t there; strange, probably caught up in the beating of an aged wino drunk on the stupor-red. The grey of his thick beard stained rosy by blood and wine, mixed heavenly amongst the bristle.

I need help.

The bus pulled up to the corner, gleaming bright and somehow disgusting underneath the polythene paintskin, in front of me. As I leapt on, and as I took a seat, I was instantly surrounded by the working and constant folk; the people too busy and underpaid to live but too rich to die. Too encouraged and too easy to step on. Cursed to never rise above the mundane. Stuck on a consistent bus ride to a destination always just beyond the hills.

Next I wake up.

And I remember.

A fresh sense of fear towards the outside world. Anew like the sun, disappeared behind the horizontal curve, and back again for a slaving dawn. Like the sun, my dreams come at intervals and are always slightly different. But I never remember them and that is always the same.

I grab my toothbrush from a broken drawer. The hairs of the brush are stale and dehydrated, white and crooked from overuse. Here the water does not run. At the end of the cleansing my mouth was full of blood and scratches. Bleed the gums to cleanse the mind.

I must be clean. Sanitation of the conscience.

I sit before an empty plate, no time for breakfast. No breakfast to have time for.

A key from the wall where the slavish sun trickles in through a slit between the door and its edge. The thought occurred to me today that I own only the clothes I am currently wearing. This thought came in the morning while staring down at cracked sidewalks. I thought many thoughts. How did the cracks come to be? What caused them? And who will fix them? And then it occurred to me that very much like sidewalks we erode. But who, after we, is there to repair?

I’m afraid to touch the bottle of glass filled with milk that’s out on the fire escape. The curdled solid form it holds is fit for none, not even the lowest of creatures. A window is an amazing thing. It holds a thousand lost images, countless bits of homeless soul. “Can a television do that?,” I wonder. And then I think “No.”

Aged steps and rusted guard railings feel like cages. The buildings are condemned across the wretched paved canal, most panes are cracked and missing glass. The windows that are still pristine are painted black and boarded, no life to hold, no life to love and cherish it, to keep clean. The prison shade paint is shedding from the cinderblocks. The red brick is peeking like a frightened rabbit from its rabbit hole.

Sometimes I wonder.

I wonder who there will be to read this when I am finished. Where does time go when it has passed? How many shovels to the center of it all?

I wonder questions that are without answers; I ask them to empty rooms

and scattered hallways. Everyone has left the abandoned ship against abandoned orders. The lifeboats have been took, the traitors. All the food, supplies, and alcohol. I have tried to leave the safety of my crumbling apartment. Sweat-wrung cloth clung to my own feeble being as I stumbled weakly down side streets that whirled and met at strange places.

“Hey, are you okay?”

What a pointless question.

Are you blind?

The words, my response meaning, hid deep in my stomach like the brick peeking out from the white paint on the building next to mine.

I shouldn’t grace him with an answer.

But for some terrible, terrible reason, some wretched reason…I do.

I whisk away, decrepit and all in weak agony, to bask in the sunlight of Les Fermin’s rooftop. The lathered tar that covers has been corroded by both time and heavy rain; Days into days, which then blossom to years, of changing weather and its relentless aftermath.

To realize that this world is a futile washing machine, spinning and spinning until it dumps you out in a pile, set to mold in mildew sweat.

We live in a world, a molested culture, that worships drug-soaked cinematic titans. That punishes the good and decent and pure. I don’t want to live anymore but Death is such a hassle.