My eyes stare at the white walls made of powdery dry wall. Hairline cracks and tiny little bumps decorate the plainness that expands in front of me every time my crusty eyes open like the tectonic plates that carry the earth, slowly, grievingly slow. If I was still a writer, I could find beauty in these walls as if they were the night sky full of stars that have seen it all. In a way, these walls have seen it all, but they are bored and so am I.
If I was still a writer, the phrase loops in my head, swirling around the electrical impulses that are too weak to eradicate my own failures now. I gave up and it swallowed me whole like the whale did to Jonah. I can no longer proclaim my winning thoughts outside of my frozen over window that hides behind orange, dust covered curtains.
The curtains were red when I bought them. They were clean and inside of a clear vacuumed pack in an almost hospital like feeling Walmart isle. Too clean. I defaced them with neglect to clean. White-blue light bounces against them from the laptop screen that plays reruns of old "reality" television. The light makes my hands look skeletal, casting deep shadows in the valleys between my knuckles and my metacarpals. Three blue veins cross the valleys and the mountains alike as if they were the route of a plane, maybe even a blimp with an advertisement of the blood that flows through me.
A placid sigh escapes my lips and if I was the same person that I was a few weeks ago; I would lie and I would tell myself that this is okay. I could say how many more days there were before spring would come and I would have to get up and do something other than leave to use the washroom or maybe go to get something to eat. Now: I have lost count of the days before spring comes and food has become bland. Everything that finds its way to my mouth by the help of a spoon or a fork just renders grey and lifeless in my eyes. My taste buds have stopped reacting, too.
On cue as if any god above was a stage director, a faint bird chirp finds its way to the conch of my ear, forcing an echo like the rushing blood inside of us that we tell children it is the sea echoing inside of a shell. My slow blinking eyes stay open to the white wall that mocks me. It could be a trick and I could stay in bed. The blanket surrounding my legs like a web, but how can I be stuck in the web when the spider is my brain? The spider cannot eat it's prey from the inside out.
My body groans as the rusted cogs of my joints bend and move, pushing myself mechanically to my glowing laptop. The buzzing fluorescents inside burns my retinas as my spindly index finger lazily drags against the trackpad. Slowly, the cursor responds and is directed to the upper right corner.
Thursday, 19, March 2020, 9:42 AM
My body freezes with a false rigor mortis until my neck gives way for my head to fall, my scratchy chin against the pale but acne dotted flesh of my bare chest. My hand covers the back of my neck in which my vertebra threatens to burst through the thin skin like mountains. Boiling tears swell up behind my waterline, an annoying tickle before they flow over the seam between my eye and my skin, pushing my lashes side to side like the palms in the tropical storm I once saw on a family vacation when I was only six.
My body shakes as my bones grind against each other, perhaps making a powder to take their place, weighing me down like sandbags just so I can fall back into my bed and stay there, lame and warm until the spider learns to digest itself.
However, my legs stretch out in front of me, the brown, straggly down hairs stick up in all directions from the static and friction from my mattress that I have slept on since I was twelve. My knees curve against the corner and with a deep inhale my rusted body forces my torso to bend and sit like a marionette, then I stand.
My balance teeters between my unsteady feet before they take the first step. As my right foot finds a new place on the ground, my body groans loudly, the tectonic plates that cover my core shift and try to overlap like bumper cars. Then my left foot and my body undergoes the same turmoil. My right again. I am a dead man walking out of a grave, unscathed except for my rotting brain, filled with weak impulses that even the worms and mites would not touch.
Perhaps sunlight would help, I think to myself. My skeletal hands wrap around the folds of the dusty, hanging fabric. It should be red and clean, not orange from neglect. With a firm swing, I peel the curtains to the sides of the curtain rod. Dust glints in the sunlight that streams against my bare skin and my plywood floors. Illuminating my bed, filled with sand and old crumbs from snacks, and my blanket which is rolled around itself like a spiral.
My burning eyes lock onto the browning and melting snow, searching for a lie that could lurk in the details. They search for the bird that took its song with my burst of energy as a sigh parts my cracking lips. Then, then I see it. A clump of grass, reaching its stocky bladed bodies to the morning sun in praise. My eyes close as my brain sparks like a computer mixing with water as it burns the clump of greening grass from the grey atmosphere against the matter. I promised myself that the first day of spring will come and I will get better. The winter is over and now I will get better.
A/N
Would you appreciate a song for each short story? :o
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Acquiesce: Short Stories
Short Story(Verb) to accept something reluctantly but without protest. A collection of short stories written over the years.
