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Hidden in the pockets of the things that frighten him most is the realization that he doesn’t like his mother. Once, he did, but she was different back then, full of love and light. Now she’s a ghost playing at being alive, a faded sheet hung upon a coatrack, only there to ensure he doesn’t become a ghost too.
It makes him wish his dog hadn’t died, but he did, and his insistence on staying dead is proof that wishes don’t come true, no matter what the storybooks say.
He wishes he could see her closer but like his father says, wishes are wet sticks that will never start a fire.
“There is a girl outside.” “What is she to you?” “Nothing yet, and she won’t be if I don’t try to see her.” “What if she doesn’t want you to see her?” “Then she should take away my eyes.”
She had never learned to sign, and he supposed this was a good thing. If her hands were not raised, he didn’t have to see the pale scars that bisected her wrists, and thus be reminded of how he had failed her.
he shuddered out into the cold and navigated the narrow dark streets with the same chaotic certainty as a marble through a tilted maze.
On the landing above, a light hung from a fraying cord, the bulb stained and smoking, filling the stairwell with the smell of burning dust.
His life was cheerless now, devoid of randomness, and without it, without the unexpected, what was there to do but sit at home and wait for his time to run out? He would be sixty next year, and the liver spots were already annexing patches of territory across his body. A glance in the rearview mirror showed a sad-eyed man with a hangdog face and a mouth that had forgotten how to smile.
Hips were thrust out, faces were upraised, arms were akimbo, bodies pressed together, a menagerie of ghouls frozen in seductive thrall to the memory of music.
It does not feel like a merry coincidence; it feels intentional, part of a design that will have many parts and leave me in a similar state when it ends.
We raise our glasses and toast gently, with no real celebration, because the ugliness of the truth we just shared is something that deserves only to be buried, not commemorated.
Now when you walk this neighborhood, it’s not difficult to imagine what the big glass and brass frontages will look like with shutters.
Upstairs and the halls are drenched in shadow and moonlight. Gingerly, I navigate the chiaroscuro, afraid those crooked bars of darkness might snap shut and cut me into pieces.
Similarly, the smoke stains on the façade and the smudges of soot around the windows—testament to an attempt to burn the place to the ground back in 1988—make it look sad, tortured, cursed, to those who wish to regard it that way.
To the few people who knew him, he was just a lonely unremarkable man bound for a lonely, unremarkable end, and that’s exactly what he got, however he came upon it.
