(c) Untitled [PG-13]

by tea-boy. Wed 15 Sep 2010, 1:52 am

Title: Untitled.
Rating: PG-13
Author: Me.
Genre: Original Fiction.
Status: One-shot.
Summary/Excerpt: A long night dawns, a new world ends.
A/N: I wrote half of this a year ago and the other half tonight. I didn't bother editing. Beware.

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He slowly drags his body down the stairs, a tangled mess of limbs and flesh. His pale face contrasts with his bloodshot eyes and I swear I’m seeing ghosts. He shakes as the towel wrapped around him is not enough to keep his frail body warm.

“You look like death.”

“And?”

He looks around, almost unsure of what to do, distant thought etched in his features. He licks his lips.

“So, uh.”

I peer up at him through my glasses, waiting for him to spit something out that resembles the English language.

“Are we going tonight?” He asks.

I look back down at my laptop, pretending to click necessary keys while I think.

“Maybe.”

_______________________________________________________________________________

We walk down a frigid street, cold air stinging my face. I look over at him and I can almost see the eagerness leap out of his throat. His eyes hold some life, some meaning. And I can’t destroy that. So as he skips in front of me like a child, like an incomplete piece of art, I let his gaunt face slide by my conscious. He makes a sharp turn in front of me, but I stay back and hum quietly to myself, I know where he’s going.

_______________________________________________________________________________

And this is the point where his glance becomes sharper, eyes cutting trough every angle in the room but the one on my face. His palms will start sweating and that half-dead organ in his chest will start beating in jagged rhythms. He’s like a fly, attracted to the strobe lights that throw themselves around the large room in mystifying patterns, and he’s gotten electrified so many times that he just doesn’t care, he’s always back for more.

I watch him twist his emaciated body around whoever he’s dancing with and kick his head back smiling. It makes me laugh. I’m just watching him corrode to crappy techno music and cocaine-laced whispers. Oh, that ever lascivious smile comes out, like a lion closing in on its prey. It burns right through the young girl he’s dancing with; both of them know none of it is real. They’re just pretending, pretending to be young and tragically beautiful, because that’s how it’s done in the movies, right? They’re pretending, always acting, trying so desperately to fit into the slots on the broken roll of film. Their glossy eyes are an effect of the lights, not of any particular emotion. Both of them are hollow, all the way through. And this time, when the thought crosses my mind (as it does every night in these empty ballroom raves), I do not flinch inwardly. I do not reprimand myself. I do not try to kid myself. There is no hope for the skeleton spinning spastically in front of my eyes. No saviour for the little boy sinning his way to glory. I simply watch the ghosts of the past-tense populace dance through the large space, skin and bones and wasted hopes. I see my wasted hope, my cowering little boy, waltz his ugly waltz, spinning just-another-dirty-blonde-distraction into the grimy hallway. I pause, unsure of my own ability to move, but lift myself off the wall to do my own dysfunctional dance.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I watch it all come back, the whole night reverse itself, greenbluepinkwhitewhitered, all coming back in the same dingy bathroom they started in the night before. I watch the familiar scene, leaning against the crack tile walls of the public bathroom, and I pause. For just a moment, I wonder what I’m doing, why I’m repeating what I swore I’ve done for far too long. And I don’t know, absolutely nothing comes to my mind. No reason. But there’s no reason in any of this. No reason in the loud music I can still hear vibrating through the walls, no reason for the broken film strip unwinding in front of me, no reason for why I walk over and bend down, rubbing patterns into his back as I push his hair out of his eyes. Right? But I swear there is as my eyes squeeze shut, unable to bear the harsh fluorescent lights cutting through me, interrogating me, telling me it’s all my fault. I keep rubbing the same pattern into his back, and take no notice that it morphs, over time, into letters. Into words. Into a plea and a confession and an accusation and a white flag.

‘Iloveyou’