He lies there. Just lays there, face smug with a cigarette poised loosely at his wine-stained lips. His fingers are accentuated with blotches of ink. Just residue left by his fucked up mind. A record player sings low beside him - a miserable man’s voice broken up by bumps in the vinyl. There’s the zombie of an answering machine off in the corner of his room, every once in a while voicing its concerns over its ever-surmounting number of unlistened messages. A new record of 56, though it hardly sounds pleased.
A half-empty bottle of whiskey sits assiduously at attention next to a cracked teacup full of its contents. An obsolete paintbrush lies across the teacup's saucer. He takes a drag and blows out the smoke slowly, weaving a thread of cancer, aiming at the spiders nestled against the struts in the ceiling. He stubs out the remainder of the cigarette on the guitar resting against a stack of the best rejects of literature. In between them dozens of unanswered letters lie. He takes a skeletal finger and absentmindedly claws at the wall next to him. Picking at plaster, it’s never been so in vogue in this part of town. One need only look out the window to see the beauty of decaying walls and lives.
A cat, ashen and sickly, screeches from the fence next door and he turns the knob of the speakers to drown out the sound and reaches out for another cigarette. When he grabs the carton, his tar-veiled heart drops when he finds it empty.
Charles, it’s your mother… obviously… ahem, I’m calling to let you know your sister’s back in town and it’d be lovely if you could try and make this dinner tonig- He throws the carton along with a stray shoe at the answering machine with a violence that rarely merits justification and, alike a reprimanded dog, the drone of the offending object is instantly silenced.
He sits up and cradles his head between his hands. It’s happening again. His brain feels as if it’s going to detonate at any given moment and his eyes are glazing over. The faces on the walls - so stark and expressive before – become blank canvases, an alien race of corpses looking on in apathy. They don’t teach you this in art class, but mind manipulation goes hand in hand with success.
He rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and opens them, trying to focus. The shadows blend with what little light evades the broken blinds covering the sole window of the room - the mixture colouring his world a shade of unyielding grey. He gets to his feet in a daze, grabbing his leather jacket off the coat rack and putting on his trademark trilby hat. A ‘gentleman’s bastard’, they call him.
He staggers over to the mirror hanging crooked on the closet door. He studies his face. Nothing too out of the ordinary. There is a scar forming above his right eyebrow, still pink around the edges. He chuckles in delight. His gape-toothed smile widens at the blossoming purple bruises at the side of his jaw. He touches it gingerly and flinches on contact.
“Hm. Tender, huh? Johnny, you are a dead man.” He says to his fading reflection, laughing at his malicious thoughts, picking and inspecting them as they chance upon him. Much like a kid in a drug store, where every prescription bottle has its own character, full of desirable pills that look like M&Ms.
He smiles once more at the mirror then proceeds to smash it with his right hand. Blood trickles along the cracks, giving colour to the web patterned fracture in the glass. What they imply in art class, is that anything can be art if it’s got a story to back it up.
He combs his left hand through his unwashed hair and with a parting smirk at his masterpiece of a face in the mirror’s remains, he walks out of the door, and like the prodigal son returning to his father, the ruins welcome him back.
