Assignments #2

Come on now little guy, let that instinct kick in! He nearly stopped the car. You know, that instinct NOT to get run over by a large moving object? Instead he opted to stay laying in the cold and damp gutter. Shallow as it was, coated in asphalt and the stench of broken dreams-which strangely resembled the aroma of several county fairs he had been to- he pawed uselessly at the curb before realizing he would have to get up sooner or later. Or, someone would have to come GET him up. He contemplated the fact that whatever city, town, or hamlet he happened to find himself in, operated very much like that of the human cell. A living organism, programmed to remove useless build up-waste-and was filled with macromolecules that had jobs; would never tire of their jobs, and really were working in order to disintegrate and become the removable waste some of them worked so hard to rid the cell of.

A little girl on her way to school stopped on the sidewalk yards away from where his crumpled body lay, and began to move slowly up the path, continuing on her original course, but at a slower more astonished pace. She stared wide eyed at the dark figure; limbs askew, head to one side, draped in remorse and a vulgar looking overcoat spotted with mud and grease. She finally passed the car crash of a man and sped up as soon as the seemingly un-safe part of her passage was no more of a threat. He did not notice. He was growing increasingly aware of the cold, discomfort, and reverberating pain in his side. Oh enough!
This exclamation triggered him to rise like some image of a vagabond living dead, destined to roam the streets in search of living flesh, or spare change. He bent a crooked leg underneath himself and straightened it, propelling him upwards towards the morning sky. The pale light left a shrinking darkness from the night before and exploded into existence behind trees and fences. He pulled his overcoat around his neck and head and wished he could return to the squeaky bar stool from the night before. The look on his face-pallid, somber, still; left something to be desired in the story it wished to tell. Images of the night before came like flash backs, each one in small doses of which he could only bare for increasingly smaller amounts of time before the probing paranoia smashed them into bits and pieces. Unrecognizable, colliding, he recollected the increasingly vague interactions he had with the floating heads at the bar.
For some reason he remembered shaking a lot of people’s hands, but that didn’t seem quite right to him, since he hadn’t shook someone’s hand since he was 16 and was forced into the niceties of receiving condolences at his father’s funeral. But, there it was, glaring at him, the memory of the night before, surrounded by witches and gargoyles and him, sticking out his hand at everyone with a stupid grin on his face waiting for the exuberant gesture to shake him back to reality. However, the only thing he stuck his hand out for was a drink. And now, he did not desire to shake anyone’s hand, especially the bar tenders. Just thinking of the sweet acidic dark bubbly brown liquid made his temples throb with swollen expectations and he was not aware of the fact that he began to massage his forehead and place his cold extremities on the back of his neck. Temporary relief. More visions of dancing and acting like a fool. At first cool, calm, collected, and then silly, ridiculous, and childish. His words sprang from his mouth like children at the lunch time bell. Limbs flailing, chaotic, rambunctious. He wondered why people like drinking so much. He figured it was because the majority of people-at least the majority of people he encountered in his life-were very good at projecting what they thought people wanted to see, and spoke almost exclusively without letting their guards down.
In the presence of a few empty pint glasses people were less reluctant to placate one another and instead let emotions pour out of them like beer from a tap. Or, became so self-involved that they began to say things they didn’t mean and wondered why no one got their jokes. This was usually a symptom of feeling as if you were being attacked and, for him, ended in a lot of yelling and terrible looks from across the fire. Uhh. He had to stop and shake off that Monday morning feeling. His brain felt two times too big for his own skull. A pulsating throbbing feeling that crept out of the darkness of one of the corners of his mind and attached itself to the front of his face. It humped the back of his throat until hunger shook itself awake and began to gnaw at his good intentions as well. Nausea and hunger were locked in a lethal battle. Both hands frantically clutched head and stomach like nurse maids they hovered about each appendage hopping from extremity to extremity.