Assignments

His gaze was unwavering, focused yet untoward. He could smash the things in his life to pieces. The same things that brought him so much pleasure; maybe even the things that provided him with a reason to become so destructive in the first place. But the feeling of sleep rushed over him like a warm breeze. It was a strong drug. Nearly impossible to fight off, yet it was a feeling that was welcome and fitting. The wrong atmosphere no doubt but still a good feeling. He felt it fill his veins, his muscles became slouched and lazy. Effort was drained from him like the blood in a skinned game kill, slowly, dripping in the end but finalized by the creepy persistence of gravity influencing the tiny red molecules to aggregate and descend.

It sustained him. It goaded him to think and force action and thought in to his life. It did not come easily; kicking and screaming. It would not go easily; pleading and begging.
The rows of trees in his mind’s eye stretched out beyond his imagination into some dark abyss before disappearing altogether. Rays of sunlight enlivened the dull and grey scenery set out before him like some guest arriving late to a funeral. The soft earth sat in a mound upon the freshly broken and filled plot of land. His face was wrenched into an uncomfortable pose of questioning contortions and wrinkling concentration. His overcoat slumped over one arm, dangling helplessly like a lifeless corpse. He ran slim fingers through dark thinning hair and tucked a stringy length of lock behind one ear. He was still damp, but it had stopped raining some time ago. The glints of sunlight bedazzled the landscape that lay covered in the rainstorms moist gift, each bead of fallen rain now a droplet of jeweled refracting light. Bending upon entrance, flashing spectral colors, providing bright faces that appeared in a flash and wilted away as the sun dipped behind clouds cloaking itself in the garments of the atmosphere. He could not bear to stand and gaze upon her earthen demeanor any longer.
His eyes fluttered from her grave to the rolling hills in the distance and a grin crept over his empty room like a sun beam, as if to blind him to the gut wrenching agony of knowing he could never have her again. She belonged to him no more than he belonged to the world, but in a sense of physical longing the emotion swept over him and he fought it off with clear discomfort. There was nothing in front of him to grab, to tear, or punch and kick. He could not reason with this swirling blackness; this invisible scourge that robbed him. His time and effort were of no consequence to the amount of meaningless dribble that wooed her spirit and warmed her soul. She was so much a part of him and instantaneously ripped away, like separating a limb from the friendly clockwork of the body. He felt naked and inadequate and was not entirely sure of the motives behind why he chose to suddenly materialize on this cloudy day at this celebration of life and condemnation of death. He did not understand. Why was she suddenly gone?
A black bird cawed in the distance. He saw it land on the branch of a nearby Maple, naked, shaking flecks of dew from its oily wings. The bird cocked its head to one side and in a twitching fashion darted a beady black eye in his direction. The small silky black shadow perched delicately and heavily on the sinewy branch of the slowly dying tree, cawed again. He itched his beak with a shoulder of a wing and dug deep into his armpit for a warm mite, nestled amongst the grease and stink, away from the damp outer world. Content to burrow deeper into the blackness.