making deals with darkness
The man sitting on the floor of the second storey balcony
tips his head down
and stares at the sun-
light scattered on the cracked pavement.
Did he break his mother’s glasses when he stepped on them when he was ten?
A feverish sweat runs down his spine like ice.
His legs swing like a little kid’s,
roughened hi-tops kick the stiff air before him.
An ex-roommate’s nameless fish gurgles in his one-bedroom apartment,
bubbles fizz in its oblate fishbowl containing one plastic seaweed tendril that used to be green.
There is a fish that swims aimlessly somewhere in the ocean, sometimes
the man stares at the fish and wonders if it would like to swim in the ocean too.
The paper calendar his mother squeezed onto the cluttered console last time she visited is stuck on July 2019 – a stack of five breed mould beneath the leaky kitchen sink.
The roaches use it as their litter tray.
The man pulls out items from his pockets and lays them on his thighs, tucked close to his hip: bent cigarette, unopened envelope, Zippo lighter. He tears the envelope open and, without reading it, he sets the paper aflame.
The man turns and twists onto his hands and knees and stills.
A darkness sits on the floor of his bedroom, cross-legged and expectant,
black oil drips down its face and watches him where eyes should be
its back is hunched, its neck jutted forward, its posture horridly crooked
but the darkness only decays deeper into its hunch and
the man has to find it laughable or he’ll cry.
He wants to ask why but the darkness has oil for eyes and nothing for a mouth so instead he lurches into the dark and grapples for a hand to shake and learns he was lied to and nothing runs through his fingers but silt and ink and -
the darkness closes the deal.
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