I wake up to a kid that isn’t mine entering the bedroom I share with two other indigents, unannounced. He is a lovely child. I tell him good morning, and he responds in kind. His manners wont get him far. Unfortunate.
I look at the body next to me. At twenty years old, she’s basically a child too. That’s why I implored the household to take her in. “She can sleep with me,” I said, thoughtless. It was the right thing to do.
The morning reaches toward the midday sun. I swim in the pool behind the apartment building, smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka out of the bottle, unabashed. It’s cheap stuff — twelve bucks for a 750ml plastic container filled with formaldehyde.
The earlier I wake, the more peace I find. Large segments of the population, often unnoticed, don’t wake ‘til noon. “Thank God,” I think, and then feel guilty for the thought. What worth my two hours before then possesses exists only in theory. In practice, it offers little.
The legs beneath me continuously turn brown in the sun, which burns wet like gasoline, purposely spilled by a tyrant beyond reach. I don’t think of automobiles as I walk, baking, to anywhere else, pretending that such a place might offer some vague improvement. It doesn’t. Because I know this, it’s only right that I pretend rather than go through the trouble of attempting to convince. I’ve never seen anyone successfully convinced of anything. The effort itself is pathetic, better left to loud and foolish persons who are most certainly engaged in their fruitless endeavors. . . Intelligent deception is quiet. Intelligent honesty is the dead silent counterpart to its damn retarded relative of idealism—perverted innocence.
I can never quite wrestle shut my jaw, my broken teeth, chapped lips. My skin cracks. I keep walking. I imagine the snowstorms that characterized my schooling years—long walks home in the Atlantic winter chill that fills half the year in that part of country.
Nothing is chilly here. No need for a sweater, no place to hide, no hand-crafted pits of fire by which to read a book, bundled in wool. Who can read in the light of whining sirens? Who can see through the backfiring light the humidity reflects? In such a light, what is there to be seen?
I stay blind.
-M. Shultz