Waiting For The Van To Come

Hundreds of little birds perched on the power lines began a general sense of dread as I walked by. Dark clouds and disembodied laughter didn’t help.

The broken, high windows on the impossibly large, impossibly purple building jumped out in the way that dust will be caught in a shaft of falling autumn light. I wondered, not for the first time, if I wasn’t creating the very air around me.

I felt the tension that I was carrying around like some corpse that I felt an irrational need to drag from place to place; I felt it in my back, in my shoulders, in a place a little harder to lay fingers on. I tried to decide why I was letting this one person’s childish issues sully my waters; I was obviously getting something out of it, purging something, atoning for something, or I would let it drop.

A tape trick played in my ear and rolled around in the muck that was seeping up in my mind. I thought of a person with his affected accent that I imagine he imagined made him sound theatrical and jaunty. It felt like that skeleton smile locked away a plague that could possibly take us all. I could see through his skin, beneath his bones, and could see the disease he held, I could read it like it was large print.

I recognized it in others around me, in the problem child causing me headaches, I recognized it in myself. As they say, it takes one to know one. Sometimes I’m just a carrier for the disease, sometimes I’m absolutely rife with it.

The train whistle announces itself and still manages to sound somewhat forlorn and lonely even in the middle of a city. I can feel dour thoughts being pulled away by the sound like the shedding of skin, the left behind dialogue of a character.