Saturday, March 1, 2008

Tonight

Tonight I am going out on the town to celebrate the anniversary of a friend's birth, some 33 long years ago.

I am sure that his mother is not celebrating this "occasion". Perhaps that is because her belly has swelled and her face has fallen sallow with the passage of time. She will spend tonight with a loaf of stale bread and a pot of boiled green beans. She'll wash it all down with cheap vodka and reconstituted milk. Then she will retire to the bedroom and lay her wrinkled face on the hard pillow she's owned since she was a little girl with grand dreams and limitless optimism. The pillow laughs at her naivety. Her soul cries. The neighbor screams. The child bites.

The beans give her gas and she rises in the night, fumbling her way towards a bathroom she's seen one too many times. She needs to relive her distended belly. Her flatulence attacks the senses, roiling the quiet night like thunder and invading the nostrils with a smell akin to boiled cabbage and rotting flesh. The moonlight catches her face, casting shadows along the deep valleys that hundreds of years and thousands of cigarettes have carved in her skin.

She lifts her head briefly from the toilet, just in time to catch a glimpse of her reflection in the dirty water. She begins to cry. The salty tears roll down her cheeks, and into the toilet. The tears follow the same path that thousands of others have followed, flowing through the flesh canyons and caverns created by her pock marked and wrinkled skin. The tears pool around the open soars on her mouth before finally toppling onto the floor.

She is thirsty. She is hungry. She is cold. She is lonely. Darkness surrounds her, both day and night. Her soul has atrophied, her body is old and used. Her mind is clouded, like her cataract covered eyes. Tomorrow is a new day, but she already knows exactly how it will unfold.

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