When he returned home he did not turn on any of the lights, even though it was a rainy day with evening fast falling, the epitome of gray.
On the table stood a vase of roses, relatively fresh, with an unopened red envelope leaning against it. He ignored this and walked into the kitchen. The ticking of the clock on the windowsill refused to fall in step with the drumming of the rain.
There was a fireplace in the living room, a real one. He always meant to gather wood, build a fire, light it, but after a year in this house, he’d still never gotten around to it.
He imagined now what it would look like, feel like—the husky orange glow breaking forth over the wood with such intensity of purpose, striking his skin uncomfortably with the heat that could not be adjusted with a button or a dial. It would be such a jarring contrast with the empty gray lightness of the house.
He turned to the fridge and the cupboards and made himself cereal, which he brought to the dining room table. He continued to ignore the roses and the card.
The bowl was only half-empty when he finished. He had had to lay down his spoon, for the sound of his own chewing unnerved him.
After he had put the dishes in the sink, he began emptying the pockets of his jacket, which he’d thrown on a chair when he entered the house. There was a train ticket, a few receipts, a scribbled note in his own handwriting—all of these he threw on the table. There was his phone, which he put in his pants pocket. It had been vibrating occasionally ever since he got home, buzzing and chirping like an animal looking for attention, but he continued to ignore it. There was a gum wrapper, a receipt, another note, this time in someone else’s handwriting. It was someone’s phone number. He didn’t know whose.
Once he had finished and thrown the trash away in the bin under the sink, he finally opened the envelope.
The card inside felt too delicate for his heavy hands. From the delicately penned words there rose a faint scent of perfume, unfortunately familiar to him.
He almost threw it all away with the rest, but thought better of it.
Next he turned to the roses. He did not smell them or even really look at them, but took them and the card along the dark hallway to his bedroom.
To his surprise and indignation, the bedroom window was open, a seeming torrent of rain pouring through, as if the clouds had mutually agreed to unleash a flood through this one particular window.
“Good grief!” He leaped forwards, not realizing he had dropped the vase on the floor to shatter. Rain had soaked his pillow and the bookcase by his bed, even the floor in front of the bookcase. The pillow was a sodden mass. The figurines and photos strewn over the top of the bookcase were heavily streaming with water. He bit back a curse and heaved the window shut, hushing the rain’s sharp intruding clatter on his bookcase to a dull, angry drumming on the glass.
In the room lingered that same smell of perfume.
He took a step backward and yelped in pain as his heel fell onto the broken glass shards of the vase. Warm blood began to stream, staining the carpet under the red roses strewn all about.
“What a gift.” He collapsed onto his bed. What a night.
Thunder roared in the falling night outside. There was no lightning, only that same constant gray, forming everything and also filling everything. It was the only true reality and the only imaginable reality, and yet it was as thin and insubstantial as his quickly ebbing memories of the day’s activities as well as the fiber of meaning that ran through all his days and tied them together. He wanted to jump into the gray as into a swimming pool, let it fill his lungs.
Yet there were the roses splashed on the floor, and the blood running from his heel—bitter red reminders that life required some kind of attention from him. And over and through it all lingered that horrible scent of perfume, the scent of betrayal and of desire.
He lay for some time like this, with one arm wrapped around his pillow, until it seemed the blood on his heel had begun to dry, and the room had grown so dark he couldn’t make out the glass shards on the carpet. He hauled himself upright and turned on the bedside lamp. It shone with a blaring yellow that nearly made him gag. With the help of this light, he put on the slides by his bed and carefully made his way out of the room. He avoided treading on the roses.
In the bathroom he did not turn on the main light. The night light by the mirror turned the blue walls gray, a darker, less welcoming gray than that of the rainy evening. The house’s central heating suddenly turned on and began to thrum, as if wearily heralding his arrival.
He observed himself briefly in the mirror. Then he sighed and began washing his foot.
In the rush and splash of the water from the tub’s faucet, in the swirl of blood as it was caught up in the water and descended with it down the drain, he saw his own thoughts, hopes, and certainties, every one of them vanishing as they had in that single moment (which he had now nearly wiped from his own memory) earlier that day. Although, this was nothing unexpected, for the end of these hopes had been fated for so many days now—they had been fading, degrading for perhaps a year. All that was left within him was the empty wound-like hole of desire, or something even deeper than that.
His chest heaved a few times while he sat on the edge of the bathtub, waiting for the rushing water to remove all the blood from his foot. The night light flickered, causing shadows to contract. Hope—of love or certainty or anything—seemed like it must be a star somewhere, very far beyond the clouds with their abundant offering of rain.
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Cover image found on Unsplash, credit goes to @chloekanske on Instagram
Really enjoyed the story 😌
AHHH I LOVE THIS