beast-in-moon-shadow - Tumblr blog

beast-in-moon-shadow · 13 days ago

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I occasionally write but I never post it anyway, so on a whim I'll just drop something that I wrote a few months ago but never ended up finishing.

Barely edited and there's no real ending so bear with me (sorry for weird formatting)

One foot in front of the other. John put one foot in front of the other under that winter sunrise. Breathe billowing to fog, dissipating in the cold air as he marched next to the dozen or so other upstanding citizens on their way to work to keep the city running.

He gripped his coffee in his hand, its warmth was comforting, he stopped at the same cafe every day for as long as his adult memory went. They were the best he told himself.

“You need to go to a hospital,” John heard the man standing over the bench say.

The man spoke louder and slower leaning in, “that’s going to kill you man, you need a doctor,” he said to a mass on the bench.

John found himself lingering, he watched the man throw up his hands and huff a breath, throwing a “whatever” over his shoulder as he skulked off.

John watched him until he turned a corner before looking back at the man on the bench.

“Man” maybe wasn’t the right word here John thought. He approached the pile of soiled and tattered cloth on the bench. That caught his eye first, the dark stains seemed to be the only thing keeping what might be an old blanket or jacket together.

Threadbare, barely able to keep the cold air out. Pitiful. Disgusting.

Next he saw a face, not much older than him, had a patchy beard over pale clammy skin.

A beanie kept the greasy hair poking out from under it plastered to a greasier forehead.

John saw wild fever-yellow eyes lazily tracking nothing in particular.

John found himself standing over the man, some magnetism or voyeuristic urge pulling him closer.

He had no idea what to he planned to do and began to feel awkward at that realisation.

He had always heard about the homeless, he lived in a city. The homeless or unhoused or whatever-they-were-called-now were simply a fact of life. You know to avoid them, never knowing when they might snap and attack you, clawing at your eyes with dirty, ragged fingernails, grasping to rip away the fruits of your labour to waste on whatever vices they acquired through poor choices they made.

There was a sense of indignation bubbling in his chest.

The smell hit John then, urine and waste, body odour on body odour, and something else strange but familiar, rotting meat and human misery. The rot stayed with him, catapulting that indignation across the emotional spectrum. Sympathy or pity.

The heavy blanket of winter air smothered the smell, it would have been a lot worse on a warmer day.

Maybe John could spare some change for the man he thought, maybe the man would enjoy that little surprise when he came out of whatever chemical stupor, he found himself in.

John stopped when he noticed the purple-black hand sticking out from under the pile of cloth.

Sickeningly bloated and discoloured, it threw back the yellow light from the streetlight across thin stretched skin.

Thick, swollen fingers looked like five worms digging into hand flesh and gorging themselves.

From this ballooned limb, this mockery of human form came the smell of rot.

The edges of John’s vision darkened; he felt a prickle travel through his body. Cold needles breaking skin as bile tickled the back of his throat.

It was disgusting of course, vile.

There was a fight in John’s mind, how could a human rot?

Just rot like that? Was the man even alive?

Yes, his eyes still rolled around their sockets. On a technical level the man was alive.

But how could something living rot?

Sounds of the city came first, cars and footsteps muffled in winter air, then sensation.

Numbness in his fingers turned to pins and needles John shook off. Had he caught the rot? No, you don’t just catch rot. Feeling came back rolling over him and John realised his teeth had sawed through his lip when he bit them. The pain and trickle of blood were odd non-sensations. Distant as it rolled down his chin to drip on his shirt. Shit a stain.

John felt guilty for that almost-thought, but the man rotting in front of him couldn’t even care enough to be offended.

John felt something bitter crawl into his mind anyway.

John was wasting time here he thought, how long had he been standing there anyway?

As horrific as it was, he had a job to get to, he had to buy food and pay rent.

Should I just leave? He thought, embarrassed he almost felt like a pervert watching the man on the bench in some private misery on a public bench.

Feeling in his feet returning, John turned to the sound of the city.

He looked around and nobody seemed to notice them together there outside of a few curious glances before they were dismissed as unimportant.

John would have been humiliated in the man’s position. Small mercy to barely being alive.

John felt frustration at himself for walking over, for his curiosity, because now his heart

wouldn’t let him simply walk away. His mother raised him better than that.

What could this man use? What could John give him?

Well it’s cold thought John, warm coffee might help.

So he bent over to leave his little cup next to the bench for the man to find when he woke up.

John didn’t know when he had started shaking but he was, tremors travelling up and down his body from sole to crown.

John found his eyes glued to that horrible hand and forced himself to look at the man’s face.

He found those eyes swimming and oddly dry.

For a brief moment he saw something ugly turn in that unfocused gaze.

John steadied himself with a shaky breath and a decisive step back.

He walked, legs unsteady, to work in the shadows of tall grey buildings that the rising sun threw onto the street.

“Hello, I’d like to report an emergency,” he told the voice on the other end of the phone; forcing himself to look forward. He’d call an ambulance, that’s the right thing to do.

He did what he could, all he could. He wasn’t in charge of that man’s life and wasn’t responsible, he told the unearned guilt that rested on his shoulders.

Guilt for what exactly? He wasn’t sure. Why would he feel guilt?

He hadn’t rotted the man’s hand; he wasn’t the reason the man lived on the streets just waiting to pick up whatever disease did this to him.

Disease? Was that it, John admitted he felt dirty standing close to the man. It was odd, John felt, that another person could be ‘dirty’.

As if the act of being homeless stained them somehow and that they could give that same sickness to you.

But that was true, they were dirty, in the very literal sense, and they were diseased.

That was a fact, proven time and time again.

Disease spread fast among the poor, John thought, it’s not wrong to err on the side of caution.

They couldn’t afford a doctor, and the homeless were likely too scared to go to what was available for the public with how many drugs they had in their system.

John couldn’t be wrong for caring about his own health, he had to take care of himself, that’s how it was.

But John was taught by school and his parents and cartoons on a Saturday morning that all people deserve respect and empathy, they were human just like everyone else was.

But you’d always read or hear about somebody getting mugged or having their home burgled or being murdered, God forbid, for their phone or a watch or their shoes. You must grow up and admit the world you learned as a kid simply wasn’t possible, kindness gets punished.

But that could change, couldn’t it? Talking heads argued about that on the news, argued that crime was just a symptom of poverty and other boring politics.

They’d argue with words you need a dictionary and a minor degree to understand.

They’d argue until their feet left the ground, and they forget that they’re trying to convince you at home what to think.

You really could only trust yourself to care for yourself.

John thought in circles like that all day, one topic to another and another, always finding another layer to doubt.

He found himself thinking about the act of thinking at around lunch but found himself still feeling sick and decided not to eat.

Skipping lunch made John wonder what hunger really felt like, the type of hunger he never felt before.

That desperate hunger that comes from not knowing where your next meal would come from, that drove you to idealise people who abuse what little power they had but didn’t suffer an empty belly.

John supposed wanting a better life, safety, power, wealth, what-have-you was a type of hunger also.

John sighed, the spiral of his thoughts started moving again and the memory of that hand in the middle of it.

When the sun tipped over its zenith and the shadows crossed the road John walked home.

He was tired, work was grinding, and his thoughts kept spiralling, questions he couldn’t answer popped up.

He barely felt like a person, some vital part of him ripped out leaving him a ghost or wisp floating on cold air.

John wanted a shower and felt the odd urge just lie down on the floor in nothing but his underwear and stare at the ceiling.

He rounded a corner and saw an ambulance. Paramedics loaded a gurney with a covered form into the back. A crowd of lookers-on gathered a respectful distance around them.

Around the bench. When had he called them?

How many hours ago? He asked himself as he wandered over to the crowd.

“What happened?” he asked, he was drifting.

“I dunno,” somebody answered, “some guy died.”

“Hmm,” was all John heard leaving his throat, a small sound, as he looked at the crowd taking pictures. A part of him wondered at what point in history people discovered the polite distance to crowd around a tragedy.

Yes that was what this was, a tragedy. A man, a person, had died.

John watched them load the man into the sterile van, he could almost see that black-purple hand and those feverish eyes through the clean white shroud they threw over him.

Much nicer than anything he had in a long time.

“Some hobo dies and our tax money gets spent,” the person beside him said, elbowing John in the side. What an odd thing to say but John could imagine himself agreeing.

John put one foot in front of the other and found his thoughts spiralling again, round and round again. A whirlpool of consciousness but he didn’t feel himself drowning. He floated over them, he floated home, at some point it hit him that he had basically seen somebody die.

That was new to him.

That means he was alive, that’s what people said sometimes, that life is experiencing new things, seeing new sights.

This counts right? He had never seen somebody rot to death before, he’d never called the ambulance before either.

He was alive and another man was dead.

What was death? Was John dead?

Well no, he had just decided he was alive but that man, the one who just died, when did he die? John hadn’t seen it actually, just something very close but when did he die? When his heart stopped? When he laid down to sleep last night in some haze? When the rot set in? When he first slept on a park bench at some point in the past without knowing that at some point in the future his arm would rot and he wouldn't go to the hospital just to die on a park bench?

It just goes around and around again.

John was certain he was overreacting, it was just a man he didn’t know, he didn’t mean anything to John, but then again all human life was precious, that's what he was taught. It wouldn’t be overreacting then.

When John crossed the door to his flat he didn’t leave it for another four days.

He’d called in suddenly sick to work the next day and the day after that.

He hadn’t shaved and he barely ate, he didn’t even take the shower he wanted. He sat by his window and stared out his window watching people go about their lives, thinking about circles when he saw the same people going to work and then going home and then going to work again.

He counted pecks of dust, and scratches, and little imperfections in the glass when his brain got tired of running in circles until it caught its breath and started again.

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