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I do believe I’m going to die. I’m not certain of it, of course—certainty is an illusion only afforded to a select few of a particular social status—but I have my suspicions. For example, as I glance in the mirror every morning, I find my eyes drawn automatically to the curves and dips of a forehead charred by the licking flames of time. There are little lines squiggling out from beneath each eye, straight folds across my cheeks that were a laughable concept twenty years ago, and my hands tremble with the gift of a friend long-denied. Age is like a solicitor who came to my door and gripped my hand, begging and pleading with me to simply give him one or two pennies to stave off the cold. I turned his pitiful expression away with a haughty laugh. “Why should I care?” I said to myself, “He won’t return if I ignore him.” And yet, the beggar returned day after day after day, flooding my doorstep with the tears of a plaintive man—broken and destitute. At first, I disliked his presence. The creature endured, rags and wrinkles and hideous, sagging skin, and he brought nothing but a shadow of anger and despair down over my house. Guests came and turned away at the door, whispering judgmental thoughts to each other and making snide comments to me about his weight, his hair, his skin… all the while trying desperately to deny thoughts of their own solicitors pounding on their door back at home. I cast him out time and time again, my disdain growing with each day he sat on my front lawn and sobbed into the flowers, scaring the guests and frightening the children. When my denial of his existence failed to drive him from my yard, I soon found myself leaping to the actions of a man consumed with desperation. I begged and pleaded and wailed, scratching my nails along the wooden planks of time and ordering him to remove himself from my beautiful home. He’s an eyesore, he’s a snake, he’ll never do me any good, I thought in my moments of despair, leave me be, leave me be! As I grappled with clawed fists, bones bent and broken from the endless battering, time soon appeared to slow and speed at will. In the crawling, tick-tock tempo of those moments I cast aside in my most human perceptions, I watched my withering knuckles scrape his matching grasp. Slow, slow, slowly- time itself crept by as though finally submitting to the crushing, omnipresent stones of humanity’s endless burden, some remnants of the curse left after Eve’s teeth crunched through the waxy sheen of that sacred apple. Pores gaped and spots arose on the supple surface of my skin, and so, I peered through the cracks in time, through those slow moments, straight into my mortal foe’s cold gaze. It may have been simply a figment, but to my prying eyes, the solicitor’s own expression had morphed from curious hope and virility to something frozen, hard, and evil. When I pulled away from my entrancement, rags hung from my gnarled fists, shaking with the disease that turns rubber to stone. I paused for but a moment. The solicitor was gone. After so long a battle, relief was the furthest expression from my heart. My beautiful home lay in dust and ash at my feet, my guests long gone, their own solicitors having claimed more than their time and their estates. I picked up the twisted and rain-stiffened rags from where they lay, abandoned on the hard clay. Piss and sweat wafted from the twisted fabric. Home. I lifted the rags as high as my stone-grip would allow before draping them over my head, wrapping them around my features until I could barely see the destruction before me. Then, I picked up the abandoned coin-hat, shaking it gently. The silence screamed the tune of empty pockets and imminent starvation, as did my stomach. I managed to worm my way off the accursed property I sacrificed everything for and slither down the streets, my newfound robes sliding familiarly like the touch of an old friend. I rapped on the doorway of a house with a purple door. My door once was blue. I like purple, myself. The door swung open. “Please, kind sir,” I mumbled from under my hood, “May I please… please… have just a penny or two for food? I do—” The door swung shut. Click. “… I do believe I’m going to die.” |
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Victoria is a young writer currently attending school in the south- the sort of warm, open south where her two favorite things, good people and the great outdoors, hold up her muse. Whatever time she’s not spending on her writing is spent around the people she loves most. She is a Hampton Roads Writers Conference short fiction prizewinner, a Muse Writers Center Fellow, and an experienced freelance writer currently interning in a communications and marketing office. Victoria has been published in Spectrum Literary Magazine as well as the 42 Stories Anthology. |
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