by Jonathan Shaw
One day he decided that the room was too much for him to take anymore. It wasn’t even a conscious decision on his part; he just woke up that morning (afternoon really) and scanned the bile-colored
peeling green walls and something quite apart from his rational mind said “Enough.”
A half an hour later he was walking quickly down the busy street he’d come to know so well. Little suitcase in hand, he knew exactly how far he was from the bus station. And he was feeling better already. Lighter somehow, and more awake than he had felt in months. Months and months. The months were suddenly and quickly buried behind him like a serial killer’s murder victims now, and he was glad as he strode into the little Greyhound Bus station on Vine… Behind him, his room with two months rent unpaid, his cheap Salvation Army typewriter and twenty pounds of paper: aborted short stories, unremarkable poems, rejected novel… all behind him now.
He sat down in the small dark bar across the street from the station, waiting for the bus that would take him away. Away from his one dirty window’s view of the alley full of trash and rusty shopping
carts and broken bottles and grey, wandering winos. Away from the lonely nights of cheap wine and impossible dreams and the peeling wallpaper that had been his life, his entire stay in Los Angeles.
And he felt glad as he sat there sipping his bourbon and water. Glad that he was getting out at last. Glad that he wouldn’t have to listen to the landlady screaming and her husband’s lumbering drunken curses as he beat her late at night. He was especially glad that he’d skipped out on the rent, the typewriter, the whole fucking show. It was over now and he was very very glad.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim, morbid lighting of the bar, he could make out the figure of a young Mexican girl standing by the jukebox, lingering like a shadow. She looked crazy. Like all the girls he’d known in Los Angeles… He gulped down the rest of his drink and slapped some change down on the counter. He took one last glance around the bar, the dirty mirror and the rows of watered-down rat poison, the crazy girl, the monkey-faced bartender…
Then he got up and walked to the door. The smell of stale piss and dried up death lingered in his nostrils as he hit the street, smiling.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…
there are so many rats at home and i am looking for a really good rat poison;::
the problem with using rat posion is that it can also harm your pets at the same time.`,