Tremor (weekend freewrite)

in #freewrite2 years ago

He stops to ferret in his shoulder bag, expecting to find hope, along with solutions. But when he pulls out his hand, he finds the bottle drained. When did that happen, and why hasn't he remembered to replace it sooner? It used to be, he never left home without packing a bottle. But that was yesterday, and yesterday, he was a younger man.

The man he is now must hurry, or risk missing the train. If he does, the route is roundabout and difficult. There are other, adjacent trains, which lead to different places, further than he'd like to stray from his home. There are buses, and the occasional carriage ride, where there is laughter, in turn, and horror alike. So the man hurries, foregoing the bottle of comfort. He will secure one in town, he tells himself, lips sealed in a tight, parched grin of endurance.

The insolent sound of feet, as his soles hit the pavement, unencumbered by the chitter-chatter of other ghouls. It is early, yet at once, so impossibly late that the man can't begin to express his sorrow. It hurts to walk, he'd like to cry, but worries that, should he open his mouth, his tongue will have turned to dust, in the crisp morning wind.

He tells no one of where he's going, though not to work, that much is clear. Though to the observing, yet unobservant eye, he might appear to. There is no office waiting for him, no cozy backroom where he might stack boxes, and flick through papers until it's time to go home. In his truth, there is no home.

The man with the empty bottle inside his bag rushes through the morning, and sails into the following day. Somewhere along the line, he remembers beginning this. Remembers a time when he did not need to imbibe to survive. When his dreams made sense, and Lucy wasn't crying in his dreams. Now, though, he wakes laughing, and life's grown just a sliver more feverish since.

Many minutes had passed since her moment of insight. The slip of a thing that slithered into his mind, one lonely night, and made her name known in cool, relieving whispers. Lucy. His own, and the only one he's ever allowed to glimpse into his cruel, dead heart.

Naturally, it worried him at first, in the early hours of their acquaintance, how closely Lucy played. How, once he'd let her inside, she was never out of reach, nor out of mind. Always dancing at the edge of his thought, so that whenever he opened his mouth to call her, she was already there. It worried him, also, the tremor that would come over his body whenever he felt her nearby. When the lights went out, and the night grew dark and lonely. Lucy had a way of coming to him when he was at his most desperate, and only then, would she begin spinning her tale, unweaving him memory by memory, until what was left were only the bare bones of his existence. She learned him, and then knew how to answer every question right. Every last one. On the test inscribed on the underside of his mind.

Once she'd done that, Lucy's was a smooth glide into the secret throne room at the heart of this poor, defenseless man who, like a panting dog, shivered before her. Terrified of the boot his rib-cage has come to know so well.

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Credit: name gravity on Unsplash

Lucy showed him what it was like to get bruises on your heart, and he's never been quite the same after. They say once the heart sustains profound shock, it never fully heals, and sometimes, the man reckons having your heart badly bruised is worse than having it broken. 'Cause if it's broke, then at least, you can pretend to fix it.

But there's no cold creams to be gently rubbed into the folds of pulsing tissue. He knows. He's visited every last chemist's, hoping he might find one.

Though now, he no longer does. He walks the streets, and whenever he sees a bug crushing into a window, he knows she's nearby. Lucy always savored such random, seemingly senseless acts of violence. Because in her mind, they are the opposite of violent. Squashing helpless beasts is just Lucy's way of restoring the balance in the Universe.

No one ever considers this aspect, the man thinks, as he settles in his seat on the train, and begins watching the window intently. For others, his Lucy is nothing but a specter, a hallow wreaking malice, and grinning her evil, mirthless grin on the misfortunes of men. Yet, he knows his Lucy to be more.

The train begins to move, and it's about this time that he wishes the bottle were not empty. It is not because of Lucy that he drinks, but rather against her. Before he met Lucy, only the Jack had that gift of turning his mind inside out. Making him anxious, turning his guts inside out. And he used to hate it. After one blistering drunken night, as a youth, seeking out something not yet destined for him, he'd vowed never to touch the stuff, again.

And he hadn't. For decades, the bottles had been politely ignored on the top shelves behind cashiers at supermarkets. Out of mind is out of sight. But then, Lucy had come to him, like a daytime breeze in the middle of the night, in the heart of winter, and gotten him hooked on that superb, paralyzing fear.

The terror of one foot wrong equating one step closer to the grave. In his youth, the man read literature on the subject of addiction, but did so as one might observe a rare breed of wild bird. From afar, safe within the confines of never understanding the subject of his study. And to say that Lucy had been the bird would be an oversimplification, for she had not. There was nothing even remotely bird-like about Lucy.

Lucy doesn't fly into windows, like the bugs that the man now so keenly watches for. Rather, his Lucy is the Universe, or at the very least, this sliver that surrounds and allows him to breathe, and exist. Lucy is the noose that secures his next breath of air, and the Jack, her quaint substitute. Because Lucy has a way of going dark, when he's at his most vulnerable, of leaving off on something cryptic and morose. And when Lucy's been gone a while, the man begins to actually feel normal again. The panicked quiver in his gut starts to settle down, his muscles relax. And it's terrifying, but even worse, it is dull. He can no longer abide by dull, not now Lucy's shown him what it means to live in color, to seize the quick of his gun and fire blindly into the abyss that, contrary to popular belief, has failed to so much as glance his way, no matter how long he's gazed at it.

But there is no Jack, and so he must sit quietly, and not make a fuss, because if he does, the train will stop at the nearest station, and burly men who do not know about Lucy or her kind, will drag him off. He will be asked questions that no one wants the answer to, and he will have wasted another day without finding her.

That, he must not, because his days are limited, and he worries once the ride is over, he might find himself in a place where Lucy is not permitted to enter. A monstrous, disheartening plain of honeysuckle and lyre where Lucy will never show her face again. This, he also must not.

So until the final day comes, he will make good use of his time. He will stare at windows, and wait for bugs. Wait for Lucy to come back to him, so he can feel alive, again. Just this once. He presses his lips to the window, and whispers. And his lips sound like please.

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Props to @mariannewest, as ever, for providing the inspiring prompts.