3x3

I wrote this piece on a creative writing website, I listened to An Ending - Ascent by Brian Eno whilst writing and thought it was a very moving stimulus to the piece. The character of David, lives on his own with his Father, who has entered an extreme depression after his wife and other son left them.

Rain can only hit a window for so long before it loses its therapeutic touch on a dark and depressed mind. Those drops that you recreationally race with lack of anything else better to do merge together with other more static drops like all those brain hammering worries in your head that you swear will one day give you some kind of brain cancer. Sometimes helps if the room you are bored to tears in is lit up, but your family, or what’s left of it hasn’t paid the electricity bill this month. So everything in the room seems to form the same colour, a blurred, horrible grey through eyes as watery as the soaking mist. There’s no life out there. There’s no life in here. Everything…is lifeless…David’s cheek was pressed firmly against the window and most definitely his ribs were also. Those bones tapped the glass as he moved to seek even the smallest amount of comfort. He would pray for some form of blubber in between his flesh and bone, even if there was no love between the flesh and bone sat behind him. His father wore jeans that were days, no weeks old. Stained. He wore a bib made out of vomit as nutritious as paper and clutched a bottle of something as fresh as a rotting crow. Only David would prefer the pot pourre of the crow above the sweaty, fecal odour that filled the room. His own Dad, a magic tree that grabbed every sense of your body and made them eat shit. He sang with almost choir boy clarity and innocence...

David: Ave Maria….

Christianity was a device created out of faith of something higher that would offer salvation in times of great desperation. Those who decided to forsake this system were said to be confined in a fiery, burning hell of eternal pain. Fire burns the skin, perhaps 3rd degree burns, maybe creates blisters. They heal though, you might go pale with the pain and your eyes water. The burn may scar the skin, but it always stops hurting. Always stops hurting. David always stops hurting. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, yeah right, what doesn’t make you stronger certainly doesn’t bring you to life either. This house, buried alive in a weather front predicted by scientists, but how can one see in so much moisture? How can one get any bearings in visibility so poor? The space around you is what? 3 feet by 3 feet? Then it’s just a void. Everything you have in your life seems to just be in that small space. Everything that matters anyway. Your heart, your brain, your thoughts and your memories. You can’t fit casino’s and big sports cars in that amount of space. A billionaire is as poor as the tramp in the fog. David let out a small smile. What you can’t see can’t harm you. He backed away from the window and sat on his Father’s knee. He grabbed the bottle and took a swig of the liquid. He choked and shot straight up, spitting the spirit on the floor as if it was a possessive demon. Only the demon, even if it was Satan himself, would have walked into that room and would have felt immediately redundant. David flushed his nose out and prodded his Dad. 

David: Wake up Daddy…

No? Never mind. It hadn’t worked yesterday, or the day before that…or the day before that. He traversed the mess on the ground and picked up the receiver on a black phone. No dial tone.

David: Doctor please. My Daddy hasn’t eaten his dinner yet. He likes to look at it though.

His dinner, he did eat it, but then decided to wear it

David: He’s still asleep. I thought if I have some of the juice he has in his hand I might fall asleep with him. It tasted yukky though. Bye Doctor.

The Doctor was busy. He’s always too busy. David put the phone down and sat by the window again, clutching his knees.

David: Daddy, I thought we could go visit Drake tomorrow? I haven’t seen him in so long and I would love to see him. Can we Daddy?

David smiled and felt ever so drowsy. His Father rose up from the seat and shook his clothes down. The vomit ran down his top like the crumbs did when he had his festive mince pie on Christmas Day. He sat beside David, the warm glow of the fire became the perfect 0 to the falling, white Christmas snow’s 1. The tree in the corner housed baubles as proud and bulbous as the breast of many a passing robin that day. David cuddled up his Father, his face nestled so comfortably into Daddy’s new jumper. He had been gifted a new book, one of his many Christmas presents. The book, “Stig of the Dump” sat in his Father’s hands like the Bible; he could read aloud like the greatest storytellers in history. The cover turned like winter into spring, the “new, fresh book” smell made David close his eyes, welcoming the sudden entrance into a fictional world.. It was just David and his Father, sat with legs stretched out in a space 3 feet by 3 feet, and it was only in that small, small space, where everything they held dear in the world at that time, was there. His Father read, stressing the right stresses, acting every line of the characters out with the delivery of the finest players that would take the stage at the Globe Theatre in London to a standing ovation by the richest in the land. David dozed off to sleep, his eyes just glimpsing the frolicking reindeers on his knitwear as he drifted off…

Rain can only hit a window for so long…