PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

     Lancaster awoke today in the usual fashion; a beam of bright sunlight penetrated his lifeless stupor until slowly he opened his hazel eyes. He was surprised he opened his eyes. The empty orange vile of vicodin was still right in front of his face when he woke. The loud yelp of an expletive followed with no other motion from his body. His left arm was paralyzed underneath his body weight as he struggled to lift himself from the mattress. Pins and needles:  his arm was still asleep as his elbow buckled. Even after twenty-two years of waking up every morning (sometimes afternoons), he was still awestricken about how he had never found a way to move his arms comfortably after prolonged sleep. Only when he was with Elizabeth, he thought, did the problem go away. He tried not to think about her but it was always useless.



     He groaned and managed to roll himself onto his left side, further entangling himself in the gray fleece blanket that barely reached his toes. He fell off the bed, but softly onto the unwashed clothes of weeks bygone that lay on the white tile floor. His dreary eyes now fixated on the flashing colon separating the twelve and the thirty-one on the alarm clock.



     He muttered, not even sure to himself if the words were English. “How can it already be noon thirty?”



     At this, Lancaster decided to get up as his arms finally regained their strength. He grabbed the dull, olive-green shirt underneath as he lifted himself up and took one big whiff of the shirt and, as if a bolt of lightning had struck, his spinal cord caused his entire lower back to undulate. The only way for his body to control this twitching was to balance it with a series of coughs so powerful that Lancaster had to hold onto the obituary-covered walls. All the walls, except the one farthest from the window, and the spot for one last clipping above his bed, were covered in old, yellow, thumb-tacked newspaper obituary clippings. The wall farthest from the window, however, was not decorated. All that hung there was a cross made of translucent glass. It clung to the wall with all its hope. Like everything else in his room, the cross was barely hanging on. Just one rusty, twisted nail was all that kept the wood from tangoing with gravity until SPLAT:  that high pitch frequency that only dogs hear, the soul escaping from the glass vessel.



     He hobbled like a drunken mess into the yellow painted bathroom. He instantly saw out of his squinting eyes his ten thousand reflections. Ten-thousand memories of one final drunken night: the ten shots of tequila, the thirty-six stitches in his right hand and the chunks of broken glass still buried deep underneath the skin. It was only last month that his hand was the mouth of an overflowing red river draining into a lake on the bathroom floor. He tried not to think about it as he ran his battle-scarred hand through his thick black hair.  He hesitantly grabbed his toothbrush, so old and worn out that the wavy bristles formed a “v,” pointing almost directly out to its sides. He bit down onto the tooth brush and grabbed a bottle of Febreeze resting on the bathroom sink counter.  He managed his way out of the bathroom, stumbling over the empty white boxes from the Chinese food he had ordered the previous night and towards the bed, and the faded green shirt.



     Lancaster made his way to the already opened window. It was the kind of autumn afternoon that would have made even van Gogh crack a smile. The sky was grey, but it was the gold and orange mix of the maple trees that grabbed your eyes and held them there like Superman being paralyzed from exposure to kryptonite. It was warm for Fall. So Lancaster sprayed his shirt with the Febreeze and hung it from the windowsill. It would be dry in no more then fifteen minutes. He looked down at the ground. He had to be at least a hundred and fifty feet up; no one was walking on the pale tan cement sidewalk. He looked down and thought.  Then he walked over to his brown dresser and picked up another bottle of vicodin. He read the warning label, “WARNING:  Take two tablets by mouth once a day.” He filled his hands with five pills and forced them down his throat.  He lifted his head, and walked back to bed. He flopped, face down, onto the soft, cushy mattress, causing the entire room to shake.



The twisted nail finally snapped.

The glass cross shattered upon the floor.

And in fifteen minutes, in his favorite green shirt, so would Lancaster.