Many years ago, after a break-up that almost destroyed me (don't they all? Actually, no, they all do not; sometimes they're just necessary), I crawled out of an abyss called Sadness and eventually channeled everything into a batch of short stories, as well as the writing of my first (unpublished) novel, The Corner of His Mind. I believe this story was written at the tail end of that initial burst or perhaps a few years later, a nod to that miserable time.
It's quite depressing, but has a certain something and, as noted, it includes a creature...or is it? Perhaps it's just the psychological manifestation of Sadness or...well, you'll see.
"Photograph" originally appeared for one week in 2012 on the Phantasmagorium website. It's about 2,000 words long. I've slightly edited it for publication here.
Enjoy this journey into my personal hell...
***
Photograph
by John Claude Smith
“Who so loves believes the
impossible.”
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The man collects
the photograph, eyes framed in chaos.
“Her name is
Alicia, and she is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, inside and
out. She taught me so much about love,
but now…”
The bartender
thinks--pretty girl--nothing more. It is late.
The man continues
with his morose monologue.
“The mornings and
evenings are the worst,” he says, sucking on a cigarette as if the smoke will
cleanse his insides, as if the heat will cauterize his misery.
The bartender
towel dries another glass and sets it with its brothers, dull eyes looking up
again, his interest negligent. At this time of night, it always comes down to
inebriated nonsense or stark confessions of the soul.
“The mornings are
bad because in waking up, usually after broken sleep, nothing has changed.
Nothing has settled how I want it to settle. I haven’t pinched myself and
awakened from the weary nightmare. I’ve only left many tiny red bruises all
over my body. Tattoos of pain that, even though they will fade, I will always
see them, remember their blotchy faces smiling at me, content in their
ephemeral time on my flesh.”
Another deep drag:
the smoke never passes by the man’s lips, trapped inside. He raises the bottle
and gulps down what remains, tapping his finger impatiently on the counter. Another
one, and hurry.
“The evenings are
bad because as they wear on, no matter the distractions of cinema or clubs or
window shopping or alcohol”—he tips an imaginary hat toward the bartender—
“wandering and wondering, at some point it seems I’m slouched in front of the
TV, some movie looped continuously, the concrete evidence of her leaving heavy
as an anchor in my belly. I am alone. Lights are left on. The movie plays on.
Life goes interminably on.”
The man’s voice
drifts, swept up like dust, scooped up and thrown away.
“But this isn’t
living…” he adds, eyes peering into some far-off place that only he can see,
only he can understand. Missing her, nothing else matters. Smoke fills
his lungs again. The man hopes it fills everything within and chars it as black
as his thoughts.
An intolerable
malaise permeates everything. The lights flicker—a sign their lids are drooping
with exhaustion? At the opposite end of the bar, the bartender places a
sweating bottle in front of the only other customer. He wanders back.
The man continues,
attentive audience or not. “I really don’t want to carry on with this sadness,
sticky and swollen as it fills my head and body, and I don’t really know if I’m
going to.”
Gray eyes like
unstamped coins glance up at him, registering nothing. The bartender is on
autopilot.
“Initially these
feelings had stretched into the days, long and languid and suffocating, then
they flowed away a bit, but like a lethal tide, they’re coming back with a
perseverance that suggests self-destruction.” The man takes another deep drag,
his face adorned with a strange smile.
“And I really
don’t care. Without her, the woman with whom I am meant to be with, well, I
really don’t care about what is born of this overwhelming dread.” He smiles
again. The smile indicates knowledge of something nefarious in motion.
The bartender’s
constant dead-eyed observance reveals nothing. His thoughts are obviously
elsewhere, and he is not paying enough attention to the subtleties.
“My friend Celine
told me when Pete left after twelve years of marriage that the only thing she
wanted for months afterwards was to sleep, to blot it out. With the assistance
of medication, she was able to drift, but the pain remains to this day. She’s
never purged it or to be more precise, she’s never embraced it. There’s no
purging this kind of pain.” He abruptly laughs. The laughter disintegrates into
a squiggly wheeze. The sound from his throat scuttles about, three blind mice
in need of a hole in a wall. “There is resignation maybe, knowing it will be
with you always, but there is no getting rid of it.”
The bartender
grunts, “One more?”
The man nods his
head. Yes, I need more. It is thirsty and needs this vile nourishment.
“I wonder, with
all that sleep, of what my friend dreamed. But I never asked. Sometimes, it’s
all too much.”
More inhaled smoke
without release. The bartender notices this despite his lackadaisical manner,
then glances up at the clock. Twenty minutes more and this familiar yet strange
evening will be a memory. Sleep awaits, something to rest his dodgy vision.
“My friend’s
survival instincts demanded sleep. Mine work differently. I want it to end, but
it won’t let me. It insists on…something more.”
The bartender
focuses on the man’s lean, washed-out features. He looks like he’s been
bleached. He’s got more in relation with a heroin addict, or a zombie. He
watches as the man again draws on the cigarette and coughs, though there is no
release.
It’s as if he’s
eating smoke...
“You see, sadness
is something more than a sensation that alters one’s eating habits and fills
the brain with repetitious drivel about one’s meaningless being.” He taps the
counter next to the already empty bottle. “It is something real, manifesting
itself as mass within myself, growing--”
“Excuse me,
mister. We got just a few minutes before closing and I think you’ve had
enough.”
Coughing again,
harder now, as if choking, the man says, “I think you may be right.”
The bartender
watches as the man stands and leans forward, as if he is going to vomit. He
curses the gods for the imposition, not wanting to deal with cleaning up
another’s mess this night. He is tired and just wants to go home. Damn it!
The man buckles to
his knees, laughter cutting through the coughing. “Yes, I think it has had
quite enough,” he says.
Knowing it is too
late to get the man outside or to the restroom, the bartender circles around
the bar with an ice bucket, hoping to limit the mess.
The man laughs
again, louder now: “That won’t be big enough!”
Asshole.
“Just put it under you, try to limit spillage.”
The man shoves the
ice bucket away as something starts to crawl out of his mouth. No uncontrolled
rush, no forceful splat, it was more like the concentrated surge as excrement
might pass through an expanding sphincter.
Black and mottled,
lumpy and formless, it pulls itself from within the man’s mouth as his eyes
widen, his mouth filling with its heinous presence. It squeezes through him,
his throat swelling as it passes, his lips kissed with blood. It is large and
it is real and the bartender gasps, his dull eyes awakened with shock.
It plops on the
floor, still growing, gaining girth as it sits there, moist and full of ugly
tremors. The bartender vomits the Rueben and fries he had many hours ago, his
body unable to restrain his own disgusting release.
The man starts to
laugh, mouth dripping blood and saliva and fluids from deep inside, and plumes
of smoke finally set free.
Smoke also coils
off the thing. It jiggles like Jell-O. A part of it opens and speaks in the
man’s voice: “You see, since I have no interest in living, I’ve rescinded my
license as human being and decided that the part of me that is most prominent
should have…let’s call it dominium.
It…I may find a better way to deal with my current wretched
existence. Anything is better than this suffering.”
“What are you? How
can you talk?” The bartender’s legs buckle, and he abruptly sinks to the floor,
stunned.
“I have been
telling you all along what I am,” it says. “I am Sadness.”
The bartender
scoots away, not wanting to see any more, not wanting to verify this thing with
his vision any longer. The only other patron in the bar is now slumped in a
booth, sleeping.
“And I am
eternally hungry.”
The man who had
expelled the thing—Sadness—stares into the bartender’s defeated gaze. The
bartender tries to avoid visual confirmation, but like an accident along a
rain-swept freeway, one cannot help but to observe, usually longer than
necessary. The man smiles again, a black hole swirling behind his lips.
Everything is
charcoal black and hopeless.
Sadness opens its
mangled, misshapen maw, opens it as wide as its body, emulating a putrid, mushy
clam. It is all mouth, a quivering, insatiable abyss. The man steps into the
black hole, turns to the bartender and says in a voice like wet sandpaper:
“Without her, this is all I have.”
His eyes are
stained with tears, but the bartender can see that the man’s heart is stained
with loss. Sadness devours the man in one ragged, gurgling gulp.
The bartender
continues to scoot away, closing his eyes, hoping to wake up in his bed when he
reopens them, maybe sweaty and uncomfortable but…not here. Anywhere but here.
He senses Sadness
nearing him, its warmth itchy as a rash.
“Are you paying
attention now, mister bartender?” Its breath is like the remains of a drenched
and simmering forest fire.
“Y-yes,” says the
bartender.
“Do you believe in
love, Mister Bartender?” Its breath is like tears, salty and sorrowful.
The bartender
wonders what this has to do with anything. “I’m not sure--yes.”
“You do not
understand,” it says, saliva spray indicating anger at the bartender’s
ignorance. “You have never loved unconditionally.”
“I’ve been in
love,” says the bartender. “I’ve been in love.”
“No, you have
wanted and not given. Love is a willingness to give up everything for another.
Because the other is the one with whom one is meant to be with. It is not a
choice, it is a gift, and, in some cases, it is a sentence. A life sentence for
one’s soul.”
The bartender
considers the inherent madness of the situation: he is sitting on the floor of
the bar, talking to this gruesome thing—Sadness—about its philosophy on love
which, if he was so inclined, made him think less about appearances and more
about worth, but under the circumstances…he had to wonder what he had been
slipped to have slipped so far himself.
“Love is the price
those lucky enough pay for believing in the impossible. Love is the
disintegration of patented realities for the sake of one’s true self and,
hence, seeing the world as it should be for the first time, crystal clear and
real for the first time.
“What really
matters in life, Mister Bartender?” Its breath is like sweat pooled in the
valley of a woman’s naked lower back.
The bartender
hesitates, thinking: What really matters in life?
Sadness pounces on
the delay: “Are you not paying attention? What matters in life, Mister
Bartender”—it’s voice sizzles, like venom about to be spat from the forked
tongue of an agitated viper— “is that one opens one’s heart to love’s
possibilities…”
The room falls
silent in a way that causes the bartender to open his eyes again. It is empty,
except for the snoring man in the booth at the opposite end of the bar.
The
thing—Sadness—is gone, though the room feels…peculiar.
The bartender
immediately tries to discount the event as hysteria, perhaps inspired by
exhaustion, a frazzled mental glitch, when he notices a photograph on the
floor. He picks it up.
Pretty girl,
he thinks, compelled to flip it over. In black ink and through eyes that will
never view the world in tedious terms again—an epiphany of understanding
moistens and blurs his vision—he reads:
Jeremy,
With you I believe in the impossible.
With you I am real!
I will always love you,
Alicia
***
Yeah. I was not in a good place. But I found my way out of that dark pit and it even pushed me to write novels as well as short fiction.
Intermission: I've had books published, y'know? Here's the three available titles. (Click on the red highlighted titles to link to the books.) Check them out and pick up a copy or three. Thanks!
Riding the Centipede: my Bram Stoker Award Finalist debut novel.
The Wilderness Within: a trippy excursion into a living forest...and an unexpected finale.
Autumn in the Abyss Redux: twenty-five short stories from my first three OOP collections.
And here's some Man Ray art that I think works with this tale...in a surreal way, of course!
