He sat on the red and black hair in a white and blue hospital, his heart very sick and very heavy, carrying a somber overture for his skin and bones.

His eyes carried a lot of water for his thirsty mouth. He drank his tears often. Thirsty. Drank a vial of tears. It was his vodka. His own form of distilled alcohol.

"I'm telling you though Sonic, he's slowly dying and very little of our efforts from our care has actually helped him at all. Very soon, he might even struggle to speak, but that's because you really can't afford for his care right now, can you Mr. Sonic? I assure you, if you can't afford anything we might have that could cure his illness, then there is nothing we can do, and your so-called son, Mr. Sonic, will die. And we're sorry about that."

Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…

He could hear the siren nurses say, as they walked down the white and blue halls.

Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…

He gazed up at him with contempt. "It doesn't seem like you're sorry."

The doctor continued to speak with a black and white tone.

"Well, we truly are. He's dying, Sonic, and what can you do to help him? Pay enough cash from your dying music career? Maybe you should get an actual job to help him. You know, anything you can do. Just lounging around thinking of inspiration for the next song that will most likely not become a hit isn't going to make him live any more seconds than us sitting here and talking about his condition. Leukemia is a very serious illness, and…"

"I don't need you to lecture me anymore, doctor," he growled, the words sounding jagged between his teeth. "You have to do something to help him. Anything. I love Tails. He's my only friend here, when everyone else seems to be too busy to even listen to anything I have to say. He's my breath of fresh air in an otherwise fogged and cloudy atmosphere full of smog…"

"But we can't do anything, Mr. Sonic, unless you can pay for the treatments available to him! Hospitals have to keep functioning somehow, and they can't just function on love and tears alone. It's simple for anyone to understand that. Raise some money somehow, or actually get a job. I can't think of any other advice to say to you. And I may seem like a cold, cruel doctor to you, but there's nothing I can fix if I don't have the required tools and the latest medical advancements…they need money to function."

"All this talk about money and you're still not doing anything to save his life…"

The hospital was a ghastly white, as pale as a dead woman's face, while the nurses and doctors passed them by, their heels and shoes and slippers cackalacking throughout the hallways.

Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…

The sirens continued to speak. They continued to cry over their forlorn love. The men who didn't love them enough to sleep with them. Their breasts remained lonely. Their tears unshed. Their heart never eaten like an apple from the man's mouth.

Sonic searched through all his photos of Tails in his wallet. Tails playing in the summer, when he was about five, when the flowers were green and yellow and began to bud anew with life, as the sun vibrantly collected long strings of light from the corner of the picture, like children's drawings. He loved the smell of sunshine and rhubarb on those days, but it was beginning to be autumn, where the trees were bare and naked, with their clothes thrown on the ground, red and orange and yellow scarves and dresses and suits collecting on the sidewalks where the rest of the world stomped on them, and the trees didn't mind at all that they were dirty and destroyed now, because they were going to get a new green shade of dapper clothes, right on the first day of spring. They just wanted to be naked in the winter, to embrace the cold, to grab themselves with their long thin stringy arms and shiver with new life for a few months. But the hospital wasn't full of life. He could hear people coughing and breathing out their last goodbyes in the hallways. He could hear the world turning and closing its eyes when the old would fall off the planet as dead sheds of skin, and then the new would come, and the world would be a bright shade of vivid pink again. He wished for a new life as he stood there, staring at the doctor who didn't seem to care at all for his surrogate son, as he suddenly thought of himself as a failure in every corner of his body. He graduated high school a few years ago, but he dropped out of college, expecting that he knew enough about music to get himself by, that he would have a new career all ready for him by the time he turned 26, that he would be successful and rich and would find a sweetheart that he thought he would love for the rest of his life and never mind anything else besides him and his son and the woman who was going to love him.

But none of that ever happened.

Mr. Sonic…Mr. Sonic…

He listlessly listened to the nurses' breathy whispers, with their breasts pointed towards his lake green eyes, and he shooed them away. The sirens' call couldn't attract him. They were old hags by the time their men came home. They were old and shriveled, their teeth hanging loose in their sockets, their nails yellow and holed like sponges. They cleaned every area of the hospital without him. He wasn't sure what cleanliness was. Their golden Christ crosses hung loosely around their necks as they talked about salvation for their patients. None of them were going to receive it. They were sick and wicked and Christ didn't love them.

He tried to sell his CDs to all the people that passed him, but no one was interested. He played songs at coffee houses, but everyone could barely keep their eyes open as he sang what song he thought was the best out of everything he wrote and recorded. The music pounded in his head, but he could barely get it out in such a rhythmic way. He could barely get it out in such a way that everyone would stand and listen.

He hated modern radio. They played songs that soon passed their prime after a few days as much as six times a day, and they barely caught his interest. But yet movies and videogames and other such media would play those songs monotonously, and the songs would be captured in his head, and he could barely let them out, and suddenly, he was touched with mediocrity, he was touched with the taint of being a shitty musician who was past its prime with one hit song and the rest were mediocre and bad in everything else. But he kept telling himself that was never going to happen to him. He would be a great musician. He knew everything there was about music. About tone and instruments and what sounded right and what didn't, but yet he never even had one hit song. He was doomed to be insignificant for the rest of his life, a born failure who should've stayed at college and listened to everyone else, who should've stayed in the lifestyle of studying and partying and the hypocrisy and all the things he began to hate about college, the more years he invested in it. And that reminded him: he still hadn't paid for his one or two years. And slowly, he was beginning to climb into debt, climb into the mountains of insanity, and the kicker? His son was dying, and he couldn't afford the proper care for him. He couldn't even afford health insurance, but he tried to make him stay in the hospital anyways, by promising them that he would soon pay them back, even with the clothes on his back if he had to. But he already sold everything that was valuable in his house. He already sold his mother's old golden jewelry and her old glass animals that was maybe worth ten dollars to some people. He even sold one of his TVs, even if he thought he wouldn't get much out of it. He only kept one he got at a garage sale, an old Zenith TV that Tails had to readjust the color every time he wanted to watch his cartoons. And one of the knobs was soon falling off and he would have to get that replaced, or just buy a smaller TV altogether that was only 5 inches wide.

Their bathtub didn't even work anymore. They couldn't hire someone to fix it. So no more baths for a while. Just showers that would be clogged up, with water that had a slight tinge of brown like watercolors. And he knew he couldn't force Tails to live this way. And now God was taking him away. And he thought that maybe, he actually deserved it, for some of the things he did in this life other than drop out of college. He could've done what this doctor thought was right and get an actual job, but he thought he wasn't cut out for minimum wage. He thought that only teenagers and the most desperate artists would have to fall for working for the demon of retail.

But maybe now, he would have to put a backseat to his music career and focus on getting one, or two, or three jobs to pay for Tails' insurance. It was the only thing he could do, with his high school diploma and his few years of college under his belt.

The smell and sounds of death still rang in his nose and ears when he left the white hellhouse. The hellhouse that was containing his son, who could only say a few words to him when he visited. With bags under his eyes, looking swollen and sinking into his skull, with his body thin and scarred from IVs and needles. He was too weak to even say "hello". And even "goodbye".

The pictures from when summer time was around with its green and yellow suits and ties and dresses seemed to tell him of a life he once had that was happy, bright, when Tails was in grade school, when he was in college, getting one step closer to getting a Bachelor's in Music Theory. But he never minded that. His days of college he thought were dismal other than the short bright days of summer. He had no friends. He could barely sleep. He constantly studied but in his other classes other than music he got Cs. His math professor hated him. He could barely write a sentence. And he always slept through his history and social studies. He had those same bags under his eyes while constantly sucking on a diet of simple sandwiches and crackers and of course, the infallible ramen, and teachers would comment on how they could see his bones and rib cage, but he never told them that he knew and he would work on it.

He never did, until he dropped out.

One of his dinners was simply Oreos and Coke. He thought the Oreos would make him gain weight. Same with the Coke instead of the tap water that he thought was beginning to smell like gasoline. Or maybe it was a hallucination. He never knew which anymore.

(They were trying to kill me, he thought. They're making me drink the blood of the land, the blood of Texas and Arabia…)

His fur unkempt, his clothes rumpled and smelling of vomit and alcohol. The drinking. Oh, the drinking. Some nights he drank until his body couldn't take it anymore. Sometimes he went to his lectures drunk or hungover. He could barely keep still in his chair but he tried to keep himself silent, in case they would see, they would hear…

"Mr. Sonic, why are you constantly moving around in your seat? It's distracting to the other students. Stop it."

But the earth was quaking below him! The earth was going to swallow him up like a viper, with its stalactite teeth and with the tongue of red hot lava. The chair would constantly move under him! With its small little padded feet, with the back snickering and laughing and waiting for him to fall on his ass and have the professor yell at him again. But not this time. He wasn't going to fall for its thieving and conniving tricks, the son of a little snot-nosing and cock-eyed…

"Mr. Sonic, I told you to stop that at once! And why are you mumbling under your breath again? Is something wrong with you?"

Something was deeply wrong with him. He was dying.

Dying like how everyone was slowly retching and decaying under the watchful eye of the professor, the killer of souls, the razor of wrists, the pills of the throat, the…

"That's it, Sonic! Out of the lecture and out of this room, now!"

One minute he was clean.

The next he noticed he tore through his sweater and he was gnawing on the wool, while his teeth chattered because it was suddenly cold inside the heated building, and time seemed to be so slow, like each second was slowly melting off the pot like molasses.

His mouth was wet with blood.

He was in the nurses' office, the smell of colds and cough medicine and aspirin that seemed to resonate in his nose, so vividly, even with the small tinge of shit.

"He's been drinking. But I don't think that's really the case…"

"Then what is it? He was disrupting my class, mumbling and chewing through his sweater and all of a sudden he was tearing through his wrists and claiming everyone in the entire building was going to die with great panic in his voice. Isn't that what drunk people act like sometimes? Belligerent drunks?"

"No Mr. Morole, I think it's something…far worse."

Was he really that bad? Did he really chew through his wrists and scream and ache in his head so awfully he thought God was going to crack through his skull?

"Sonic…unfortunately, I leave you no choice but to leave this college and repair your life. I'll send you a referral to a psychologist…"

But he didn't go to one. He thought he was okay. Fine. Normal. His wrists were bandaged, but he thought they were simply cut open by an accident he didn't remember having, maybe when he was drunk. All of it really was because of his drinking. He knew. Because being drunk often had the worst effects on people. Loving husbands became wife beaters. Logical and intelligent people became as stupid as dodos out in the rain. And the quietest people became as loud as lions after they were caged and starved for several days for no discernible reason other than to make them suffer and to see how long a lion could last without food. Then suddenly they were freed and had all the piece of shit humans it could eat, like a disgusting and horrible people buffet where you could watch them rightly suffer as you picked their ribs and lungs and heart to chew and swallow to feed yourself. But did that really made you the better person, just to resort to cannibalism, especially of people who probably ate nothing but hard liquor and canned meat?

He sighed. And shuffled on, through the Buffalo streets.

He lived in a shitty apartment like most shitty people. And ate canned meat and once in a while drank some hard liquor. His favorite was vodka with some schnapps and whatever shit he could find to put in his drink that he considered to be given to an alcoholic. He once mixed vodka, schnapps, Coke, and rum together, and even if it tasted like he was putting his tongue around a garbage can full of tampons and pads and dirty diapers, he drank it anyways. Because that was what desperate people did.

And he checked his answering machine to see if anyone called him. Of course, there was nothing. And he would chug his schnapps and watch TV.

And the TV was shitty too.

But he didn't care. He just needed noise to get through the night. He couldn't stand silence in his apartment. Ever since Tails was in the hospital. Ever since everyone in his life left him.

The night was bright with the radiant stars, glowing just for him, ready for him to blow out all the candles and snuff himself out to silence. But the night was watching him, with his sad little movements, with him wailing the guitar and hearing the whispering and screaming wind pass away without him, as the cars below honked and carried on their business that didn't matter to him at all because he had bigger problems, problems that God couldn't even handle. He sat on the warm mauve couch and tried to count away the seconds and minutes that passed and he nearly drank half the container of his schnapps, his eyes blurry and his stomach heaving with his only meal of Jell-O and chips, as he clutched the couch and wished the world wouldn't melt away from his grasp, because he still had things to do, he had to save Tails, he had to save his music career, and most of all, he had to save himself.

He had to save himself.

Words he thought he never had to say.

He could hear the echo of a dog barking below, of a train steamrolling on the tracks, as the emptiness continued to consume him.

The apartment was a bright piss yellow, with lights that nearly couldn't function anymore, with wallpaper that was cracking and chiseling away with white specks like a broken egg yolk. He smelled cigarettes and beer and sex in the other room a lot. He lit candles sometimes, but they could never burn away the smell. It made it even worse if he got the wrong candle he thought would simply smell like heaven.

But yet he had the skylights. He had the world below him. It used to be such a high class apartment, until he fucked it up, of course.

And he could feel the pressure rising in his throat. The hot acid and bile rushing from his stomach, and he promptly threw up in a trash can, and drained away the taste of vomit with more schnapps.

Everything that was good in his life was wasted away. Like all the money that he wasted paying for his financial aid, for a college he never even graduated in. Like the taste of schnapps in his throat that burned and made his head shake, the pain was coming back to him, but he soon forgot about it, as it all was swallowed and absorbed. Fingers touched the sun of his light, the broken cracked ceiling lamp that shone for all his summer nights when he was wet with sex and drink and firefly spit, and he coughed and wheezed and acknowledged that he was a failure, and he had to deal with it. He had to deal with the fact that he would never have those joyous summers and those joyous days where he thought he had a future back, no, they were gone, like his liquor cabinet now, as he finished the last vial of schnapps.

And like the schnapps that was now completely gone in his life, nothing good was going to happen again. He drank away all his wealth, all his happiness, and he watched the liquor drained away by his tongue, and it happened. Rock bottom. He was a failure, and he would always be a failure. And because of his failures, the good summers were gone, and his surrogate son was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to help him, except work his ass off in menial jobs that would never be enough to pay for his treatment. And he realized that his bank account was in the negatives and he couldn't buy more liquor to escape the pain of his everyday, torturous reminder that he was nothing in this world, and that if it wasn't for Tails, he would just leave this city and leave everything he had and start a new life somewhere far away and change his name and change his personality and maybe even change his appearance so all his loved ones could no longer recognize him as that hedgehog who threw away everything for a risky music career, but got nothing in the end.

He threw away the schnapps bottle in with his vomit. And he tried to keep himself from crying. He held himself as he sat on the coach, trying to focus on his sitcoms, but nothing was ever going to make him laugh, as long as he had this life, that he wished he could shed like a snake and have brand new fur and skin. The droning laughter rang in his head and began to taunt him, the police checking on him through the windows, the spiders that were flowing through the cracks of his apartment in black tiny spurts like blood, he wanted to end everything, and he wished he chewed his wrists a little bit more and killed himself right in that classroom and left the cold dead world and he would become cold and dead himself.

The world crackled like fire now. It burned and singed his fingers and his eyes. Feeling, he decried, feeling! Feeling the flames blackening and warping his body, he could feel the demons eating upon his flesh, the world of Hell living on his misery. He knew he wasn't crazy. He knew he was just a strange hedgehog but not a crazy hedgehog that heard things and got strange ideas about the world and had his mind bleeding once in a while in a river of madness, that led to Styx and the underworld of Hades.

He looked at his magazines. None of them were particularly interesting. He just collected old magazines on the streets for collages he did once in a while as a passing hobby. He always found magazines with a lot of flowers and furniture and old ladies smiling back at you warmly while doing their crocheting by the fire, magazines that he thought were simply women things but he couldn't waste it, as any magazine was a thousand opportunities to make a new collage art, but he only managed to cut out another woman and tear out her eyes with needles and glue them both on a piece of painted cardboard, called "Peer Pressure". He thought it was clever, but no one else seemed to care.

But flipping through one of the magazines in a drunken stupor, just wanting to gaze at more vivid colors than his TV that sometimes highlighted everyone with a bright green marker, he managed to find an advertisement that interested him. Something that just poked through his mind more than the needles in his collage piece.

MEN AND WOMEN WHO HAVE A PENCHANT FOR CREATIVITY AND AN ABUNDANT OVERFLOWING RIVER OF IDEAS WANTED!

If you think you fit the description…

Come to Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge!

Have people described you as the creative type? Artsy fartsy? An emotional quivering ball of emotions? And you like the arts, such as music, painting, fashion design, interior decorating and anything else that you think might tickle my fancy? Come to Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge for an interview, and we'll decide if you're creative enough to enter our team! We need several directors, one who truly knows what he/she is talking about, to design the lounge and the team's uniforms and even the music that is chosen to play in our speakers. Must be at least 18 or older, have a college degree or have entered college for a few years, good-looking (we're not going for drop dead gorgeous, but we're not exactly looking for someone who can't take care of their appearance either), good with people, and of course, has the same penchant for coffee like their penchant for creativity and the arts (because if you didn't like coffee at all, then what are you doing in a coffee shop, when the smell of coffee is always in the air and it makes you want to vomit day after day of entering our building while you have to listen to some stupid ass hipsters recite their lame and boring poetry? Then you wouldn't like this job, and trust me, we can't stand hiring someone who isn't going to like his job). If interested, just walk right in and ask for Mr. Shadow. Be forewarned, Mr. Shadow fully analyzes his clients and sees if they will truly be fit for the job, so don't come calling us on the phone and complaining you didn't get the job because Mr. So-and-So doesn't know jackshit about art. Well, did you know there might be other factors too? Maybe he's better with people than you. More good-looking. Smart. Polite. If you're considered for the job, Mr. Shadow will call YOU. Don't call us asking if you got it. Mr. Shadow will let you know. If you don't get anything, then enjoy your unemployment like the rest of 20% of America. If you don't want the recession to bite you in the ass and you aren't creative with a single damn thing, don't bother. Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge is located in West Hildegas Rd., near some other ma and pa shop that can't afford to keep in business. You know the ones. These monopolized American corporations like Starbucks is taking over, and maybe we're next, and that's why we need you. Apply today.

The advertisement didn't fit in at all with the rest of the magazine, with the flowers and the cutesy children treats and the smiling old ladies and the one secret to lose weight that all of America didn't want to tell you about, as if all skinny-thin women needed to eat more salads and run more miles.

A coffee shop that was actually hiring, who wasn't going to accept pretty girls and pretty boys who just came out of high school. And even if it didn't tell him how much the employee would get paid, he thought maybe it was a little more than a menial job. And all he had to do was make decisions and be creative! He could certainly do that! Even if his creativity was as dull as a brown-tinged razor that scraped and cut baby smooth skin like the asshole it was.

Sonic circled the advertisement in jagged, thick black lines with his Sharpie, and tried to remember the name in his drunken mind. Shadow Grounds Coffee House and Mocha Lounge…it sounded like a small-time coffee shop, like the many he saw around his city, but this one seemed to have more…character. More mystique hidden in its black Helvetica typefont.

They said if he entered a few years of college he could be qualified for the job. And he thought he was creative. People described him as good-looking. He was very good with people. Charming. Maybe this would be his dream job. Maybe working minimum wage at this place wouldn't be too bad. And he liked coffee too. Not enough to drink gallons of it like some people did, but he liked it enough to have a cup or two in the morning.

And he could start maybe as early as tomorrow.

And for the first time in a long while, he smiled big and wide. Even with all the schnapps and beer in his system who reminded him that he was constantly trying to get away from ache and misery.

He sloppily tore out the page, with long strands of it sticking out like jagged teeth, and pinned it to his wall with the chipped and decaying paint, as he sung what he thought would be his new hit song, and thought…maybe, Tails would soon be alive after all.

His happy smiling surrogate son who used to play so happily and joyously in the summer backyard, would return to his life again.

And maybe he could pay his debt too, and be a functional normal hedgehog. Maybe not with a hit song, but a paying job like the rest of America. And maybe he could even reenter college too, and pick his life back up, the fragile glass pieces that shattered a long time ago to make a beautiful, Mosaic art piece that the world would forever admire.

But his eyes gazed back at the quivering festering piece of bloodied flesh that was rotting away in the corner.

If only the demons that rested in the black hole of the corner of his apartment would stay where they were, their bare teeth flashing like knives, ready to eat and tear through his fragile little brain again.

He would have to keep them at bay. Maybe with alcohol. Maybe with the few pills of vicodin he kept in a little orange bottle in the cabinet.

Maybe God would look out for him, but even with all this pain staining his body, he wasn't so sure if he was keeping his eyes on him anymore. He was looking away, looking at all the pretty people, down below his apartment, gazing up at him, looking at all the horrific and disfigured hedgehogs.

He went downstairs to buy more alcohol. The night was too lonely without it.