Over Again
The air is too cold and sharp, covering over a brittle, pale sky that's ready to let itself slide down into night. He hunches farther into a jacket that makes him feel too small for it, and he would get a new one, but he might as well wait until this one wears out anyway. Bags rustle against his thigh as the thin plastic catches some flutter of wind.
Out of the two proper grocery stores in this town, one of them has the self-checkout mechanism he can't quite bother to learn, and the other is well-stocked with employees that won't let him carry his own bags. So when he stares into the refrigerator and the refrigerator stares back into him, he goes to that dingy little store to collect an odd basket of whatever he's missing. And somehow, he always comes back with more food than he'll eat alone in two weeks. They don't have the eggs anymore since they downsized, but there's canned spaghetti and chocolate bars and those cup-noodle things that he eats awkwardly with a fork.
Better than all that, they have the cigarettes, the right brand and everything, which is getting harder to find these days. The idiot checker that likes to rib him about his lung health makes him almost wish he'd suck it up and go to one of the real grocery stores, but then he gets to sneer back, at least I don't work in a convenience store you bastard, and everything is equal. Well, it was until they replaced that guy with a polite, elderly lady. Much better. Yeah.
No one really consistently nags him about his nutrition, which is well enough, since he can't imagine himself as anything other than that rough-tendoned skeleton that looks at him in the mirror. Once in a while girls would say something about it, though. He'd had a girlfriend once--
Well. To be fair, he'd had more than one girlfriend. Not that he ever puts any effort into attracting anyone, but somehow being an off-putting bastard keeps a steady stream of people interested in him anyway. Having a girl look at him with her soft, soft eyes makes him feel hungry and lost right down to his gut, so he would live through the touching and more of the touching, until that one night she would say something that touched him deep, angling arrow-sharp between his ribs and stirring the deep black pool of things inside himself he didn't understand. The whole thing always ended messy-quick after that.
Ah. But that one girl, she'd lasted a little longer than usual. She had a little kid from a previous whatever, and if anyone asked why there were three scrawled drawings in that drawer beneath his socks, that's what he would tell them. Except he wouldn't, because he wouldn't ever let anyone find that, not even the soft, soft girls.
Maybe, though, he might show his old high school buddy, after they'd both gotten roaring drunk, or even just convincingly drunk on his buddy's side, so that he could drag out those damn drawings that are colored all in highlighter fluorescence, and blame it on the drink. If he knew where that asshole was. There was some idiot rumor about where the guy had gone off to, but it was more likely that he was just too lazy to keep in touch.
It's getting too dark. He clenches the steering wheel, bitingly cold, and he jams his elbow against the broken door handle he'll fix one day. Some guy in a minivan is in a hurry about something, and he can only dig up a half-hearted snarl when the guy gets too close to him and his bumper. Soon enough, it's just two lanes, and then one, and then the stretch of road. Over the rise is a hanging stop light that flares red, off on off on casting its color faintly onto the roof of his house. He once got a perverse pleasure out of the fact that it was perched out there, a signal that there wasn't any more civilization for a long way, and he was the one at the end of everything.
But now, he barely lifts his head to look at it, because he knows what it'll do. It'll just repeat itself at him.
Over and over again.
A/N:
Defafaeth Mechqua, Broken Reflection, xeledhwenx: Aww, thank youu all! I'm glad you liked that one!
treneka: squeeeak I love your writing, so getting a review from you is like.. grin Yes. Thank you! I'm happy you enjoyed it.