• Currently reading: The Shining – Stephen King
• Currently listening to: Mania – Fallout Boy
• Currently watching: The OA

Just a little section of something I’m working on between the short stories and poetry. Feel free to let me know what you think but be warned this has not been subjected to the 4 stage editing I am installing in my work at present. It’s more of a ‘Grammarly says its fine’ kind of job.

His hollow eyes stared out into the nothingness from their grey prison on thin and blistered skin. Every breath softly growling through bile and phlegm like an almost inaudible scream of a soul full of regret, drowning in pitiful agony and his own bodily fluids. The trembling muscle spasms had finally stopped racking his bones and he didn’t need to be able to move his head to see that the black patches of dead flesh that had blossomed from the needle marks, old and new, had all but covered his fragile body. Death was close; the smell of its imminent arrival haunted the air around his bed, and he longed for it. Finally, he would be free from the wrong choices that were made, the dark paths he’d chosen that had led him here and eaten him alive. Despite the state of this man, his surroundings were immaculate. Piercing white and brushed stainless steel, as sterile to the eyes as it was to the touch. In the weeks leading to this moment, he had been thankful for being plucked out of the mud and filth with promises of comfort and warmth. He believed it would be his second chance at life, a chance to get back into the city, find a job and maybe he could settle down and have the life he didn’t think he’d ever want. Now though, he was cold to his core and swaddled only in only hindsight and a thin hospital sheet. The realisation that he wasn’t going to be getting better, that they didn’t want to get him back on his feet, had washed over him like leaves in a flooded gutter. They had their own agenda and it was shrouded in lies and faux promises.  This wasn’t a real hospital. Its white-clad and masked doctors weren’t bothered by their patients’ pain or his proximity to death, instead, they delicately tended recording equipment in total silence. A microphone was repositioned by his gaping mouth. A camera at the head of his bed whirred as it adjusted until his gaunt face filled its grainy frame. Ominously waiting like a black and silver mantis to capture every moment of his passing. Those moments arrived and like a neglected car whose parts fail almost simultaneously, once it began it was over in a few sputtering heartbeats. Despite his acceptance his body still fought a weak battle against the shadow of death, his bone like fingers clawing at his sheet, lungs convulsing to draw just another breath. Three minor spasms set his nerves alight, their burning demise making the air forcefully rush from his lungs encased within bubbles of black stale blood. Dry, unseeing eyes became eerily still and with the final rasp of the last of his breath came the almost inaudible words;

“Sun, on a tin roof.”

The doctors switched the camera off. They didn’t offer him any dignity by pulling up the sheet as you would see in all the films. The doctors simply and meticulously packed up around him. A man in black overalls arrived later that evening to wheel the trolley bed and its deceased passenger down the narrow corridor towards the furnace room.

L.S.Black 2019