A Nervous Man of Erratic Disposition

A nervous man of erratic disposition fumbled with his lighter as he attempted to smoke an unlit cigarette. Exhaling tersely, the heady waft of dry tobacco made his breath feel stale and his morning ahead feel all the more hopeless.

This was a man of short movements, a man that held a consideration for the world around him in a way that proved dangerous for any glass of water within arms reach. His rabbit-hearted pulse marched triple-time with the second hand of his watch as he checked it and then dropped his bronze lighter into the gutter, swearing in a wayward swipe as the lighter fell and set fire to the dried leaves that had escaped the previous night’s street sweeping.

‘Bugger,’ he spat, now dropping his cigarette and stamping his shoe down upon the smoldering leaf litter below, ‘double darn and drat, can the street sweepers never do their job?’ his embarrassment needing outlet, it fell to those unseen to take the onus for this small fire now quelled under his expensive boot. Giving up on fully extinguishing the fire, the man plucked up his lighter and shook the lid closed, almost throwing it into the gutter a second time.
Thrusting it into his pocket and feeling it radiate a warmth against his leg, the man stooped down to pick up his cigarette and ignite it upon the leaf fire that he had created. ‘Bad day, bad day,’ the man repeated to himself as he resumed his waiting for the pedestrian crossing and watched a small panicked looking man pour his coffee over the burning leaves, rambling something nonsensical about people needing to be more careful.

Tick, Tick, Beoop, pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.

Exploding into a flash of green and noise, the crossing changed and permitted the by-standing pedestrians to hurry up and get across the road, lest the signal tower call for the idle cars to spring to life and run them down.
Striding across the crumbling bitumen, the man grew out of breath and felt a rush of blood from taking off too quickly. Everything was a blur of movement, car’s turn signals clicked and clacked falling further out of rhythm as time progressed, a gym window across the street reverberated against the concussive sounds of falling weights and low structured drum and bass electronica; these noises and movements, the man would sometimes pause and take notice of them as he shuffled through his day. It annoyed him when he did notice these distractions, time, for him, was a tunnel of singular direction and all these extra othernesses just wasted his focus.

Checking his watch again, as he had failed to take notice of the time on last inspection, the man tripped up the adjacent gutter and bundled into a lamppost. One of those days, he thought, one of the days that paper clacked into the following like every other day living in the Polis: a series of little things, little hurdles, all aligned like a corrugated slippery dip and running adjacent to every direction one could take to get ahead.

Detaching himself from the lamp post and looking around to see where he had, once again, thrown his cigarette, the man gave up on smoking and paced up High st, stalking like the amalgamation of a wounded vulture and a meerkat.

Looking at the concierge and ignoring her acknowledgment of it being morning, the man continued walking and wordlessly pressed the button for the elevator.
The lobby to his workplace was an odious type of Art Deco: over-ferned and distressingly marbled for what was just the facade of a soulless office block. There were cubicles, there were water coolers, there was no reason that this lobby should be torn out of the Great Gatsby and smeared with an oil-like sheen to avoid copyright. Glowering at a languid fern, the man sharpy jabbed at the lift button again and accidentally pressed the down call, delaying his trip and adding just one more of those little hurdles to his day.
Clunking and whining, the lift motor kicked into life and began its descent to the ground floor, rumbling as it passed each floor. The man’s desk was quite close to the lift’s doors and, although it was quite a pleasing feeling to step from his desk to the lobby, the sudden bellow of compressed air and clanging metal seemed to always interrupt his work flow just as it was beginning to get efficient.

The doors opened to the basement and to the face of an embarrassed smile who stood to the side and allowed space for the man to pass. This wasn’t his floor, he knew it wasn’t his floor, he also was aware that he didn’t have the access card to call for the lift again should he alight on this level, but seeing the kind face of the person grow confused, the man stepped out of the elevator and, despite every twisted coil of his personality, he managed to mutter, ‘thank you, good morning.’

An emotionless voice chirping going up and the solemn sound of two doors closing behind him, followed the feeling of the nervous man of erratic disposition deciding to have another go at smoking.
And so with hurdles unseen and within a small room of abundant smoke detectors this man shall be left for now. For the dampness of an overly sensitive sprinkler head and the composition of still water in rusted pipes is not worth regarding currently.

-Farewell.

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J.McCray
2021