The tiles were cold.
In the flicker of straying sunlight, the faint outline of a shirt, half-hung from the open washing machine, appeared to be alike some kind of misshapen beast crawling its way back from the abyss. It was pallid creature of crumpled skin and flannel texture, a voiceless horror without hand nor face: a lemure whose wretched existence was signally brought upon by my poor sense of garment care.
Morning, it was definitely morning.
The warble of a lawn mower heralded the sunrise and the mistakes of the night before had yet to rouse themselves from slumber. It was a time of foggy half-thoughts.
I had yet to notice that I slept in the laundry, and I had chosen to disregard both the pot plant lurking within the washbasin and the chest of draws underneath a running shower. This was a calm state of existence, a windmill laying down and dreaming of distant fields.
The momentum of my inner thought was now beginning to show some signs of life, but I was still yet to identify whatever had brought me to this moment.
‘Just a moment,’ a voice called out, muffled from every item of linen and clothing that I could currently remember, ‘I need to find which way is up. Did I miss the fireworks?’ The haggard voice continued through their cotton tomb. A wall of cushions and pillows had apparently collapsed under its own unreliable support and buried whatever occupant underneath, a wayward hand clutching at a bottle of cheap champagne the only evidence of survival. The hand momentarily attempted to unfurl itself but was quickly consigned to defeat: escape impossible, the bottle was slowly withdrawn back under a section of tea towels. The following quiet led me to believe that the buried friend had fallen back asleep, and this collected thought unfortunately opened the dam onto the valley of a hangover.
All too quickly the floor opened beneath my feet and vertigo flipped me sideward. What was once a distant rumble of a neighbour mowing their lawn became a klaxon of grating steal and vertigo dragged against the chalkboard of my own undoing. I glanced to the searing light of the LED clock of my oven and saw the time as a haze of unmistakeable lines.
06:00
I reached out, desperate to feel something other than my aching brain, jabbing at the plastic display and hoping to advance time to a more reasonable hour.
New Year’s Day and the future was all too bright before me. I let momentum carry myself further into the kitchen and gazed at the detritus of bottles that covered both bench and floor. Echoes of, ‘have you ever tried a rum and wine,’ formed two pieces of an unhelpful jigsaw as I attempted to complete the crossword of my night before. On my fight foot was a shoe without sock and my left bore a sock without shoe, my half readiness to go for a walk meant that I had become “let’s find a tree to climb” drunk.
06:00! That hateful hour blinking back at me, so in danger of ticking back to 5:59; I would have spit if my body was anything more than a dehydrated husk. It was warm, I felt as though the day was slowly pushing me down, kneading me flat upon the tiles and forcing me to acknowledge the repercussions of a moment happiness. It was if my soul were attempting to leap out from my face and run toward the coastline, a continual weight that unrelentingly increases until you can only curl into a ball and wish you had the strength to find a Berocca.
Oh, I had fallen asleep again
Opening my eyes to a second tiled floor, I once again admired how cool they felt against my face and wondered how I had found myself here. This floor was bumpier than the other, various breadcrumbs and the innards of party-poppers prickled and pecked as I rolled onto my back and the bottle that had been digging into the side was granted freedom to roll off toward the loungeroom. Nothing had improved, I glanced up toward the clock from my supine state and wondered what the hieroglyph of 07:22 meant. Looking up to the safety of a featureless roof I saw that someone had placed a tie around the kitchen light and I admired how formal it looked for a moment.
Whatever miracle of mudlarking that my memory was capable of had dawned upon the realisation that there were leftovers in the fridge–albeit the knowledge of what leftovers were was still yet to be uncovered.
I wabbled to my feet and the door before me opened with a tired hinge, a buffet of dead air then drizzled out from the humming box that I recognised to be a fridge. It was clean once, I thought to myself while scanning the remaining beers and half-eaten pasta salads: now looking to be as appetising as pond water after a bad day on the bins for an ibis.
Nothing!
Just a wilted lettuce and the hollow feeling of emptiness that was equally matched my own churning stomach. If only I could spare the moisture to cry.
Dejected and sunken into the mire of my own creation, I closed the fridge and walked out to my veranda. The air was crisp, and the eking morning was slowly lumbering into it beginning. Time was slow. From a nearby house, I could smell the sizzle of bacon, from another the zombified teenagers had managed to make it through the night: their electro still blearing out with an admittedly half-hearted lustre. I took a deep breath a waved at a passing jogger. With a smile and then the double-take of a frown, they ran directly into a bin and scurried off at more of a run than a jog, the purpose of fresh fear scrawled across their face.
Ah, yes.
Pants…
I should go back inside.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 