An Immovable Lease

It was bright in the city that day. Fleecy white clouds drifted lazily above the tallest buildings, and below pebbles skirted in the street as rivulets of people trickled through.
I was content, even eager to enter this quiet scene, and with meager funds I was relieved to find a nice apartment. Three cats, scraping meat dried to cans, peered quizzically at me as I mounted the stairs of creaking wood. Inspecting my new abode from my balcony, I found few living creatures who strode the broken roads.
I was satisfied.
It was a lie, I knew, this serenity, but it was one I could live with. Deserted by its inhabitants, this city was a dwelling-place for the dead, a harvest of locust-eaten crops.
The city was falling about my ears. The paint flaked off in my hands, floors rumbled threateningly in my wake, and all I could see was a desolate wasteland with its pitiful survivors meandering aimlessly in dried arteries.
Soon, a drenching, desolate wasteland. For rain poured from a heaven that suddenly closed in menacing dark clouds, like steely vengeance, like relentless death, filling the old city’s veins with new poisonous fluids.
I was repeatedly pierced, but did not die. I had come here to lick my wounds, as they say, reassemble my broken parts in private. Here no one I knew could look at me, sneer at me, judge me, or help me.
A woman, with a face drooping with age, the living embodiment of my defeated surroundings, rented the place to me, and we agreed to be friends, meaning mutually tolerating of our defects; hers, being old and having no future, and mine, being young and having no past.
There were other, trivial differences, some abrading nerves beyond endurance until I believed one of us must go, I understandably succumbing to insanity, or she to a convenient heart attack.
But we were companions, for better or worse, with a need that was more powerful marriage vows and sexual urgency.
And all the while the rain fell, but the city endured. Yes, my haven of cracked mud, my paradise of drought and past disaster.
“Do you like it here?” the query was querulous and random, initiated to fill the silence.
“Am I enjoying my stay in Hell? No, not particularly.”
“Clearly you are a very young man who knows nothing of proper etiquette. The correct answer would have been—”
“That I love this elegant, spacious rooms?” I swept my arm in a derisive arc. “That I cherish the breathtaking view afforded by this gracious balcony? That I do not see—”
“All right, very well. No need to go off into some ranting monologue.”
I calmed. “Regretfully, the urge to be polite has never been strong in me. The virtues appear to have fled, leaving vice as consolation.”
“If you do not like it, you can leave, you know. There is nothing holding you here.”
“My wallet, devoid of anything save outdated general invitations to gentlemen clubs, says otherwise. Where can I go? How?”
The old woman fumbled in her faded skirts, her wrinkled brown fingers trembling like blind worms digging in the earth.
“My medication,” she mumbled. “I need—”
“I have it,” I said. “I am always here.”

posted - 6:59 PM