"Almost Green"

"I'm Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill"

How long has it been?

A good couple of months. Give or take, more or less. Mind like Lateran cheese, full of holes and ravines, can’t even trust himself most of the time. Strands of it clung together like web to a slipper leaf bathed in the morning dew, blah, blah, all that. 

Life felt like a constantly repeating roll of a black and white film being played at an empty drive-in theater. There he sat, all alone in his van, in the very middle of the parking lot, staring out at the big screen and watching the gray days blending into one incoherent pile of colorless slop. Ghosts poured from the sides, passing by as he traversed the empty streets, sailed the concrete ocean of Lungmen’s brutal infrastructure with a blank expression staining his face - ghosts of concerned colleagues and friends. Blonde, black, apricot, and sometimes crimson. The crimson ghost made attempts to brush past and approach this faceless sailor more often than it did before, with varying results. It’d invite him into its lair after long workdays of running empty packages across the mountains of glass and lights, dead set on “repaying” for a fault once committed, twice repeated. Buried in open pizza boxes and cheap Yanese noodles, they’d sit there, the sailor and the ghost, staring with empty eyes at the TV, rewatching Lungmen’s most tacky action flicks for the fifteenth time. The ghost would listen to the sailor’s stories of war, of raging seas, repeated again and again - anything to keep him talking, to keep him saying anything, just speaking words. Words she, the ghost, could use to justify her actions and slap away the hounds biting at her conscience. After all, if he hated her, he wouldn’t have sat there all those nights, would he?

Andy blinked. Somewhat synchronized, the countless chandeliers above his head blinked along, wavering in their only task. Darkness poured from the overly grandiose windows that protected the library’s exterior from any unwanted homeless ori-fiends, as the slums had no fancy lights to keep the streets nice and safe. He found himself at home, sitting not in his usual spot, the leather office chair that sometimes made him feel like a king claiming a grand throne, other times shielding his crying face from the world, but on top of his desk. Legs crossed, he couldn’t even remember how he got there. A full day of running deliveries for Duflot’s union in exchange for barely enough money to pay off the electricity bills had him in a tight chokehold, quite literally beating the memories of that day right out of his head. 

His head. His weary, heavy head. 

His hair’s grown long again, but he hasn’t even noticed. Too busy watching the camera that span around his life’s film roll over its metal claws to even notice his own deplorable condition. A gentle, yet slightly annoyed sigh arose from behind, as a pair of fleshy tweezers dug into those gray curls at the back of his head. His spine sent a wave of shivers all the way up to his brain, before his body managed to find some familiarity in the careful touches of those fingers running across his hair. They weren’t foreign to him, not at all.

“... Y’know, baws, ya should really invest in a pair ‘a scissors. ‘An tha’s comin’ from me.” A roughly pleasant voice soon followed. A millisecond was all it took for him to connect the dots and assign a friendly face to the bodiless sound. Miss pastry girl, staying after hours once more. 

Why? He had no idea. But he was so glad she did.

“Yeah, I know.” Andy muttered and allowed himself to lean back a little. His shoulder blades pressed softly against the girl’s chest, as if hesitant to push any further. The two of them were, after all, strictly bound by nothing but a contract and a professional work setting. Of course they were. “Just haven’t had the time. Just all these… these damn boxes.” His half lidded eyes scanned the room, picking out each pile of cardboard mountains scattered over the place. They tumbled over one another, reaching as far as the mighty chandeliers hanging by the ceiling, all threatening to fall over and bury the two underneath their weight. What even lurked beneath the paper, he did not know. Duflot made himself clear, “no opening boxes, Andy! Those are our clients’ worries, not ours.”