The Alcoholic

A man stumbles down the street at dusk. He sat down on the bins outside the back door of a luxury restaurant. He smells the flavours of the pastries that the head chef is preparing; they are getting ready for dinner. It makes him terribly hungry and the pains gnaw at him, but the great thirst must be quenched first.

"Here I am now sitting on the trash cans in the alley. They call me the king, King Alkie. I'm not drunk!" he waves his hand lazily in the air, "I only drink about two sips a day," he teases.

"What's wrong with that, I can stand my ground. Years ago I was, the man," he says very despondently and it hurts his ego quite a lot. His sense of self-worth is still in him.

He looked up at the blue-blue sky above. The sun will soon set and the blue of the sky will slowly disappear around him. He looked down and shook his head.

"I am suffering, but I am thirsty. The pain in my stomach is great, but I am thirsty! I'm crying out for help, don't you hear me?" his voice echoed through the air.

A few minutes of silence pass. He come early in the morning thinking that the restaurant people would help him, but not even he would eat the rotten fish from two days back expiring dates.

"Cursed are you all!" he shouted out with a flabby hand in the air. Tears began to roll down his wrinkled cheeks and he was shaking terribly.

Alkie just sits in silence, ... on the trash among all the trash. No one looks for him, no one thinks of him, he is thrown away. Then the night fell swiftly and suddenly around him. The alley is getting dark, the sun is gone. It is only his sobs audible in the dark silence.

His hands are dirty, his nails pitch black and long and he stinks rotten. His breath that he exhales is full of years old yeast and his teeth is brown when he gets that mysterious smile.

The restaurant's night light by the back door suddenly turns on and he is startled. He hears the rich with their luxurious shiny cars parked in the parking area.

"They come to eat and drink to their mouths full before they go to bed." Alkie grinned at himself.

He wipes the tears with his sleeve and begins to laugh out loud of necessity. He laughs so loudly and ga-ga that the spit is spatter out of his mouth. He gets fits of laughter for all his friends and family who just left him.

"It's your fault that I'm sitting here, not my own fault!" he gestured with his hand to the invisible people in front of him.

"Make way for me!" he barks at no one in front of him.

One moment he feels sorry for himself and then in advance he will accuse everyone again!

A dog barks far into the night and two drab street pigeons come to lie in their second-hand nest in the loin gutter on the roof just above Alkie's head.

"But whose fault is it that I look like this?" he asked spitting. He mumbles a few more words, but everything in front of him becomes a blur. Now he's getting dizzy, because his stomach is empty and the yeast building up inside makes him feel sick and he almost stumbles backwards.

"I'm apparently drunk, my friends," he gestured with both hands and told his invisible friends again.

His body swings left and then right, he loses his balance on the dented trash can.

"Kap slaps!" he tumbles off the trash can! Like a big bag of cement and with a dead fall he lands face first on the ground. It must have hurt, but he can't feel anything, he's really drunk. Without him asking for it, his upper lip began to bleed. His face was so swollen from all the drinking that the skin was thin. The circles under his eyes are already yellow, because his kidneys are rock hard from all the drinking.