A Crossing of Man and the Gods

Chapter 1: Town of Skeletons

Chapter 1: Town of Skeletons

It's hot today. Too hot for early April, at about 75 degrees (Fahrenheit.) Well, no so much hot as it is humid and mucky. The air sticking to your skin like a thin layer of Vaseline. The sun poured its bright light all over the town of framework and rubble. Collapsed and uninhabitable buildings, ones in the process of being built crowded the streets that packed a punch to anyone who stops and thinks of what the future did to the past. Not one building rattier than the next (thank whatever God was involved in that miracle.) For a town that was in the process of being modernized, this is still a rancid hell hole. Litter was more prevalent than grass, and this place has a population composed of scumbag after scumbag after asshole scumbag. Drug dealers and their worshipping addicts, pimps and their loyal whores. Everyone in this town has some skeletons in the closet, some more deformed than others.

I'm happy to say the worst thing I've ever done is tune school completely out, and call my step-father a cock-munch once or twice. In comparison to the general track record for people who call this place home, my history is spotless. No drugs, no STDs, no alcohol, no stealing, nothing. I am essentially a patrician among these parts, a nobleman. I just need to become rich, famous, and popular, and I’ll start my own aristocracy.

I work at Boyd's Produce, one of the many run down mom and pop stores that infested this town like cockroaches in an apartment in Detroit. You know the place. Well, probably not specifically, but it's that mom and pop store you go to when you're too pressed for time to go to a store that sells quality products. That store where you're just about positive they're paying off the health inspector, but until they admit to it, it doesn't concern you all too much. Poor lighting that flickers at random intervals, dingy concrete floors, a low ceiling scarred by water damage. That is my place of employment.

As it has been for the last three years.

This is where you picture an angst filled 19 year old sighing in his beat up faded navy blue Suburban, with the air conditioner blowing in his face. He’s got short bottle black hair, a nose ring, lip ring, and a couple scattered tattoos. With the dark gray puddled under his bright hazel eyes, you're not sure if he's wearing eyeliner or not, but he probably is. He's got on a black band shirt with whatever was printed on it has faded and hardly resembles what it used to. Torn dark blue skinny jeans and ugly beat up sneakers.

Got all that?

Good, because that guy is me. I happen to be sitting in my car, waiting for my clock to tell me it's 8:20 am and I need to be in there, in my uniform (also known as an ugly maroon smock, itchy khakis, and a forest green polo), and working. It is hot out today and this god-forsaken building that -of course, has no AC. Boss can spend money on meth (the good stuff, I've seen him wired), but he can't spare a little money for at least a fan. After all that sexual harassment you figure he'd try and make good with me by giving in to at least one of my (many) complaints.

8:16 am

It doesn't really matter very much; I'll just hang out in the freezer section and pretend to be stocking up or something. It's not like I'd jump at the opportunity to work the register. I'm sick of idiots that are coming down from a couple day high spilling something on me, or the area I have to work at for the remainder of the day. When I said this town is full of druggies, I meant it. Everyone I know is on something; glass, coke, PCP, Heroin.

Vices left virtues in the dust.

Mood; Sad, lonely, upset, empty. It dawns upon me this is just going to be another day I spend alone, eat alone, watch TV alone, and sleep alone. I want to do something. This purgatory will be the death of me. I'm caught in a whirlwind of absolutely nothing. Soul crushing blankness and I can't escape. I can't make friends; they're all addicted to drugs. They'd probably sell me for an eight ball, and if they were a loyal friend, well you know. My luck dictates they'd die the minute I became attached to them, or the second I decided they were someone I wanted to have in my life. Maybe I'd get sucked into the drugs, too.