Guilt Subletting Shame
By Sean Garland
He hears a metallic ping. The
sound of a bottle cap spinning around on his living room floor abruptly wakes
him up from another hazy dream. The loud
noise rings in his ears along with the unpleasant screeching voice of a drunken
woman being too obnoxious for her own good. She should know her place, he
thought, she should know that her presence is unwanted. He wakes up regretfully
dreading the day when he allowed such trash into his home.
He thumps his long legs out of
bed and causes the floor and walls of his room to shudder. A bunch of dust
bunnies scatter along the hardwood floor in fright. He pretends he is a creature,
rising from sleeping through winter with disdain for what frost lurks down the
cold walls of the hallway. The creature has been stirred into a test of its
patience and a test of its might, but this creature would put up a fight. After
all, these people had somehow crawled into his living space as if through a hole in the wall or a crack in the floor.
He threw on some layers to have a larger impression before opening his door to
the shouting of the troubling couple.
He staggers out towards the coffee
pot and sees the lateness of the afternoon. The voices continue to disturb him.
From down the hall, she sounds like they were hanging outside of the creature’s
bedroom. The woman’s screeching, drunkenly and aggressively shouting and trying
to woo the other voice of the stranger, the man who convinced the creature to
sublet the spare bedroom. The stranger had been nested within the creature’s
walls for weeks, having agreed to fly the coop come the end of summer. The
stranger had caused creature’s suspicion, having been in a relationship with a
woman in the earliest of her twenties who already came bearing the
responsibilities of a child. While there had been no signs of the infestation,
which had been creature’s main worry, this woman was a pest.
The creature tried to ignore
their rambunctiousness from down the corridor and mind his own business; the
first of which was preparing some grub. He burrowed through the kitchen
cupboards and pulled out the frying pan, a cutting board and set them down on
the counter. The woman cackles and the creature waits for his anger to subdue
before withdrawing a knife and beginning to prepare.
While the breakfast heated on the
pan and waited to be eaten, the creature was back within its room collecting
dust. He did not hear the soft but thundering footsteps of the woman as she
approached his bedroom door while heading for the washroom, but once he had
turned holding his vacuum of dirt she was staring at him, sweetly.
“Hi Janis,” says a somewhat attractive blonde
in her mid-twenties carrying a subtle bent look in her eyes. Janis wonders how she knows his name and who
she is while pouring his eggs into a bowl. She then whispers softly behind him,
“Smells good,” as if her soft words stroke against his cheek. He turned
abruptly and asks for her name. She seemed familiar, but did not sound similar
to the other woman with child, not even close. She seems close to the stranger
and enough to cause his heart to skip a beat.
Janis hears them fucking from
behind closed doors. She sounds like an animal, wildly wanting to be ravished
and raped. Janis thinks about the stranger, how he had disguised himself as a good
shepherd only to be the devil himself, filling the place with sin. Eventually,
the stranger gives the animal a ride back into the wilderness. Returning to the
apartment sometime later, the stranger’s heavy footsteps carry metallic pings
while moving up the steps of the metal staircase to the porch where Janis stood
smoking.
“Oh, shame,” the stranger carried
with him the weight of an invisible burden, “Shame and guilt. That’s all I feel
right now.” Janis offers the stranger a smoke while the man confesses his sins
and reveals his scars. The animal had scratched up the stranger, as if clawing
away at the facade of a decent human being, revealing the two-faced beast who feeds
decent people petty bullshit. The stranger, desperate for common ground, asks
Janis, “Have you ever cheated on someone before?”
“Yes,” the creature admits, before
returning to his cave and hibernating.
