"Guilt Subletting Shame" - STORY JUMPSTART

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.