Underthehoodofcarsthatmakenoiseslikethecheetahwho runs not quite fast enough

It’s a good life if you don’t weaken. Let’s be honest here. I hate to sound solipsistic, but I think they’re out to get me. “They” being no one at all.
I wanted to leave the quaint surroundings I’d inhabited for so long. Josephine had left again, and I was alone. Calls had been coming in from all the streets of the cities where we’d been up and high. People who wanted something would call to complain about their lives hoping I’d get the hint and offer all I had to quell the calls and get some rest. I didn’t offer. I sat in my solitude and listened in the dark. I wasn’t actually listening, but wondering where Josephine was, and if she was still alive.
The calls didn’t stop, and I knew that if she were to make contact, she wouldn’t call; she’d show up.
For six months I waited in an unpaid apartment, and all I really did was wait. I had a big bag, but it was gone by the end of the second month. Food became scarce, but I managed on gifts from the various saints that knew my affliction and sent their minions to me at my door bearing gifts of cold soup and stale bread.
It’s amazing really, eating off the plates of the rude rich. They see their immense backyards and expect that to extend the whole of the world over. This was no one’s backyard though. No gold trickled through these troughs, and no human being was human here. Instead, the Indian cattle roamed the street, the only ones out after dark, peddling cheap momentary decorations and claiming that only theirs won you back the soul you traded to be treading circles in empty, scattered apartments.
Jos didn’t come back to ours. By the time I was discovered, my emaciated body was asunder beneath my mattress trying to keep warm, a phone beside my ear listening to a scag bearer who’s Last Temptation had come and absolutely needed some one to talk at. When asked who I was, I could move my jaw, but not my vocal cords to speak. Two well fed police officers looked at each other and tossed me in the back of an ambulance to suck at the bare coffers of the health system.
Josephine heard about my health and made attempts to see me without exposing herself. Once as my old high school friend, once as my landlord; clever guises.
I laid there, struggling to breathe, balding, jutting and gasping through painful conversations as to how I was treated here and who my next of kin was should I die.
I didn’t die. In a fortnight I was released, and my absolutely desolate craving for a big bag laid down on me hard. A big bag isn’t easy to find on streets like these. Empty eyes are on every corner but approach is a tense subject when you dry yourself out with cigarettes and a forty.
One knew me. He slapped me on the back and instead of responding, I simply gasped hard and kept walking. He slapped me the next day, but not after that. He learned. He learned not to bring his cheap addiction near mine. We were separate and we were in competition for our souls here, not a cheap commodity, that.
During those four days, I crawled from one shelter to another. Some roofs leaked, while others held firm beneath a cold moon and rich lights of city banks miles above me. Busses and cars whizzed along their trajectories, and out of every corner at the very bottom crawled another wonderful creature unrecognizable from those miles up.
None of them was Josephine, but I took solace in that I knew she was not watching from above me.
Old Ren drank bleach and died. When I heard about him, I went to Old Ren’s best friend and sought some type of nicety like that. I was in the market for cost effective creativity.
Noel Rado was a perfect target for this creativity. I couldn’t see what his full tattoo said beneath his stained undershirt, but “THEC” stood out, and I made out an A on his left pectoral.
I spoke to him briefly in the context of our mutual understandings. Above us both, outside, a spotlight crossed the sky, and darted back against the towering structures beside it. Money passed through the air, and with the right gloves, you could catch the invisible waves carrying it. Meanwhile, a mile below, the worst scrapped for the pennies dropped in the sidewalk cracks, and upended themselves to intoxication.
Noel laughed as I stretched my bony hand out to him. The crumpled paper in my palm hit the plywood table, and I felt the Cup of Trembling topple when it hit. Noel dug briskly through a small wooden box and buried it once again in his metal case.
From it he’d removed the capsule that was to be my final swallow. The last bit of air outside seemed wonderful for being free. I walked for seven blocks and reached the apartment wherein I used to wait.
Inside, I could see Jos, naked and writhing on some poor man who’d come to replace me. I could hear her fake moaning and crept up the stairs.
She gradually got louder until she screamed that she was coming, and I opened the door. Neither one stopped. Two big bags drifted across the floor and I stepped into the bathroom, stared in the mirror and chewed the capsule. As I fainted into the screen, I noticed the blood across the floor, and realized that it was in fact blood I’d lost in the wait.
Gradually, the whole apartment filled with blood, and the ceilings began dripping a foul yellow liquid, and the drapes were made of hair, and the lamps were shining colors of all intensities. The walls drained slowly, and out the window, behind the great watchtowers, a kite flew across the sky into the hydrolines.
I watched them finish fucking and decided to die.