This is a two year old exercise for my creative writing class… I’ve got other stories in the works but here’s something for those interested.
Numbers
Circles around his purple eyes, his gaunt fingers dragging pink pills from a heap to organized rows. “375…376…377…” his voice trails in and out of my hollow head, and I can’t focus on the pills that are scattered before me. Paranoia floods my veins with an unwelcome adrenaline. My thoughts are of a SWAT team bashing the door down with rifles, to shout at us to lay face first on the carpet floor. Dogs follow, noses wet and drooping. Men take our pills away; they sweep our handiwork into large plastic bags labeled evidence. I shake the thoughts away; they dissipate easily in my hollow head. I can’t focus. The piles and piles of bright pink pills of sensual goddesses stamped on their tops left me with nothing to hope for.
Our dingy apartment, bare rooms and carpeted hallways that were brand new but we already knew it wouldn’t last. Already we were sitting in a bubble of hashish smoke, hazy and unbroken for as long as we would stay collected at this lonely piece of furniture.
“I don’t know man…” cotton mouth left my voice parched.
“402…403…404” he kept counting, eyes lusting for the nude women stamped on the pills. I began once more, “Are you listening to me? Why do you need so many fucking pills? If you were to ever get caught up…”
Numbers trail in “415…416…417…418…” and out “419…420…421…” of my fragmented skull. I slap his bony hand away from the faded brown table we had found at a garage sale. He screams at me, dissonance escaping his cavernous lungs, “Christ! What the fuck’s your issue?”
I hastily try to defend myself, when I thought I was the accuser, “You spent what? A grand on this shit?”
Trevor stares back at me, not hearing a word that stumbles out of my mouth, “Are you going to explain yourself?”
I begin speaking as calm as possible, “I don’t want a part in this man, I can’t… I won’t help you sell all this. No money co-” But Trevor interrupts, “I never asked you to sell it, dumb fuck.”
“They’ll have your head if they catch you…” I spit.
My words file past him and his only response infuriates me, “Finish counting, that’s all you have to worry about.” My limbs feel tethered, they don’t move so much as tremble. I finally begin again, “132…133…134…” his voice trailing in and out, “486…487…488…” of my own numbers, “143…144…145…” We sort them into tiny rows, our lives dictated by numbers.
Trevor had smiled a few days ago; it had crept across his mouth and had left in a fleeting moment. I had come to know it as his gambler’s grin, but no one would ever know. His teeth were still white; he had bought all those products, those bleaches that dye your teeth back to natural white. Perfect teeth, girls believed his promises. Now here he was, counting, fulfilling those promises, gambling with his charms. Maybe that’s why I followed him so much, even when his world revolved around the wrong set of numbers.
Copywrite 2009 Michael Villo
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