News At 11

He sits in the dark, a horizon of light protruding from the television; his face a white wall. A room temperature TV dinner sits on the tray in front of him and his glass of soda is flat. The chef’s knife, among his other cutlery, is an average size and innocuous; sharpened well enough to cut through the tough, rubbery meal in front of him. Headlines flash across the screen while he sinks into his chair and drools.

“Thirty dead in Brussels terrorist attack”

“Trade war escalates with increased sanctions”

“Fallout of school shooting; shooter claims insanity”

“Dozens dead as protest descends into chaos”

“More at 11:00PM, only on Channel 9 News!”

His mouth gapes, yellow teeth exposed in the light of the perpetual news cycle. Words had been lost long before this late night recap. Now, only groans exude from the wretched wall of white that sits in a depressed leather seat. The chair’s cushion is flat and its arms are down, where the thing lays his unkempt hands.

The white light fades to black, transitionally; but the sickly pale remains on his face. He sways his weight in order to stand; his erect form a crescent moon with scrawny legs. Then, he takes his dinner and drink into the kitchen: the crinkles of a stationed paper army attempt to drown out the television as he steps on newspapers and fast food wrappers cast aside in the presence of an already existing mound in his garbage can. After he puts his meal and cutlery on the counter, he notices ants crawling in and out of the sink on their single-minded cycle. Upon seeing how the ants operate, he takes in his surroundings and stomps about his kitchen, swearing, and causing the dishes in his sink to emit a porcelain cacophony that is sure to scare his roaches away. After nearly slipping on a wrapper amidst his disgust, he shifts his attention to the trash blanketing his floor and filling his home with a putrid stench akin to dead bodies. Using his newfound consciousness, he finally acts and presses down on the mound of garbage in the can; wriggling the bag’s uneven, weighted form out in jagged, destructive motions. After he ties it and slings the bag over his shoulder, the corner of a hardcover textbook stabs him through the bag and sends a sharp pain through his bent back. He curses in a growled, animal manner and his hunch worsens from the altercation. The media prisoner starts his yard time as he walks to his front door, opens it, and steps into the refreshing, windy kiss of his hometown’s September weather. When he looks up, the stars resemble individual sparkles on an expansive black glass.

With a sigh, he steps from his porch and makes the familiar round to his trash can, the textbook edge digging into his back again with every other step, and slings the large bag into the empty can. His actions are backed by the sound of a natural symphony, fronted by horny insects and the work of Aeolus kissing the oak leaves around him.

Turning his back to the can, he pulls a cigarette from his right pocket. He takes the lighter in his back pocket and lights the cigarette, puffing the smoke into the tranquil night air. He puffs until the ash singes his hand and he reacts to the stimulation. Once he retrieves the butt, he crumples it into an uneven half; observing the imperfect angle of his work in the radiance of his shed’s dim motion sensor light. After the proudness of his work evaporates, he sighs again. The man, resembling a deciduous tree amidst a blizzard, walks back to his porch. The grass is an unkempt wheat field, except for where his boot prints have left marks in the ground.

At the top of the stairs, he takes one final look at his cigarette butt and flicks his art project into an ashtray on his porch railing. That butt bounces off the previous entries to his gallery, landing into a sea of forgotten artistry at his top step; whose middle section is faded while the rest is still the beautiful chocolate color it was when he had the steps put in.

A car’s headlights illuminate the entrance to his house as he pushes the black, plastic handle of his screen door and lets himself onto his porch. The headlights shut off in the driveway next to his.

He slugs his way back into the radiation wasteland and makes his way to the kitchen. He observes the ants still marching on his countertop and how they have turned their attention to the knife and his cold dinner. He grabs the handle to place the knife into his sink but is interrupted by a series of feeble, but persistent knocks on his door.

“Damon,” an elderly voice yells, “I need to speak with you, sweetie!”

As the pounding on the door fills his head, he releases his grip on the knife and sludges out the way he came in. When he steps out onto his porch, he sees a round, short woman wearing vibrant, mismatching colors. She sees him, too.

“Hello, Mrs. Baranowski,” Damon said, his hunch and unwashed face imposing upon the elderly woman.

“Oh, dearie, you look god awful. Just terrible! And all these butts all over the place,” she exclaims.

He stares at his long-time elderly neighbor, blinking slowly.

“Never mind that! I must speak with you, sweetie.”

Damon swallows the insult, sighs, and walks closer to the door, realizing that there is no way out of this conversation. He goes to open the door and, as soon as he cracks it, Mrs. Baranowski oversteps her boundaries and barges through Damon’s doorway. She shuffles into his living room; the semi-hollow foundation echoing under her feet. He catches up to Mrs. Baranowski and finds her in his kitchen, inspecting the dishes and the ants.

“Since you haven’t been taking care yourself, or your surroundings for that matter, have you at least seen the news lately, Damon?”

He stares at her, trying to hide his anger. He knows any actual conversation would be encouragement, and protest, like any of the dozens attempted over the past seven years of his tenancy, would not resolve the problem and only make her stay longer from the subsequent argument. He spreads his lips for an incoming reply.

“Y-”

“Boy, I tell ya, what has the world come to? What kind of world do we live in now? I was riding home from the store, listening to the news on my car radio and there was talk of that damned terrorist attack in...that one place and just it’s awful. Things didn’t used to be this way, I tell ya, Damon. It’s always somebody dying or a bunch of people dying and it’s sickening. Makes you wanna stop watching the whole damned program,” she smiles to the side of her face, “‘scuse my language, Damon.”

“You’re excused, Ma’am,” Damon says, faking a chuckle. “Would you like anything to drink?”

Before the question can register with Mrs. Baranowski, the clock on Damon’s living room wall played a full jingle and rang eleven times.

“Oh, dear! I almost forgot,” the elderly woman says as she stomps to Damon’s cleaner chair and sits down as the familiar jingles play and smiling faces show; leaving Damon in the kitchen to soak in the woman’s audacity.

“I can’t miss this one, Damey! I hope ya don’t mind none,” the old woman says, making herself at home as Damon lets it happen to avoid an argument.

“School bus bombed by terrorists in Syria; forty dead”

“Overdose rates increasing astronomically”

“Little girl gang raped, body found in sewage drain”

“Stay tuned for more!”

“Ugh, disgusting,” Mrs. Baranowski exclaims as she sits with her eyes wide, “You’re still watchin’ this network? I hate this one!”

Damon, ignorant to her shrill complaints, observes the ants and how they apparently multiplied since he last saw them. He watches as they crawl over the TV dinner he had planned to eat before he forgot to, allowing it to become cold, bland, and inedible. Now, in the wake of his forgetfulness, two large piles of ants engulf the juices of the salisbury steak and ingrain themselves into the potatoes as if they were pepper flakes. His eyes follow another line of ants, past a lone deceased one on the way, to the knife’s handle. Damon shoos them away and grips it, picking up the knife by its black, weighted, and hollow steel handle; admiring the shine on its blade. His concentration on the blade is broken by more of Mrs. Baranowski’s shrill complaints.

“I tell ya, Damey, the world we live in today is something else,” she says with a consistent left-to-right shake of her head. “Geez, I wouldn’t have kids in this world anymore....”

Damon looks at the back of her head, snaps to the smiling faces relaying tragedy on his television, and refocuses on the knife, his ragged appearance reflected in its sheen.

“I’d be too afraid some sicko would kill ‘em out on the streets. Hell, I even fear someone will break into my home at night and kill me, Damey. With all the crap that goes on nowadays, you never know. I tell ya, I never had this fear when I was kid...”

As she babbles on, Damon begins to approach the elderly woman, knife in hand, walking over to her, his hands shaking and blade unsteady.

Mrs. Baranowski feels Damon’s shadow loom over her and breaks her gaze from the radiant screen to see his hunched, wretched figure ready to attack. As she screams, he strikes with the knife, missing her neck and stabbing a one and a half inch wide slit through her cheek; cracking her teeth and slicing the side of her tongue. She screams as tooth fragments fly and blood shoots from her mouth and the side of her face, falling away from her attacker and onto the dingy carpet in Damon’s living room.

The dilapidated man pounces again.

He mounts the distressed woman and begins slashing her face repeatedly; carving her face up with dozens of elongated cat scratches; tearing apart bits of her skin. She screams, kicks, and flails her arms but Damon suppresses her movements with his mount and several chaotic stabs to her shoulders; digging the eight inches of blade into them and ruining the muscles with his wicked rotations of the blade inside of her. After Baranowski’s shoulders are shredded, Damon takes a breather. The once screaming woman bleeds and sobs on that ruined carpet, now unable to fend off her attacker, as the newscasters watch from the screen with smiles on their faces; her blood illuminated by the television’s radiance. Damon, failing to catch his breath, experiences tremors, and heaves and shakes vehemently while he straddles the weeping woman. He breathes heavily, the bottom row of his rotting teeth exposed. He drags the tip of the blade across his previous cuts; mapping her red, tear-soaked, and trembling face before forcing the blade tip through her right eye, just enough to blind her, causing the old woman to cry out in agony once again. He stifles her screams with his hand, yet faint cries escape from the slit in her still-bleeding cheek. As Damon reigns in her wriggling with his younger, healthier frame, he shoves the knife into her other eye, breaking through her skull and penetrating the whole of her brain. Roughly two inches of blade protrude from Baranowski’s eye socket; the remaining inches lodged in her brain and at a jagged clash with the back of her skull.

The struggle stops.

He retrieves the knife; wriggling it through her gelatinous cerebrum, which coats the blade with a pale-pink matter, and drives it through the middle of her throat. Twisting it. Working the meat. Further draining the animal. With this final blow, his carpet inundated with the blood of his neighbor, Damon shakes and pants, drenched in his own sweat. He rolls off of her corpse, curls into a ball to at her side and begins sobbing. The thick accumulation of saliva causes strings to form between his lips when he wails. His face becomes indistinguishable from Baranowski’s leakage as he squirms in a pool of it, crying and cackling as his head pounds and his hand aches from the grip he had on the hollowed handle. As he flops and squirms beside his victim, the newscasters sign off and the white goes to black once again.

Damon writhes until the sun’s radiance from the windows blinds him. He writhes once more, like an electrocuted animal, until he collides with the corpse of his neighbor. He drapes his arm over her corpse and pulls himself up for a look at his carnage. He retches and scurries from it; the dried blood forming purplish earthen islands around the body.

Upon realizing the crackling of his clothes, he rips his ruined shirt over his matted hair and blood-smeared face and tosses it to the far corner of his living room. Once the rest of his clothes are removed, he scurries to the bathroom and bathes himself. For the duration of his bath, he continues to shake and sob; snotting on the shirt he puts on when he dresses himself after his bath.

He walks from his bedroom to the living room as his rapid heart beat drums more tears out of his eyes while the skeletal hallway crushes him. He runs through the hall and stumbles over Baranowski, gagging at the sight of her. Once his retching ceases, he hears the TV and turns around with wide eyes and quick breath; the 10:00 news was back from its first commercial. Upon seeing those smiling faces, Damon sprints out of his house before he hears a single headline; refusing to stop until he slams the porch door behind him and presses himself against it. The news is gone and so is his breath control. Damon, amidst his hyperventilation, leaps from his porch and scurries from his house, with his left hand gripping his right bicep. As he walks, he shakes like a freezing dog; and he stares down at the ground like a guilty one, watching his breath billow out of his mouth from the cold morning air, only stopping when he reaches the third house on his right: “913 Milburn Avenue”. Bo’s house. He peers through her windows from the street. Like any typical morning, Bo has her curtains open and the sun shines into the living room, reflecting off its waxed, hardwood floor like a field of wheat in Montana during harvest season.

The living room has two black leather couches, placed next to each other in an alcove facing the window. Damon remembers the conversations they used to have on those couches. Tears fall from the memory. Bookshelves line each part of the wall, stuffed like a university library with novels of different sizes and colors. A lone, leather black coffee table stretches across both couches, where a speaker with a phone attached sits between the four novels on the table. The speaker is playing soft soul music, coating the house in holiday warmth.

As Damon walks closer to the window, he sees her. A woman, her skin glowing in the sun. She is long and dignified with a vibrant, pink afro. Barefoot, and with nothing on but an oversized yellow t-shirt that compliments her mocha skin, she dances to the soul music as if she is making passionate love to the air of her living room, with twists and turns like her curl pattern in every step of the elegant freestyle.

Damon, in sneakers with the toe bumper detached from the rest of the shoe, tattered, acid washed jeans and a plain, gray t-shirt steps over the plants in the owner’s garden and taps on the window.

She is startled by the sound, turns to face it, and then sighs with relief. She smiles and starts to wave, but her face drops upon realizing his desolate expression, and she motions for him to go around to the door. They meet on her porch.

“Hey, Damon, you okay,” the woman asks upon opening her door to the ragged man.

His lips quivers and his eyes water. He says nothing and falls into her mocha-skinned body; latching onto her with the tenacity and desperation of an addict amidst withdrawal. Startled by her friend’s rush, but familiar with his breakdowns, she offers her shoulder and escorts him to the leftmost couch. Sitting down in an embrace, she rubs and pats his head while whispering soothing sentiments into his ear as he continues to tremble and sob.

“Tell me. What’s wrong,“ she asks, still patting the pitiful creature in her embrace.

He sniffles and, amidst near hyperventilation, squeaks out, ”I’m having trouble, Bo.”

“Aw, ” she says as she reaches a hand to her phone, wakes it up, and pauses the music, “School givin’ you more shit?”

He debates the lie for an agonizing moment, but decides to invest in the fortunate alibi.

“Y-yes,” he says through a built-up membrane of saliva in his mouth that he must swallow to rid himself of; which proves almost impossible. “Something just ain’t working right.”

“Well, I’m sure it ain’t nothin’ we can’t fix, Damon. But first,” she moves his hair from his face and cups the shattered mask in her hands. “promise me you’ll take some deep breaths an’ get that breathing under control?”

He snorts, then nods.

She smiles, resumes the music, and embraces her troubled friend; guiding the deep breathing at first, and then humming to the tune of the music once she could trust Damon to continue the process without her aid.

Minutes of silent embrace, save for the sounds of her humming and his descending panic, pass. He faces over her shoulder and his breathing resembles that of a child losing a fight against sleep. As his eyes dry on her sopping collar, the music is interrupted by a buzz from her phone. He instinctively checks the source of the sound. It said:

“Brussels bomber apprehended and in critical condition, more dead in aftermath of attack”

He reels back and cowers on the opposite side of the couch; shaking and sobbing like an abused animal and nearly betraying his lie. She is startled by his reaction, checks her phone, and reads the notification.

Noting Damon’s previously fractured state, she sighs, “All this shit scares me, too,” attempting to reassure him.

As he shakes, nails digging into his friend’s couch, Bolanle puts her phone to sleep, grabs a novel from the table, and coaxes Damon to lay his head in her lap.

Then, she attempts to soothe him with the graceful cadence of literature. Though her velvet delivery floats into his ears like changing leaves swaying to a soft earth, his panic persists. Despite slower breathing, his tears continue to fall and soak her bare thighs, falling like rain in a psychopathic painting and resembling Rorschach images. Amidst his slow recovery, a lull between paragraphs allows him to note the sound of sirens in the distance. The progress is undone. Another tremor moves through him. He nestles further into Bo’s smooth legs. He mutters nonsense. Bo places the book onto the arm of the couch, intent on supporting her friend through his hard time. She rubs his head and plays in his hair. He shakes under her cotton palm.

As his tears run, the sirens grow closer.