Lives

A sequel to Fumes.

From the heaven descended bulky drops of rain, they struck Sean’s face like arrows hurled from the slings of a group of deft archers. He had been waiting in the rain for more than ten minutes now, and he wasn’t carrying an umbrella, abiding by his inveterate trait of acute carelessness. Andy is supposed to pick him up. Andy had called five minutes ago to let him know that he was caught up in a traffic jam and would be there any minute. Sean had replied ‘Okay!’, not complaining the slightest, in his usual strain of uncompromised indifference and utter expressionless-ness. He was indifferent to the rain, to the vehicles that went past him splashing mud-water at him from the roads. He stood there shaking, feeling and observing- the unobserved, the unkempt, the unfulfilled, the unnerving facades of the vivid, poignant and beautifully destructive dystopic  colours of unnatural nature, which mercilessly yet mellifluously debased life, his life. He was painting, capturing, narrating and listening, all with his eyes.

Time flowed,

So did water.

Clouds bellowed-

Hoarse thunder.

Sean could feel a silhouette approaching him, but he chose to be indifferent and be engrossed in his job of discovering the dystopian spectrum, the obscure light which was making unflagging and unmitigated efforts to keep dusk, night at bay.

A man appeared out of nowhere and asked Sean “What time is it now?”

Sean replied “It’s quarter past six by my watch.”

Sean realized then, that five minutes had long passed.

It was no theatre,

So did he ponder.

Why did people gather-

In a crowd yonder?

Sean asked a person who was walking hastily towards the crowd, “What’s the matter?”

The person, without even glancing at Sean replied hurriedly, “There’s been an accident.”

Suddenly everything seemed still, the rain, the noises, the people around; everything. Sean’s senses seemed to have undergone temporary selective impairment. He walked towards the crowd, often bumping into people; not apologizing, he moved on.

He dreaded these accidents, these sights made him sick.

Sean recognized the car at once. He saw the body lying on the road, soon to be put on a stretcher and carried off in an ambulance, a few people surrounding it. The man was still alive, Andy was still alive. Sean observed Andy and the car, he couldn’t figure out which was more wretched, Andy’s body or Andy’s car.

The blood made him sick.

Sean’s senses did not get better. Silence prevailed.

Without inquiring anything about the accident, he found his way out through the crowd, swiftly.

No tear escaped his eye, no shriek escaped his throat.

Sean reached home. He was soaked to the skin.

The warmth of his home was hauntingly tranquilizing. He did not turn on the lights. He didn’t change, nor did he get himself dry; he sat on his bed, inert, motionless.

His mind drifted-

One year ago,

“He was in love. They have been together for more than two years now and the spark was still there.”

Sean was on his way to meet Penny. Penny didn’t turn up that day, instead she texted him, ‘We’re through!’ They had their fair deal of occasional tussles, but that was a bolt from the blue.

Dejected and crushingly mesmerized by the aura of atrocious affliction, he had switched off his cellphone and wandered apathetically on solitary streets.

When he reached his hostel, he was informed that a friend of his father’s had been trying to get to him all day. Sean called him back immediately. Sean was instructed to get home as soon as possible, availing the quickest and best mode of transport he can manage to get.

Sean stayed in a different city. He was studying engineering.

All the while he was on his way home; his mind was digging up the same cadaver of his deceased relationship with Penny. He had even shouted out once in his mind, “Thank you God; what can be worse?” He didn’t even try to know or comprehend why he was rushing home.

Sean’s family comprised his father, mother and younger brother. They had been out to the market on an evening, shopping. While they were returning, their car had met with an accident on the highway. It was a ghastly accident.

There was no corpse on which Sean could rest his head and weep. Just a heap of flesh, undistinguishable; what was his father’s flesh, or mother’s or brother’s.

Sean hardly remembered when was the last time he had hugged his father, had a hearty chat with his mother or fought with his brother. He was away, in his own kingdom of inherent insane inanity.

Water dripped from his hair and from his clothes on the floor. The bed was already wet.

“Andy: ….Don’t be this dead man, this zombie. C’mon, don’t be Frankenstein...”

Sean: …Victor Frankenstein is the name of the scientist who created the monster and not the monster itself. ‘Don’t be Frankenstein?’ I’d love to be him….”

Sean bent down and with his index finger as a pen and water as ink he started writing on the floor-

Why do you follow me so assiduously, o’ Death?

I won’t give up, although it hurts with my every breath.

Why do you bruise me with your abhorrent tentacles of depression?

My life is annihilated and exiled are my expressions.

Why do you stab me again and again, to inflict agony with your blunt knives?

With my head still on my neck, I won’t be afraid of you, for those taken LIVES.

Finished with his eccentric scribbles, Sean sat up again.

It was still raining outside.

He kept sitting on his bed, inert, motionless!

-------

Life is futile-

And short-lived.

A bullet fired,

Hits the target-

In no time.

Tracing the path of-

An obnoxious projectile.

Sequel - Visions