Tag: urban fiction

#15 Tumbleweed

It had gotten so that he could only vaguely remember what not being tired felt like.  He knew it wasn’t age (he was only in his twenties, after all) but every joint in his body ached.  Most likely sleeping in ditches would do that to you.  Or not sleeping at all, depending on the town he was passing through.  Truth was, it was getting so that he could only vaguely remember anything.

It had gotten so that he couldn’t tell the difference between the parts of him that were crazy from sleep deprivation and the parts of him that were just plain fucking crazy.  But he could still remember when it started.  That memory was crystal clear.  That memory burned his eyes like a sharp wind on a below freezing night.

He had kissed her.  He could remember what she felt like, small, not as soft as most girls he’d held.  She seemed so small, so delicate that he had thought she would feel fragile when he held her against him and their tongues slid soft against each other, but she didn’t.  She felt small, hard, and strong, but she kissed soft and tasted like something green and fresh.  He remembered the feel of her warm skin under his fingers.

Then she stopped.  Everything in his world stopped, and as far as he could ever explain it to himself (and never out loud), that was the moment he caught the Crazy.  It was the name he gave it, the Crazy, because it felt a lot more like a disease than some sort of mental fracture.  And it wasn’t like he fell apart completely.

He just felt this need, a burning, pushing, impossible to resist need to go.  He had no idea where it was that he needed to end up.  But he did know what direction he needed to move in.  Only, he couldn’t feel it if his feet weren’t touching the ground, so it was walk, and keep moving.  Sleep on the ground ‘cause he’d long ago ran out of enough to pay for a room.  He was living off kitchens and churches, but it was weird, because whenever he was hungry- really hungry, weak from it, food would show up.  He hadn’t even had to sort through a single trash can.

So he kept moving, and jumped at the sight of himself when he caught his reflection.  His hair stuck out matted and crazy.  And his face was covered in scraggly hair.  His clothes had lost any sense of color, even the blacks had faded to some version of brown, and what skin on his body he could still see was either weirdly tan or weirdly dirty.  He couldn’t tell.  Not like he’d had prior experience in being a bum.  He was supposed to be a market research analyst, for chissakes, not the crazy walking guy.

Funny, he remembered the title, but not the work.  Whatever he had been doing, it had not only been boring, but it had been so pointless as to leave no trace of itself in his brain.  He remembered what the smoking area looked like.  Remembered the faces of his fellow tobacco loving refugees, even if he couldn’t remember their names.

What troubled him most was that he could not remember his family aside from very vague images and uneasy feelings.  He could not figure why that should be.  And he knew that he wasn’t going to figure a damn thing out until he had slept in a bed.  Most likely for a whole week.