I've been gone for a while, and I've written a lot of stuff since then, so, here's a story I wrote a few weeks ago:
The silence is what he never gets used to. The springs that make tiny indentations in his cot never bother his withered old back. The indentation that his head has made in his blotted, yellow pillow never give him a headache. Sleeping in a child sized bed, he curls up so that his knees are tightly hugged against his chest. Every night, these tiresome acts he performs for comfort never bother him. It's the silence of being alone that makes him hug his knees a little bit tighter.
Each morning he's reminded, despite his alarming ability to forget for a man his age, of what he once had. Instead of being awakened by a kiss or a child bounding onto his bed and shaking him, it's the sun that creeps under his eyelids and soothes him awake.
And when he wakes, there is no one snug quietly next to him, arm draped over his chest.
It's a while before he moves. Once his deep, weary eyes get used to the new sunlight, he stares with glazed eyes at the turned over picture on the nightstand. He smiles briefly and turns it back over, revealing memories of better times. A man with a full head of hair balancing a grinning child on his shoulders as a brunette smiles, the light grazing her face in a way that makes her look like she's beckoning the day in, clutching a book to her chest and connected at the hip to the man.
Things change, though. When he whispered in her ear at night that he wished the moments they shared, sitting on the rocking chair together after they sent the kids to bed, her on his lap, arms draped around him, would last forever, he meant it. He meant it every single time. People tend not to, and if they do, its to an extent, but he meant it. The moments grew more and more fleeting. The kid began having girls over, and they liked spending time on the chair. Then the weaving on the back of the chair began to splinter, and it hurt to sit in. After the kid had gone to college, they had to sell some things to pay for his tuition. The chair was one of them. They gathered only a small payment for it, but they scraped him by through his education with every penny they earned.
They lived their lives for their son, and after he dropped out of college, the man's wife became bedridden with age. They recieved letters from the kid occasionaly, where he assured them each time that New York City is a great place for a musician. He assured them he met the right people and his career was going to take off any day now. Eventually the letters stopped coming, right as the man's wife suffered a stroke. Each day the man would enter her room with a bowl of soup or a book or just to sit with her, and each day her face became less and less bright. Eventually she asked what his name was.
On a January morning he entered the room to wake her up. He sat gently down next to her and put his hand on her shoulder to no avail. He brushed her cheek with his fingertips. Then he kissed her. Then he shook her softly. He shook her a bit harder as his eyes began to well up with tears. Finally he collapsed next to her and cried deeply into the pillow, hoping maybe to wake her. The house was repossessed shortly after the funeral, and he was left standing on the sidewalk. He put his hat on, griped his cane tightly and shambled off down the road.
He went to the only place he knew. The factory he worked at when he was trying to make a little extra money for the kid a few blocks away was abandoned years ago. Once inside, he went straight up to the warden's office, where, the warden, as the boys he had worked with rumored, slept in a back room while everyone else worked. Inside the warden's office, the man rummaged around until he found a cot folded upright in a closet. He dragged the cot to the middle of the factory floor, along with a nightstand next to the desk.
He unpacked his suitcase and took out his two pillows, the picture, still in its original frame, and a change of clothes.
And when he wakes each day, he wanders around the factory, greeting dead and gone employes that work diligently around him as he holds his hands behind his back and smiles at everyone. Its his little way of coping.
And each night, as he goes to bed, he turns the picture back over.
