I am lifeless in front of the led tv screen, that monotone semi famous news presenter rambling on god knows what, sleeves slumped over my sad tv dinner watching my sorrowed sister moan about her ex husband . I ponder watching a documentary, then marvel at how monotonous my thoughts have ended up but that thought and my tv turn off with the flick of a remote. I haven’t left the house in days, my outstretched palms soften into the sofa, but I can’t quite tell between which is which. That’s what being unemployed does to you, when I got fired I put off doing anything and rounded it up under the vice of “retirement”.
Sister shrieks again, “pay attention!” whines about her ex-husband , that he’s a condescending psychopath. Psychopath? That man seemed dumbfounded by the complexities of how to tell his left from right, let alone count to ten.
“He wants to kill me! I’m telling you Gary, he’s coming for me any time now” she says “he’s such an idiot”. I twitch my sunken legs to confirm their presence and heave out a sorry sigh.
My pupils play ping pong between her furled up brows and that grandfather clock ticking away on the wall. Tick,tick,tick I hear, “always calling me up” she chirps but I’ve already tuned out and slipped away to the depths of my mind. All of that blabbering is converted into some sort of a piece of percussion or the sound of a coin falling from a large height.
My sister and I had been close in our childhood, best of friends, but ever since her picturesque marriage with the “love of her life” she had grown restless and stubborn, exactly like a maggot on the bottom of my boot. It would pain to glimpse at it, to see or have to hear it squirm around and make awful high pitched noises with its mouth, so I choose not to listen.
Instead I drown everything out with my television, and my sad pre-packed tv dinners and my wine and avoid her contentless words with grunts and sounds which I’m sure are incoherent.
My body has reached that mellow state, the lines are blurred between what of my body still remains mine, and what is part of my surroundings. A content and blissful ignorance, frantically interrupted by the door slamming open.
The attacker stands at the door, AK-47 interlocked in his hands, tips of fingers on the trigger.
I always knew “love of her life” was bad news.
Bang, bang,
I am lifeless in front of the led tv screen.
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