LEFT ALONE
Joshua Gale
Content Warning: Course Language, Physical and Mental Abuse.
Slumber's edge comforted the youth, bringing back an unreal, unconscious realm. In this daze, he sees a morbid figure, muddy and legless. It gives him a condescending view of reality. But as the figure gets closer, fear gets further away. A girl not much older than himself steps into his sanctuary. He sits upright, surveying his surroundings, avoiding her gaze, fully aware he must not look too deeply. His sister asks through her invisible smile.
'Why are you here? Why do you sit with these sleepers when you are sleepless?'
He whispers, hardly audible, 'I’m scared.'
'Why here? You fear dying, so why are you here with the dead?'
'They can't hurt me. They have achieved something I cannot. You have achieved something I cannot — death.'
'Don't worry, you will.' The wind answers.
'I know, but it does not feel real. There must be a way out. My death will bring everything to an end. If I die, I murder the world.'
'Ignorance persists until the end of existence. So, make warm memories, create a place. Go now and leave that fear here. Scale the fence and take the pain with you. It lives here no more. Please leave with it. Take it with you.'
Pulling his sister’s sleeping bag around himself, he walks back to his car. He wishes not to run, desiring for the fear not to chase him. As he gets closer to his car, his sister's memory and her words get further away but stays warm with him in her sleeping bag. Opening the door, he turns on the radio, climbs into the back of his car, pulls the sleeping bag tight around his head, snuggled into his pillow and finally finding a comfortable position he falls asleep in the back of his car, warm and comfortable in his home.
It's cold and raining. The streetlights spread over the dark ground. The light swirls down the storm drains, following the run of the rain. Rain hammers the vehicle's roof, loud yet subdued. The window provides a view of enclosed, warm houses. The homes outside his car remain unlit, yet gas heaters emit a warm glow. His legs are stiff, and he lies on his back staring, wishing he could enter one of those houses. However, the comfort a dwelling may offer is unavailable to him.
He wakes and wraps himself tighter in her sleeping bag, he stares out at the dark rain. There is nothing on the street, but he can sense a figure, the feelings, the thoughts. They seep along the street, then crawl beneath, above, and then through the steel that encloses the boy. The darkness formed an invisible coldness. A dark thing he could not see but its weight immensely crushed him. His heart suddenly beat faster, the sound of blood pounded in his ears, as the raindrops slowed. Nothing stares through him, watching, eating the warmth out of the boy. From the automobile's front seat, the feeling moves through him. Through his spine, and out through his toes. The feeling expands and leaves the car. It floats above, waiting, watching, and all sound stops.
Breathing in and stretching out his legs, those young powerful legs cracked under the weight of bent knees, fluid filled his joints. The joints felt older than they were. He felt older than he was. Alone in his home, his car, the safest place he knows. It also feels like the loneliest place on earth. He breathes in, sees the cold air enter his mouth. The air comes out of him warm and freezes. Then it disappears when entering the stuffy atmosphere that is his home, his lifeline to the world. Breathing in, he feels the entity slip back into the front seat. Breathing the warm smells of himself through the seat cushions, he feels icy fingers rest on his neck, icy eyes burn into his back. The fingers grab hold of his heart again and squeeze, harder, rougher, and longer. Each breath is excruciating as the fingers slow the blood. Extracting the air from the blood that tries to leave his heart. He cannot move, or scream- its eyes burn into his back. It just sits there now, weighing him down. He wants to jump up, grab the door handle, and free himself from the claustrophobic thickened air that is cold and burning at once. No words will escape his mouth. His mouth does not even move.
His legs squeezed tighter, fingers gripping her sleeping bag. He readies himself to run. But outside the darkness stretches further. Here in her sleeping bag, he holds the dark, the fear. He controls it, keeps it in. It watches him, controls him. but outside it is too big. The home he longs for but does not welcome him. It holds the genuine fear, the fear that put him in this car. The dark that follows is still in the light of his warm bunk at home. He sits with the dark as it watches him from the front seat, from above the car. Through the windows, he imagines returning to the place he knows he can enter but cannot rest. He thinks back to where he is escaping from.
*
Entering his home, he can hear the muffled swearing of his older brother and his friends. Hoping to bypass the loungeroom undetected. Creeping, the floorboards cracking under his every step, his knees and ankles crack from past broken joints from many beatings, creak, crack, shuffle. Then, there is a silent shock before he hears his brother's drunken and high voice.
'You little bitch! GET IN HERE! I know you're there, Paul. I can hear your stupid fucking knees. What is youzzz trying to get your little fucking safety blanket? That fucking magical sleeping bag.'
'Leave him alone. Come and have another hit, Gaz.' Shirley's voice quietly fades as a sniffing suction sound takes over. Paul can see the door to his room. He tries to run, but Gaz comes flying out of the lounge room, crash tackling Paul to the ground. The punches rain down. Paul escapes into the darkness. The hits keep coming, adding more bruises to old bruises. Blood pools in his mouth, and warm liquid slowly puddles in his eye from a gash on his forehead.
'You like that, you little cunt. Go wrap yourself up in her sleeping bag. You want her back. She was so fucking perfect. I'm all youzz got now. Come and have a beer, you prick. Shirley wants to twiddle your bits.'
'Yeah, come in here, sexy. I put you on lay buy, but I want to buy now.' Laughter fills the room as Gaz lifts his enormous frame off his younger, smaller brother. Paul gets up and runs to his room, grabs his sister's sleeping bag. The one they watched movies together in. The one she hid him under when Gaz would come home drunk. The one she died in.
*
Finally, the grip lets go. He gets the handle. The rain has eased. He throws open the door, twists, tangles, untangles, searches the floor for his jacket, feels the warm fleece. Pulling on the jacket. He springs into the frosty night air, dogs bark, and the sound returns to the earth. Now he can hear the crackle of the power lines, and he takes a last breath and fills his lungs. The frozen air heats his heart, and he runs, screaming, crying. The pain feels so good. He wants to punch and thrash, he kicks and punches the ground, until he merges with the darkness. He runs more, spins, yells, pulls his jacket over his head. twisting the material of his sisters sleeping bag, his fingers flex, and tiny cracks form in his dry fingernails. The light in his car dims in the dark, gets smaller behind him, houses flashing past. A car speeds past him. It gives no comfort. Into the street it follows. He sits and ruminates. Should he go home? It will be warm. Given it's just there. It's so close. Running again, he hits the end of the street, seeing the cemetery ahead, where his sister is at rest.
The great sandstone wall of the cemetery jumps out of the blackness. Where the dead sleep quietly under the ground, in a peaceful darkness, wet and warm with more life teeming around those scattered bones than the boy feels he has. He wishes the ground would swallow him and colour his world black. A tiny gazebo, glimmering, stands in the distant, set amid the deceased. This small location offers rest while encountering the deceased, the cheerful, the secure. Looking back at the small light of his car, he runs, aiming directly at his car. Tearing through the dark, he grabs her sleeping bag from the open car door. The form watches him. It watches as the young boy scrambles up over the sandstone wall and disappears into the light of the little warm gazebo surrounded by death.
Lying down on the table, under the warm glow of the crackling fluorescent light. The darkness surrounds him, but the light and the company warm him. Sleep envelops him. His eyes are heavy, and his brain shudders from consciousness to something just beyond. Giving the world outside himself a fuzzy and grainy picture. This spot where his sister urged him to rejoin existence. The place he finally fell asleep.
As dawn illuminates the cloudy sky. He returns to his car. Observing the raindrops left on windows. Watching the droplets compete toward the base of the windscreen. Some run into others, creating larger, faster drops. Cracking his car window, he smells the damp drying grass and hears the voices of morning walkers. Hearing the distant murmurs of people brings him back to the world, the one he believes everyone lives in, bar himself. Sometimes he hates their ignorant bliss, their ease of living. But he does not envy them. He would not wish to be anyone else. Contentment is what he yearns for, simply freedom from fear. He longs to be a trilobite embedded in stone, forever blissfully ignorant.
Searching for comfort, he escapes the urban areas for natural settings, near the seashore. He needs the road, the music blaring, a cigarette blowing out the rushing window as he races through green rolling mountains, the dark endless, white-topped oceans. On the beachside, he feels at home. No one goes there, just him. Alone, sad, drunk, and happy.
As the sun is setting, it is difficult to see, headlights blind him, and the dusk scatters his vision. The darkness screams up behind him, chasing down his home. The V6 engine screams as the speedometer hits 180km/h. Calmly and smoothly, he navigates every corner and bump. He has travelled this road. The road is familiar to him. He owns it. The night sky is born above him, but he keeps ahead of the darkness, his thoughts only on the warmth of her sleeping bag and the springs of the single mattress in the spider housing beachside caravan that he intends to make his home and that will provide him a refuge from having to go home. Like a home, it has been the site of pain and joy. Here, people forget the residents. Only the present remains. Regardless of how one enters that space, one arrives carrying their identity. But ghosts still haunt here. The breaking surf erases the memories that linger outside the caravan walls.
He sees red eyes staring at him through the darkness on the road ahead. Rather than slow, he moves toward the other side of the road, maintaining pressure on the accelerator, cutting through the dark. Getting around the red eyes, he sees the kangaroo bounce off into the weeds that are encroaching upon the road. When he looks forward, he sees a smaller pair of eyes, childlike. 'What the fuck is a kid doing out here?' His brain reacts and he slams on the brakes and pulls the wheel. The screeching sound does not reach anyone. The boy also hears nothing as the car rolls over onto its roof and slams into a tree. Blinking at the mess, the small joey scratches itself. It then jumps over the discarded sleeping bag and into the weeds to catch up with its mother.
The End
Josh is recovering from alcohol dependence and found peace in philosophy. His surrealist horror writing is his way of observing experience. He lives on the rainy peninsula of the Gweagal People, trying to find meaning in the nothingness.
'Existence precedes essence' (Sartre)
