Fiction: Contracted Lowburn Freakout

By J. F. Gleeson

 

In my lunch hour I bought two tall white cans of coconut Malibu, hasted into my bag because the shop was close to where I worked, and then I sat outside on a wall in a quiet place in a grass pocket, gulping the Malibu and tucking it nicely into my bag between lifts for fear of colleagues or anyone and especially the bulbed security camera opposite which was in place I was sure to witness bottom level employees sat outside the building sweating in July heatwave comedown summer nothing panics.

Certain kinds of enervating ruminations bring with them unkind or at least unpleasant corruptions of time: moments expanded till entire days lumber oceanic, thus crushing and impossible to navigate and spacious in terrible ways. The mind and body entire join on these occasions and by force manipulate the subjective receipt of time so that it is vaster than could be desired, each last dredged bit of rusted despair or uncoupled sanity pored over inside impossibly extended seconds; a strange waking activation of dream time in which emotions GIGANTIC and travels FANTASTIC are lived through in minutes and quarter hours. Of all things, with this I had not ever learned to live, could rarely return to the currents of living time, must fish up sad treasures and turn them in my hands.

When I finished the Malibus I threw the cans into the bin and began through the city. There was nothing in the way of colour for daylight to lift out of the streets. They were seared so that they became bright with blinding grey glow. I did not sway bodily though my vision had slowed a little, odd always and sordid feeling in the day, where night’s brown glows and streetlights seem well made for slurring and abstract visual paste. The pavements boiled with holiday people out of whose way I tipped myself, stomping hotly and lurching across the roads of which I did not know the names, only their vague geographic relations to the places I had time to stomp to in my lunch hour; a big green plastic bin, a theatre outside of which a young boy had screamed violent curses at a frightened elderly man. There was a sense of blundering that I carried through into sobriety and into all aspects of my life. I would arrive vaguely at a street and find where I intended to go by repeated situational coincidence. I would not know the name of the street. I would not know precisely on the street where the shop I wished to go to stood. If somebody asked me how to get there I would not be able to tell them.

By such purposeful accident I arrived at the arcade and stamped down the plastic stairs into it. The front doors, left open, granted the daylight passage down those same stairs so that it rolled onto the patched pool table and diluted the lights and flashing colours and curled into the trenched scratches in the bright Mario Kart seats and hid the grease on the Guitar Hero buttons.

There were few around save city students. I walked the unbusy milling floor to the dance machines. One was broken. There was no sign or visible malfunction to indicate such, and I knew only from prior visit. The slot remained open to suck on £2 coins. I fed my £2 coin into the working machine and danced the three songs it bought.

*

I was not freed in the dancing, because while stamping on the arrows I had to increase my expenditure of mental fortitude on pressing and important things. The three songs came totally to nine or ten minutes. Minutes so well spent: I am not wearing the right shoes. Everyone is looking at my shoes. Everyone is wondering who this is. Everyone is wondering who is this man alone in the arcade at lunchtime stamping on the arcade dance machine arrows. Everybody is irritably waiting for him to finish so that they might have a turn. Everybody is thinking why doesn’t he move his bag as it is more likely to be thieved in the right hand corner than the left. Everybody is thinking why is he holding onto that hand rail. Everybody is thinking why is he here alone. Everybody is thinking he is very alone. Everybody is thinking he is very crushed by being alone here. Everybody thinks this is the inevitability of the cosmos. Everybody is thinking dance, dance, dance. Everybody is thinking why doesn’t he move those keys out of his pocket which are crashing and jangling and jumping each time he stamps his foot. Everybody is thinking look, there he goes, stamping off and sweating back to work in the sun, quickly to be back before the hour is ended, ENDLESS monologue loop almost heard aloud sighing, swearing, slumping, sludging.

He passes the shops he has never been in and the places he does not remember how to get to.

I spent the rest of the day asleep and breathless from dehydration and overthought and the wasteful attempts at exorcism of the latter.

I do not remember what I did when I got home, but it probably was not much.

Worrying is as everything a biological mechanism and it can be realised its contents are dependent on their maker of many different statuses of practicality and irrationality. It is born of usefulness and not ready for worlds beyond the Stone Age.

Everybody knows that.

I am contracted an hour for my lunch break but it is not really true, because I experience a great deal more.

J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has previously appeared in Maudlin House, Ligeia, Overheard, Crow & Cross Keys, Bureau of Complaint, Bullshit Lit, Sublunary Review, Spartan, Weird Horror, ergot. and other places.