It’s been a while since I posted to my blog. Not gonna bore anyone with excuses about school, but they’ve been true since I started working and studying simultaneously. I’ve finished a novella and a short story which will be part of an upcoming horror collection that I hope to release sometime in 2021. Just as a bit of fun, I thought that I’d edit and release a stream of consciousness piece that I wrote back in 2018. I called it Natsukashii. Enjoy.
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Dogs. Must have been, I’d heard a barking from another flat maybe three doors down. They’ve always said that dogs are one of the animals that possess some kind of pre-cognizant sense for danger, that they can sense a threat miles before human awareness can catch up. What a load of trite.
I’d had a pretty nice view from my flat. The balcony stretched out a few feet into the drowsy autumn air. It would have been beautiful this time of year if I’d lived outside a megacity. Below my balcony lay miles and miles of neon lights and decaying concrete. An endless, winding maze of hazy smoke, bad seafood, and rain.
The sun hadn’t quite emerged from its artificial sleep. Wouldn’t matter much as I couldn’t see it anyway. Too much smog is what they say, but at least considering the whole dog thing, I don’t think trusting a vague ‘they’ seems all too solid of a piece of advice.
A cigarette then, now that would have been great, just a little something to take the edge off. Maybe that’s asking for too much. I mean, when has there ever been a time when it was that simple? Not since I was a kid at least. Or maybe that’s just the nostalgia. Fuckin’ perfect time to get a wave of that, but I suppose it’s only natural. If only the word had the same meaning that it used to.
Voices, lots of them I think, all launched into a downward crescendo. I didn’t really have time to react. Can’t say it would have made much of a difference if I’d had had an opportunity.
The door was thrown asunder as they poured in from the hallway. Flashing lights and skeletal armor tore through the gloom, a number, all at once, and then nothing. Just nothing. Not a sweet sort of nothing, but rather a gradual numbing of the senses sort.
A little rude of them waking up the entire tower with their noise like that. Hell, they were waking up the little, old, amnesiac lady next door to me. That was probably the biggest crime to me. I’d had only a few chances to speak with her as she was as reclusive as I was, but it had been nice to find a bit of a kindred soul in her. Husband passed away…. what was it… six years prior? She was probably tucked away in her cozy pull-out couch. After all, who needs a real bed if you’ve none to share it with?
Dogs, right? Maybe that barking would have given me a chance, but it came a handful of seconds too late. Little bastards.
Can’t say I remember much passed that, but as the wind danced through my hair and I got a firsthand observation of the smog, I realized how truly far the neon had spread. The illumination of this obelisk of iron and metal seemed to stretch on and on, etcetera. I’d never had a chance to observe it at this angle before. It was a wonder that humans ever built such a fortress, but I suppose that’s just about all we’re good at. Building. Walls, fences, towers, guns, y’know that jazz and all?
I was starting to shiver a bit, but I don’t think that was the wind. And there was this sleepiness that was starting to bite at me slowly. Could’ve been the protopiates, I suppose. Probably not though. Damn, those neon billboards are bright at this time of night. Blinding even. If it had all gone down differently, then maybe it would have ended differently. Last minute confessions, right? All too late. Always too late.
The Inky Hearth 