Untitled: Chapter one

With a sighing click, the yale lock sealed the flat once more.1

Left the gentle, slow pitter-patter, just a dribble to play by itself. A slightly muffled drip, almost as if someone had poured honey beneath this dull crescent moonlight. Who could tell between one puddle and another? He lay beside the bed, head lolling a pantomime rhythm to the burden of each drip. With each sighing gurgle, contemplating the penultimate moments through a haze of half recalled memories.2

As they faded from his imaginings, a hand reached out, imperceptibly caressing his cheek. He looked up into a timeless face. Never to change again. Hollow sockets stared out at him, the ivory rictus nodding, a simple tilt of the head. With that he knew his life had concluded. In this of all places, but it was inevitable, he supposed. 3

"And what happens next?" he uttered, in reply, the shade swung his scythe, collecting his crop, shorn away from the dead weight at their feet. In this manner, he did not look back, merely walked forward into the unknown ever after.4

It had been a moment long in the making and he was right, it was inevitable. Perhaps he had consigned himself to this fate a long time ago. Found the world a place he could find no niche of his own to reside in. So he clawed himself a gash in the world in which to curl up. He never had any regrets. A one man Universe, how could he have known that anyone else had a soul, feelings of their own. At least, not feelings beyond his own reckoning. 5

But where does a story begin? A world of infinite complexity, one thing after another, after another and another. Perhaps this one begins with a birth. A boy like any other, screaming into this world. Parents filled with joy, like any others. Only one parent filled with joy by the end of the first month. By the end of the second, his calls for food, bathing, comfort drowning in a well of arguments and his mother. His mother turned sour. Slowly rotting to a thin, discoloured core of a woman by the sixth. Jaundiced by her medicines, a bottle for the baby to keep him asleep, the other for the mother, to close off the world. 6

The father, kept them all in booze and bread, finding comforts where he could. Loyal to his family through it all, even if not to his lady, for she had long since become an empty shell. So by the age of three, the boy had learned no longer to defecate himself. And on one such occasion, he found his father, neatly soiled. No breeze to rock him, in his imitation of a most macabre swing. He may have tugged on the trousers a little, looking up into the face, smiling forever, eyes staring into an oblivion only his father could see.7

As these things happen, with the morning post, an unfortunately collection made. He was told at a later date, that his mother had succumb to a poisoned death, his father to heartbreak. Miles taken into the never so loving embrace of an orphanage. All the children herded as cattle, feeding, playing, roaming a small pasture. It was here he first saw her, aged nine and her twelve. Perhaps not the beautific vision of perfection to many but through him, a vision of perfection. Her dark auburn hair and delicate features, grey eyes looking out at the world. They grew up together, for a time. The older sister, to a younger brother.8

As he grew up with her, she ascended beyond his years, ejected into the world where she sold her wares, or so she said, at eleven he vaguely registered that little could be sold from so little storage among her "working girl" outfits. Yet she always returned with enough to beat off the sharks of starvation and more. 9

Though less when the master and mistress took her away to sample her goods. Perhaps her name was Helen. Or Fiona. She may have been a Susan. But in the dim recollection, who can tell? All he knew was that one day when he was thirteen, she did not return.