A fragment.

1
He was feeling depressed, so went outside to the garage to get his bike and pedal away his sadness. It was cold out, and his breath left clouds in the crisp, night air.

He picked up the bike, and carried it out through the garage door, avoiding the tools and spare parts neglected over the stone floor. He wheeled the bike down the driveway of his house.

His car was parked not in the middle of the path as he wanted, but close to the side of house. He tried to avoid scratching it, but heard the scrape of metal on metal and saw a long gash running straight along the side panel. He fell to the floor and began to cry, calling out into the empty night. As he cried, his sorrow began to turn to anger; directed purely at the bike, and at the car. he got up all of a sudden, tears of frustration gushing from his eyes, he grabbed the bike, lifted it up over his head, and threw it with all his strength down onto the front windscreen of the car.

He wanted the glass to smash; he wanted the car to feel the pain he felt; he wanted the bike's tires to rupture, torn on the fractured glass of the window. Alas, to his horror the bike didn’t smash the window, but bounced off the glass, back towards him. It struck his face, breaking his nose and causing blood to stream from both nostrils. He fell over onto the car's bonnet and cried tears born from self loathing; his total inadequacies; his failure as a human being. The tears ran down his face into the corners of his mouth and tasted bitter on his tongue.

Eventually he stopped crying and began merely to sob at frequent irregular intervals which, each time caused his entire body to shake gently. He slid off the bonnet, and walked back into the house.

When he got inside, he walked over to a cupboard in the kitchen and found a small bottle of unopened whiskey. He untwisted the cap and took a deep swallow; the harsh liquid burned his throat and caused him shortness of breath. He took another gulp and returned outside.

2

He walked along the road on which his house lies; it is full of pre-war, red-bricked, semi-detached buildings. He doesn’t know anyone who lives here, but he knows people do, he has seen them from behind the blinds in his bedroom. He is desperately lonely.

He reached the end of the road, whiskey in hand, and turned toward the city center. On his way he saw a tramp, asleep in the doorway of the local hairdressers, there was a bottle of cider discarded next to him, and a pool of sick lay on the floor in front of his mouth.

He arrived in the city, nightclubs and bars were loud and raucous which caused his head to ache; people were spilling out into the streets. A man in a white shirt and jeans, his arm wrapped around his female friend, shouting near nonsense at a person standing just three feet away from him, caught his attention.

He had finished the whiskey by this time and was therefore feeling quite drunk. His nose no longer caused him pain, but his depression had worsened and he felt sad as hell. He stumbled down past closed shops and onwards towards the heart of the city, he was repeatedly shouted at by various alpha males, impressing their friends and lovers. He avoided direct eye contact with anyone.

It was around this time that he --quite by mistake -- knocked into a woman. He wasn’t looking ahead and alcohol had further numbed his perceptive senses. She too was intoxicated and lost her balance, falling onto the floor. Her companion, a huge tower of a man stormed over to him and threw a fist at his damaged face, the giant connected with his right eye and he fell to the ground. He barely had time to cover his face and to crunch his body into a ball before the man was over him, kicking out at his exposed back. He is not quite sure why, but he started once again to cry, not because of the pain induced by the torrent of blows landing on his back, but more likely because he realized how pathetic he was, lying there in the fetal position, drunk, cold and uncomfortable.

The assailant, when he decided that his quarry’s back had suffered enough, stamped violently on its head. The attacked man thinks he lost consciousness for a few seconds. But what he does know for certain is that the man who attacked him did so before checking if the girl he had knocked over was hurt.