Young Writers Society

Your headache has worsened. Not only that, but your stomach feels as if it’s ripping itself apart. It’s trying to eat itself, you suppose. You can’t remember the last time you had a meal. The refrigerator hums; it’s not too far off. Perhaps…you shift your legs experimentally and a weak gasp comes out of your mouth. No chance of walking in this condition—now that you’re down on the couch it isn’t likely you’ll get up again until dawn, if that. You’ll have to weather the hunger until Gerry wakes up. There’s a whining need creeping in at the back of your mind, too, a yearning that will swell and build until it is a scream. There is a word for this nagging and you know you cannot satisfy it without slipping back between the stones to the lightless tunnels where dustpans line the roads. It will be with you for a long time, at least until you can walk again and maybe find some money. Your wallet is missing—it occurs to you how unlike you it is to forget to check for it. The fact that you only realized now is disconcerting to say the least.
At any rate, this you know: You should not feed this particular urge. You need to focus on getting clean; this affliction has distracted you from an efficient pursuit.
Oh, but the want…
The lie is what angers you most, this professed necessity that winds your body into knots and plunges ice-cold into the center of your thoughts. Inescapable desire, unappetizing and yet impossible to live without. You cannot draw your mind away from it. It is soft and fine, grayish brown like a moth crushed between two hands. So fragrant one could easily forget the grave dirt under the seller’s fingernails. It smells of rosemary and old leather, deceptively benign and achingly nostalgic. An article you read many years ago explained advertising in the dustmarkets, how they drown the scent of ancient death in the familiar and fill the minds of their customers with the promises of utopic visions. You knew better. You know better.
Perhaps you should lie still and turn your mind to other things. Happier times, calmer waters. But where are those, in the fog that has settled over your memory? It is a blessed thing that your recollections are returning, however slowly, but it disheartens you that there is so little to raise your spirits. Most of what comes to you as you wrestle away the thoughts of dust are memories of hours upon hours staring at a corkboard on your bedroom floor, overroasted coffee, wary looks from Stroud and the other members of your precinct. Those are the most lighthearted things you can summon; the darkest thoughts evade you, and you do not pry.