Where old beat-up suitcases go to die

I was writing about the suitcase full of money and got to wondering, what happened to the beat-up suitcase after the money had been transferred to the new case on wheels? So I looked into it and this is what I found?

Rumi the butler as an iron fence was spending too much time being melancholic and having conversations with a hollow tree. Every day he would watch the no. 9 saucepan full of boiled leavings from his cardboard box jam-packed with the strain to make spaghetti-ends of dirty fish rubber-stamped with the doom of it all.

He’d given up playing his trumpet after it turned nasty on him and wouldn’t play anything else but big band music which he hated. And his dog ran away with the cat leaving him all alone in his emptiness forever.

One big Sunday that was huge and wouldn’t leave him alone there came a knock at the door of his apartment. He waded through the dust to answer it. It was only a small knocking but it didn’t seem to be going away, which was good because he lived a very long way away from the front door.

When he finally got there and opened it, there was a suitcase of expectation standing there looking very ready for something Rumi couldn’t quite make out. And it had the smell of old money about it.

“I’ve come a long way,” said the suitcase.

“I can see that,” said Rumi, looking at all the many stickers of distant places stuck all over the case.

“Can I come in?” asked the case, tiredly.

“Why?” asked Rumi, wondering if it wanted to sell him something.

“I’ve come home to die,” said the suitcase.

“Perhaps you have the wrong address,” said Rumi closing the door with a sigh of the much put upon.

He began the long trek back to his chair down the dusty dark hallway, fully expecting the knock to come again.

The night was falling down slowly, but he could tell by the deepening gloom that it was happening, albeit only really noticeable in the corners of his room where the blue-dream spiders lived hungry and dreaming.

Twilight was his time for remembering Paris in the fall but tonight he was troubled by the words of the suitcase. He wondered if it was still outside his front door waiting to come in to die, such a strange suitcase, perhaps it was in mourning and chose his door to cry at.

“Why won’t people leave me along?” he said to his dog no longer there at his feet. “What was so attractive about his door?”

It was the third time in a month; first the woman who turned out to be a prostitute; then the dollar salesman who wanted his dollars, and now the suitcase.

“As if he had nothing better to do than open his door to strangers,” he said into the airless air.

The faint murmuring of the moon called out its love song, an old friend turned stranger now, to compliment the Chinese melodies from the bar across the street; and spices from the Thai cooking in the street restaurant drifted through his open window. A mosquito bit his ear.

“This is all too much,” he said aloud. “Why can’t you all leave me alone?”

The night that had slipped in throbbing with heat and a thousand buzzings in an emptiness that was too full spoke about strange things: the hydra in its doom; curly whiskers his cat, still lost away out there; a memory faintly mouthing around; hard things that the shadows couldn’t sing, and all in a language beyond his ken.

Tomorrow he had to go out there again as bits of him were becoming lost forever even as he gathered what he did have left to build something that could go out there again.

“knickers,” he shouted but immediately regretted it…”What will the neighbours think?”

Knock-knock…

“Who’s there?” he called.

Knock-knock…

“Come in.”

Knock-knock…

“Knock-knock,” he thought, “is someone at my door again?”

The night was spending its answers rapidly but his clock had stopped ages ago and so didn’t say a thing to relieve the question that was turning.

“If I answer the door now and see something sane I know I will go crazy, unless I already am already. Maybe if I don’t make a sound they will go away. They say it runs in the family. Then I am quite mad. How could I run up such a bill?”

Knock-knock…

“Go away.”

And then a silence came that was so profound it didn’t say anything at all.

“They know where I live,” he thought to himself determined now to do something; driven that way by the thoughts too loud and the lingering of an old suitcase that wanted to come in and die.

“Alright already, I’m coming,” he shouted down the long dusty hallway to his front door. “Just wait until I get there.”

Outside of the front door the suitcase was panting its last breaths, ready to burst open and die on the spot. It had one word left to spend in a very long life of travelling from one place to the next, so that when the door opened and Rumi was standing there in his bare feet, all it could say was: “Help.”

Rumi picked up the suitcase and carried it inside and then shut the front door and bolted it up tight.

“Purp,” went the suitcase, half a breath left.

“Arpoo, come home,” called the voices calling.

“Time is up,” said the voice of all things.

And that was that.

The suitcase grew very heavy in Rumi’s hand as he was shuffling back down the dusty hallway. He just had to put it down, it was too heavy; as heavy as a dead dream in his hand, as heavy as the passionless dragging of his feet along the dusty hallway of his life. Rumi was down now where there was nowhere left to go.

“You’re thinking too slowly,” said the screaming lizard in its all knowing encompassment from under his bed.

Rumi heard this in his doom and that long walk to his couch.

“Why me?” he moaned as he proceeded.

Rumi always proceeded wherever he was, it was taught to him when he was young and open by the ones who would teach the young anything they had been ordered to by their superiors who were only following orders that came from on high. So Rumi was a robot, using artificial intelligence, pre-programmed by the evil ones he would never see; but something in the matrix of his brain was amiss…

“CQ calling, CQ calling, is there anyone there?”

“Am I speaking to the machine?” asked Rumi, breathlessly in the dark space of the passageway.

Scrambled over the airwaves came a call as some dirge in the night, or a lovely bee in the tree with its wings on fire…

Are you caught up in the crutch of the illusion, bought beyond repair? Are you small? Can you see what you really want? Or are you filled with it all to the point you are full of it? Without a clue then, we shall fade away where we are most forgotten.

“I must wake up,” said Rumi swimming in his soup, still thinking very slowly from the information overload of the wireless waves.

‘Ring-ring,’ went the bell like the faceless crew that comes from nowhere.

“The postman,” said Rumi; and turning around he began the long walk back to the front door to get his mail. He shuffled past the dead suitcase to open the door.

The postman was waiting patiently, in his pyjamas.

“Love will melt all things,” said the postman, gently as if in a dream.

“Will it melt a dead suitcase?” asked Rumi opening the door fully to show off the dead suitcase just inside.

“The release of all you know will come in the dawn of a new day,” said the postmen, still standing in his pyjamas.

“But how will I pay for it in the ten million leaves of a morning grey?” asked Rumi, not really expecting an answer.

“Not all treasure is gold, there is one treasure that comes from the heart, read it and be blessed.” And with that the postman turned around and shuffled away until he was quite gone.

Rumi shut the front door and began his long walk again. Some days are an endless variety of ennui.

“I’ll deal with it all tomorrow,” he said when he got to his chair to lie down and sleep.

Images from Pixabay

Join us @steemitbloggers
_{Animation By @zord189}

And now we know where the empty of money beat-up old suitcase went to...