Regret and Apathy / A short story

She was on him, screaming his name, squirming like a hungry maggot while he lay still enjoying the springiness of the bed. She was a passionate, fiery-eyed goddess and He was carrying an entire galaxy in his head. But in the end, underneath they were both dead. She longed for a countryside life with horses and pigs and cows and little yellow seeds that she imagined growing into big fat trees. He longed for nothing anymore, except perhaps the continuous oral care of his cock. To be honest both their dreams were futile, for while one tries to follow her dream, the other pins her down by the mouth with his manhood. These are all metaphors. In the morning they have coffee together, hungover without drinking, cross-eyed and cross with each other, for no apparent reason. It is just so. They have no work, no hassles, and no expectations from other people to slow them down. But here the question arises: slow them down for what? In twenty years time, they will not go anywhere. The same house will stand in the same place on the same street, decaying. By that time his cock will not be able to pin down even a squirrel, and it won’t even matter. It will be too late, too late for her. Her blonde hair will be doled with wisps of grey and white silk, and her hands will be too coarse and deathly to hold the reins of a horse.

After a series of genial miscarriages and insipid attempts at accelerating whatever she considered happiness to be (she didn't know. You and I don't know, either), her want of life has faded away. Her eyes reflect the apathy and grief of her city, the streets of which are swarming with people, creatures, mirrors of each other, all dead underneath. Yet they hide their loneliness well, deliberately and with haste. He likes to think that he doesn’t, anymore. His loneliness is poised on a sad little stage for all to see. He visits strip-clubs and dingy pubs with suspiciously mangy creatures, who spend their time polishing their ten-foot fingernails with a hot bowl of wax while eating soup with their vagina dentate. They are strange. He is lonely.
He likes soup but it doesn’t taste like anything anymore.

They got themselves a dog, a thin old spaniel, the name being Rasputin, blind as a worm. He wasn’t a very good dog, but that too is debatable. Half of her time went by cleaning his faeces and washing all the insects crawling over his body. He drooled like a hagfish. She loved him but he only humped her leg, sometimes, half-heartedly. She tried to take him for walks but Rasputin would prefer to stay, instead, with Him. He, on the other hand, hated Rasputin and would tie him up to a poplar tree in the garden and kick him repetitively. After a point that seemed to be his favourite pastime. After a point, Rasputin was no more. His ribs had been kicked open and he died a terribly painful death on a painfully festive night. She cried a little, while he got his excuse to get drunk with suspiciously mangy women. Life drifted by.

On the day of his death, he was at the museum. A horrendously heavy night of drinking had left him wandering zig-zag with a bottle of rum in his hand all around town. A suspiciously mangy creature followed him, eyes rolling, lips wet. Soon enough and somehow or other he had stumbled towards the museum, and it seemed to him natural that, since he had come this far, why not give himself a free tour? The time seems right to see the history of our little ickle earth, what with the dinosaurs, and the fossils, and the artefacts, and all that science, mystery, legend... "Fucking monkeys," he thought. And so he broke in, walked halfway down the hall and passed out. Asleep, he went on to choke on his own vomit and die; he didn't even have the reigns to his life in his hands at the moment of his passing. Fucking monkeys.

If anything, she was jealous. Her eyes had not delivered tears when she heard of His death. Her eyes had delivered only a look of confusion, and then a look of anger, and then a look of acceptance. And the next day it was a look of jealousy. It always leads to jealousy with these people, thought God, the most jealous of them all. And so, now she was all alone, and the house was as empty as her mind. She only felt grief and a curiously large amount of self-pity. In her coming years, she will never realise that the change she had wanted, the excitement she craved all her life, was always within reach, always in her hands. She only had to reach out and grab it, and shove it out towards the sky for all the stars to see. In the coming years, she will inevitably fail, spiritually, to realise that she, like so many of us, has lived the life of a vegetable. And on the day of her death she, just like him, will regret every day of her life. Perhaps she will not falter with her own reigns, but that's just a post-script to the gargantuan, treacherous parasite that is regret.

And those of us who do not experience life, but rather passively drift by without empathy, without compassion, within the dystopia of spirit-crushing capitalism, we shall all regret, and never be able to escape this samsara.

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artwork: #pen on #paper.