Hello everyone, this is my first post. Critiques are always welcome.

A Still Age

by Valpo

The old man’s features were illuminated by the flickering firelight he faced as he sat motionless in the faded blue armchair. This was the scene of many an evening hour since farther back than he cared to remember.

The chair’s cover was worn through; yellowed stuffing erupted motionlessly from holes in the arms, back, and cushion; it smelled of dust, dry leaves, cloves, years. It had always been somewhat uncomfortable, but the old man had ceased to notice long ago.

Course, bony, discolored hands rested motionless on its arms. Head slightly bowed, eyes fixed in a distant stare—intermittently interrupted by the flitting of a pupil. He listened to the old hardwood floors creak under the shifting weight of the settling walls, the sigh of the tired breath from his nose, the inscrutable language of the flame… he watched his thoughts superimpose themselves over the dancing flame… it was a fitting backdrop.

He had always been among the quiet ranks of the subdued—subsumed by the silencing complexity of life, seemingly unaffected by malicious intentions, responsive to kindness with a subtle gratitude that only those who knew him well could detect. No one knew him well. Hardly anyone knew him at all.

If he kept quite still in the arms of the decrepit chair—unblinking in the dance of the blaze—he would gradually lose track of the locations of his extremities. There was no clock in the room, and the clock that was not there didn’t tick, he would gradually transform into a small cloud, hovering at head-height.

As he became entranced by the dance, transfixed by the flames, he would lose everything else. This ghostly, timeless, disembodied perspective allowed him to watch, passively, whatever memories stepped up to perform their macabre spectacle against the inferno.

On account of the war, one might think that it was the dozens of terrific, dismal, wretched memories forever ingrained—mercilessly branded with orange, ethereal iron—in the old man’s mind that tortured him as he and the time passed each other. In the past, this painful process of mental self-immolation had been his evening chore. But now the water of time had doused those malevolent embers, and they no longer moved him.

Sometimes—maybe once in any one of the dripping marmalade hours—a subtle disturbance would briefly invade face. Eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly, his enraptured gaze would fall momentarily to the dust-lined meeting of the floor and fireplace. The corners of his mouth would involuntarily dip downward, the brief victory in a ceaseless turmoil that rages inside the stoic and the strong. It was nearly detectable, but that didn't matter. There wasn’t anyone to detect it.

The old man had “good” memories: memories of childhood’s innocent wonders, humorous and earnest failures, summer naps in green clearings with young, sweet, tumultuous love. Glimpses of old friends whose faces and voices he could not conjure, the intricate substance of family, the skeletons of places that had once been home. They should have merely been the source of a meek smile, tempered with the pang of nostalgic sorrow, bittersweet yearning for those days that were no longer.

But these memories were polluted by vivid, invading, nameless sensations. An insidious array of inexpressible sentimental abstractions, all smeared together as fluid time flowed over them. They were vague hues of obscene colors, translucent with grey light or enclosed in crimson opacity. They were textures repulsive to the touch. They were traces of the vivid odor viscera, the brutal sounds of entropy in the distance, the faint tingle of an inedible flavor. They swept over him without warning, subtly contorting his face with unbearable dread. For anyone else, they would have been tears.

Rich, smoldering, tempestuous—the swarming substance of memory melded with ethereal heat.

His grip tightened on the small glass vial in his trembling right hand, which was now beginning to tremble in its struggle against the serenity of helplessness. Walk gently into the night while the light keeps raging on.

He was motionless.