His dark hair drenched in sweat, Corey tears his green eyes open, when he hears his rumbling alarm clock. The 7:15-freight-train, a steel-throated beast that shakes the foundations of his makeshift home under the bridge just as mercilessly as it shakes his sanity.
The cold dampness of pre-dawn seeps into his 40-year-old bones, urging him to pull his threadbare blanket tighter. Stiff of dirt, the fabric rustles, as if it were out of autumn leaves, and so it could be. Out here you take anything that can somehow keep you warm.
What's this stench? Like something died out here, and maybe it did. He would certainly not be surprised.
When he pulls up his nose, his bedraggled beard starts trembling. Until last year, he used to wake to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee every morning, and look forward to the tapping of his fingers on the keyboard, as they would jump from letter to letter and put down words that matter.
Ever since he ended up here, however, the aroma of roasted coffee beans has been replaced by the stench of stale beer, burnt wood, and the acrid tang of despair that is clinging to everyone who calls the hollow under the train bridge their, hopefully only temporary, home.
Like everybody else around here, Corey is a ghost. Only a shadow of the successful journalist he once was, even though he used to be good, damn good at his job.
He would dig deep, chase leads across continents, and break stories that would make headlines on a day to day basis. Until an unearthed revelation that the government wanted buried. Right next to it they buried the person who brought it to the surface, Corey himself.
Now what is left of him is only a cautionary tale that is whispered about in the newsrooms across town.
He is a former somebody who dared to pull up and dust off the carpet, under which the lead politicians of more than one country had swept the filth of an entire pigsty, and by doing so he has become a no one.
He has lost everything in the process: his career, his apartment, his friends. It was a slow and agonizing bleed, and what he has left now is only a gnawing emptiness inside his chest, and the haunting ghost of a story that he can no longer write about, because he ceased to exist.
Stiff and aching, his tall and slender body rises. He makes his way past a dozen sleeping bags to scavenge for food and firewood, when a dull ache settles into his stomach. A constant companion that he is slowly learning to ignore. When he stumbles out from under the arch of the bridge, the morning sun hits his edgy face. Biting light. It is as painful as the attack of a black Doberman that you would overlook at night.
Due to the mess that is humanity, the sky is light-polluted nowadays, and night is just night, without a moon or stars. Amidst the dark, how could anyone discover a black dog, before its teeth are bared?
By the time you see a flash of white, it is too late, and the painful bite, no longer preventable. With the sun it is different. It rams its rays into Corey's eyes, as if they were teeth, but unlike a Doberman at night, he sees it coming.
He could have avoided the bite and the pain that it causes, if he had looked away or closed his eyes. Much like with his ex-wife, when he noticed new jewelry on her almost every day. When she started working on the weekend and ended phone calls, as he entered a room. Then she changed her passwords, even though they used to know everything about each other. A bit thereafter her cheeks started smelling of musk, even though he never wore aftershave with that scent, and would prefer the natural odor of the wild and stormy ocean.
Warning signs to which Corey could have closed his eyes. He could have looked away and would not have had to investigate whether or not she was having an affair.
But who feels comfortable in the dark?
Corey does not, and for good reason. Even though you cannot see them, dangers are lurking in the shadows, and those that you don't recognize, you cannot even fight.
It's better to shine a light on them, so he thinks, and look them in the eye, so you can, at least, prepare yourself for them.
He would never choose to stay blind. He hasn't done so with his ex-wife, not with the unsettling things that he used to uncover, and neither is he willing to do it with the sun just now. He encounters its teeth with his eyes wide open. In a way, the stinging pain he is feeling is his own fault, and perhaps the one that you're taking responsibility for yourself is the worst of all.
The suffering that you could have prevented if your own wellbeing had been worth more to you than the recognition of not yet even visible things which could become a threat to it someday. The agony that you could have avoided, if the act of looking away hadn't frightened you more than everything, no matter how awful, that you could possibly make out if you kept your eyes wide open.
Before she broke off contact, Corey´s mother used to say that the illumination of things is only important to those who don't feel safe in their own skin. People like that, she'd say, aren't cut out for life in general. They are more scared of the uncertainty that is inherent in an existence than of death itself, and they consider the joys of life suspicious, as they feel like they deserve them just as little as a disobedient dog, a piece of sausage.
Maybe she was right. Out here, under the bridge, Corey is slowly starting to wonder if nowadays only those who are punishing themselves are still after light and clarity, after certainty and truth.
She looks down at him, laughing. His mother might do so, too, but right now he feels like the sun is doing so on its never-changing way across the horizon. It is shining and radiating, as if it is pleased with the pain that torments him after his attempt to encounter it eye to eye.
Let it laugh, he thinks. Just let it! I don´t give a fuck!
He will show forgiveness. He´ll forgive the sun for the bite, just like he forgave his mother for a horrific childhood, and his ex-wife for everything, including the things that he never knew about, since she smashed his headlights and ran off, before he could illuminate every corner of her lies.
Forgiveness… Corey thought it would feel better. To be honest, he is not feeling much, besides his painfully empty stomach that seems to start devouring itself. He needs to find something to eat. A discarded crust of bread, a nettle, or the root of a tree. Anything to keep the hunger at bay.
When he makes his way through the sleeping rows of homeless people and other outcasts who are living right beside him, they slowly start stirring and waking up.
Whispering Willy, a gaunt man who claims to hear the secrets of the wind, is muttering to himself close to the riverbank. Big Joe, a hulk of a man who is rumoured to have ties to the local mafia, is nursing a dark and potent looking drink, his eyes shadowed with perpetual threat. Just behind him, there is Maya, a young woman with haunted glances, who sketches intricate portraits in the dirt all day long with pieces of charcoal.
All of them are broken, and fractured. As if they were cursed, they are discarded by a society that has no use for them anymore. Or perhaps it never did, and that is how they ended up here.
Food is rare out here. Even breadcrumbs would fall victim to the piercingly keowing seagulls that are constantly circling above the river, before any of the people who are living here would get their hands on them.
Down at the banks, in between two rocks, Corey comes across a can of beer. It gives off a dull thud when his perforated leather boot gently kicks it. An attempt to figure out whether it is a treasure that he found, or rather useless scrap metal, which has a worth of its own, according to Skinny Winnie, a bottle collector five sleeping bags away from Corey´s blanket.
Winnie won't get this one, this one is full!
For now it will have to do against Corey's hunger. He bends down to pick it up, then returns to his sleeping spot, and when his rough hands finally open the can, it pukes foam into his face.
What a day, he thinks, wiping it off with the sleeve of his torn, olive-green coat. What a shitshow of a day!
While the sun is wasting its light on a sky without blue, he's slipping away on his can, and hoping to get wasted, because it helps with the pain that the sun just gave him.
Everything is like every other day. The tossing and turning in the sleeping bags. The light of the rising sun. The dampness of dawn. The hunger in his stomach, and the stale taste of a luke-warm beer on his tongue.
Not much is new, when his eyes scout the environment. Here and there he sees a tree between the poles and houses in the distance. Naked, and with its head bowed, it is standing there, as if without its dress of leaves it is ashamed of the bony skeleton that you can see underneath the dried up bark. So it should be, he thinks. It doesn't look well anymore at all, and not even birds are sitting on it.
He is sending his eyes into the sky, but not even up there he can see any. Their sonorous voices are playing, as if off tape, but they stay invisible, because perhaps the millions of lunatics were sane, when they denied their existence on social media and declared them a government scam, a surveillance system that only pretends to be living. Just like most people do, as well.
Corey doesn't know what to make of it. Of the sun without blue. Of the trees without leaves. Of the birds that don't fly and might not even be alive, or of the many humans nowadays who lack a human side.
He forgave the sun, so that something could become of this day, but days like this should not even exist. Days that are caught between two stools, where your bottom only meets emptiness that cannot hold it up and has it crashing on the ground. Days full of neither, and those have been for a while, the thinks. For weeks it hasn't been summer, and neither has it been winter. It hasn't been cold, and neither has it been warm. It hasn't been pleasant, and neither has it been unpleasant to sit next to a can of beer and stare into space, as if life isn't waiting to be lived, and maybe it really isn't, on a day like this.
An inch away from Corey´s feet, miniature trees are sprouting. Those with the pleasant scent. Those that only grow as high as a finger and have no crown. No branches, no bark, and no trunk, either. Only a puny stalk, on which a bud gathers its strength, like an exhausted hiker on a mountain top. Until it has enough, it will stay closed. For how long exactly is up to the sky above, because at some point the safecracker-sun will use its laser beams to pry open even the weakest buds, although they may not want to open up and only feel pain in the process.
It's doubtful that they will forgive it just like Corey did today, because nature is as unfamiliar with mercy and forgiveness as a virgin is with the Kama Sutra. He will keep an eye on it, and despite his forgiveness, both of his - he squints - still hurt like hell. Hopefully, the miniature trees will feel less pain under the sun than he is feeling.
Somewhere inside the buds, they're purple. You cannot see it yet, but like the eye color of a wasted party girl, who can no longer lift her eyelids but tries to blink out of the slit they are forming, the eyeballs rolling, you can sense it either way.
What are they even doing here? The miniature-trees that could, with a little generosity, be called flowers? To become actual ones, they are lacking blossoms, and perhaps that is why they're here. Because only things that are missing something in order to become anything are gathered in this place. The things that no one who has become something is missing. Those that no one really needed. The same ones that nobody will ever want.
Around here, those flowers are growing everywhere, in entire fields. Around here, where rusty knives with blunt edges are disposed of so they won't be found by investigators, who are looking for them in a murder on the other side of town. Around here, where ivy vines grow on the driver's seats of corroded cars, and even though their roots are tightly wrapped around the accelerator pedals, they won't get to move. Because the engines are missing after last night, when a crackhead broke into the bumpers and ripped them out, like a cannibal, a heart, to sell them for a few cents online. Around here, where toasters designed only for toasting look like they're from the 16th century next to sandwich grills with roasting and moisturizing functions. What they, however, have in common is that all of them have seen better days. With their cables hanging out, like the tongue from the greedy mouth of a fatso with a food craving, and what he has been missing ever since he plugged them into the socket is a heartbeat. Because, with flying sparks, they blew up into his face, which was enough to blow out his lights, and thereafter they ended up here.
Everything that's broken somehow is here. Everything that has gone belly up, or turned somebody belly up. Hundreds, maybe thousands of useless things and old appliances are cuddling in the hollow before Corey. Like lazy lovers, who don't actually love each other, but have settled in to convince themselves of it out of convenience, so they won't have to move anywhere ever again, and can just stare up at the sunny sky, sickeningly content, before they will finally die and disintegrate.
Perhaps there are exactly as many useless things under the bridge as there are flowers that are lacking blossoms. Whether that is true or not, no one can really tell, because neither the blossomless flowers nor the useless things that are piling up next to Corey are important enough to anyone to ever be counted or even noticed.
Well, perhaps someone takes notice. The young man with the black hair who is just arriving. Observingly, like only a journalist would be, Corey is staring at him. The blue eyes of the man are flooding his stubble-face. They're overflowing, like a clogged toilet, as he stumbles from one old gadget to the next and eyes each of them as eagerly as if it were the plump butt of an adventurous 20-year-old.
He is on his way to his baggage, a tumbling and middle-aged skeleton, whose clothes indicate that she was a female some day. Now she is waiting for him under the swaying train bridge, enveloped in the smoke that her crack pipe coughs out. She is jealous of the old gadgets, because in a long time she hasn't been eyed at by him as eagerly as he is eying them. Despite it, she has a lot in common with them, primarily the lacking purpose.
They all fit the picture perfectly. The dumped murder weapons, and the ivy-car-racers that are forced to stand still due to a lack of engines. The broken toasters, and the tongue-sticking sandwich grills that got a fatso killed. The petalless flowers, and the stubble-faced man with his baggage and the burning desire for old appliances. The formerly feminine, swaying skeleton under the decaying bridge, on which a freight train transports a thousand new goods to the stores, so they will be bought by brainless shopaholics, who have no use for them at all, and will soon dump them out here.
Somehow, everything that Corey sees all day is the same, only in different shapes and phases. Everything, including himself. We, who are here on a day of neither, he thinks, are the same. Even the sun is one of us, no one really needs it right now and probably no one ever will again, because it ruins your health, and if it continues like this for the rest of the day, it will burn the flowers without blossoms, before they can grow any.
Beside the spanning arch of the bridge, the sun´s heat sticks to the corroding asphalt, as if the tar were wet. Perhaps the blazing-hot rays of light have liquefied it, when the warm downdraft whipped them across it and stuck their fire to it, as if it were a freshly spat-out chewing gum with artificial strawberry taste that had to leave the mouth of a hopeless dreamer, who was waiting for a kiss, even though the woman of his dreams was only disgusted by him.
Corey has been sitting here for weeks, and barely has he seen a thing that would disturb the picture of uselessness that they - the sun, the old appliances, the freight train goods, the petalless flowers, the skeleton with the crack pipe, the stubble-faced man with the baggage, and himself - are displaying. Only one thing doesn't belong here. It doesn't belong to them. Not to the lack of purpose and meaning that unites all of them.
An obsidian cat that seems to enjoy being there. Amidst the neither-nor, with the sun on its dusty fur, it is rolling around and purring in the heat of the blinding light that the wind sticks to the asphalt. It has a bright red collar around its neck, a heart-shaped pendant dangling down from it, meaning it belongs to someone who loves and misses it. To someone who benefits from it, because without even trying to be useful, early in the morning, when it feels like it, it rubs its head against her owner´s leg and heals his aching joints with its body heat.
Just fuck out of here, Corey thinks. You don´t fit into this place, and make the lack of purpose around here unbearable.
Staring at it, he sips down his beer and remembers that he grew up with a few of her kind. Before he turned 13, all of them died. They were torn apart by lawnmowers, crushed by trains, shot by angry neighbors for droppings in the sandbox, or run over by trucks, as were the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
Weaving between the debris, the black cat glues its emerald eyes to him. He has seen stray cats around the bridge before, but this one is different. It carries itself with a certain confidence. With a regal air that seems absurd in this squalid environment. Its collar starts gleaming, and the sunlight has the heart-shaped pendant on it glowing.
"Shoo," Corey mutters in between sips of beer, waving his hand, because if there is one thing he doesn't need, it is another mouth to feed.
The cat doesn't budge, but patiently sits down and regards him with unwavering intensity.
He tries to look away for once, because he has learned from his mistakes. At first, the eyes on him make him feel uncomfortable. Nervously, his fingers start playing with the cap of his can, but the longer the cat keeps on staring, the more of his resolve is crumbling.
Fine, just one look…
With a dull thud, he puts the can away and bends forward until the cat cautiously approaches. All of a sudden, its sun-warm head rubs against his knee. Because it has just plunged it into the deadly heat that is stuck to the asphalt, Corey can feel it eating through his worn out jeans.
Oh, he shouldn't have looked!
He wasn't ready for this.
This is too close, he thinks.