Hungry

The colors on the couch were softer than they had been before. Owing mainly to very hard water belched out and coughed up from copper pipes into an iron basin they’d had little choice in the matter. Theirs was to fade at a rate of no more often than once a week with soaps and suds and sometimes bleach through several cycles culminating in a heavy spin, a thorough jerk and a sudden stop. For now they were up to what they toiled at for the rest of the time. Covering the larger portions of a mattress that covered the larger portions of a box spring that covered some small section of a floor. The floor would feel cold when it was stepped on with naked feet but nothing of the like was happening just yet. For now, like the sheets, it was at its main purpose which was to keep many un-named inanimate objects off of a soil that was no more than half a foot below at any and all times. This is the manner in which the box spring and the mattress and the sheets were being kept where they were. I was covered up in the sheets as the room, like the floor, had gotten cold and there was no thermostat because there was no heater and there was no need for a heater anyway because there was no insulation to keep the warmth from going anywhere but inside these walls. Soup would have been good right then but soup only warms the stomach and there would have been a whole lot more that was left cold. Besides there wasn’t any soup. I don’t know that there’d ever been any soup in that house. I just knew that it was cold, would be colder without the sheets an that it was a couple of hours before I had to be anywhere. And so now the best thing to do was to continue laying down and think of nothing at all because there was nothing at all worth thinking about. So I just stared at some walls that were white and empty except for pictures of people I’d never met and pictures of places I’d never been. The pictures were held in place against gravity by multi-colored thumbtacks that had been punched into place by not only a thumb but an index finger as well. Their colors had not faded and were pleasant to look at but would o doubt also been cold to the touch as they were made out of plastic and plastic isn’t a very good insulator. Nor at any time a better insulator than what was not between the surface of these walls and the outside of their structure.

As I was on that mattress and not shivering very much I could hear the knuckles on glass and shoes on a porch. It was a late hour of the early afternoon and so I supposed it an obvious thing that more industrious persons might be about using moments of the day that I was presently hiding away from. As I knew no industrious persons of such earlier descriptions I hadn’t any guesses of who it might be that was knocking at my door. With no guesses or interests or curiosities to appease I turned my head in another direction and waited for whoever it was to go away. They were very persistent. They were very insistent. And I decided to ignore them no more. So my feet fell to a floor that had been waiting there for a time and I found that I was wrong and it was not so cold after all. All the same I put on a blue and white striped robe and began walking. As with walk there was hope. Hope that in this not so cold and sometimes so very wrong I wouldn’t find a couple of transients found and shown up at my door. Looking for a ride to the health clinic, looking for cigarettes, looking for conversations and even more green bottles. There was no way they could have found me . . . there was no way they could have known . . . still I worried.

Once passed the hallway I took a moment that was there to admire how well the living room poured out from the hall and passed right back again into the dining room. This was an awfully nice house. Much awfully nicer than the amount of money that went into the rent keeping me here could assume. Two hundred and twelve dollars for every month. That’s all it took. To have these hard floors, and this far away ceiling. To have a front porch that now carried an unknown person and between them and me a fine wood door with a fine glass area up top that was now ever more furiously being rapt.

I took a few more moments to admire how the handsome brass locking mechanism and handsome brass locking knob fit well into a door filling no more than four corners and used far more than that in most single days. The locking mechanism itself must have dated back several decades but now seemed very unlikely to have been an original from the houses construction back then during the  second score of the last centuries years.

The pounding from the outside continued. Each one louder and quicker than the one before. Excess of that nature can only go so far. So far as it was getting this time was me glancing across some undetermined distance and it could be seen that a dark hand had dark fingers and slightly blue knobs and slightly blue joints that were being applied . . . retracted . . . and then applied some more.  Waiting no more a door was pulled and then it was drawn. From a vantage no longer obscured it was seen that the focus of such determination was no more than an old woman. An old woman who was tiny . . . who was confused . . . who was lost. I didn’t know how long it would remain polite to gape. I didn’t know that it was ever so polite to gape. But I didn’t have to think on that too much as she spoke. And when she spoke . . . when she spoke it confused me. Even more surprised at that than at staring down by her two puffy eyes that could as easily have been dual harvest moons occupying a symmetrical space on an oddly bright and oddly starless night. She looked like a child, except children don’t have wrinkle . . . except that children haven’t gone gray . . . and but for those  things I wouldn’t have known. Wouldn’t have expected that she could speak to me . . . or perhaps just couldn’t have believed that I would have been there to hear her when she spoke. And thought it was only one word I still didn’t understand it . . . really couldn’t place it where it needed to go until I looked again and made sure that this fragile old woman child in solid baby doll shoes was really there . . . and that I was really there and that I was not back in some room on some floor with some mattress clinging stupidly. And when her one word finally hit I knew that she must have been cold and more than that I knew that she must have been hungry. This is when the door closed on her and I turned around after having delivered to her one less word than she’d given me.

**

The kitchen was the only room in the house that didn’t have wooden planks for a floor. In their place were tiles fit together as if  forming conclusions to the world’s simplest jigsaw puzzle. I stood on their conclusions wondering what I should feed the old woman when I came across a can of soup that I only then remembered had been somebody’s idea of a good housewarming gift. The soup was warmed and in something like deliberation poured from an all copper pot into a half porcelain bowl. Perishable bodies had made this non-perishable item as well as the spoon that was dropped into its place. These things were then carried from a kitchen to a porch.

The woman was still there so I gave her the bowl and the spoon and some soup and then closed a door on her again. I went to a couch and sat there and thought about how people say that if you feed a cat once it will return everyday in hopes of more meals. And though I sometimes liked cats and sometimes didn’t like cats I had no ideas on what I would do with an old lady and had some ideas that my land lord might not like it so much and that wasn’t going to be so good.

And so I went strolling again up off a couch that was there most of the time and covered in cloth that usually didn’t end up in the wash with the bath robes and sheets. There were other things that I wanted to look at in the kitchen and so that is where this particular stroll ended and so I was there and here and in front of a refrigerator door thatwas opened so I could see what I was really looking for and then I grabbed it up and took another stroll to the front porch. I stood there looking again but not at the half empty parcel in my hand but rather at the porch that was all empty except for some chains and a swing that spit between the two. No more dark hands and no more old child like woman here and I paced for a minute or maybe two minutes before pacing down some steps. From here to the road the other steps lent and once there looks were made from left toright. But there was nothing more to be seen and so nothing more was.