blood & gunk

Jaded, Motherfucker?

A cigarette lowly hangs from Andrea's lips. Her uneven bangs crown over her eyes, the rest of her hair shorter and darker than it was a fortnight ago. The hair change is a crisis management textbook step. In this case, it is a broken hope smudged onto her ribs.

Andrea takes a drag from her cigarette, gazing the shaking ash dispenser on the washing machine as it rattles. She clears her cigarette in the air, the ashes dropping to the floor. Her feet lean against an adjacent drying machine. Her eyes lurk over the impossibility of getting her shit together for once and for all.

She thinks the bangs are somewhere between being a painfully pretentious idea and a cliché when long-lost Hope Smasher appears through the smoke accumulated in the small laundry room, stepping in.

She sucks on her menthol stick, minding the only fact that she must pretend he died within the first twenty four hours of his disappearance.

She notices that his head's been bandaged as he steps closer. She'd rather die. She'd rather die than be anywhere else. The smoke escapes her mouth in a tragic sigh, her chest feeling shallower.

Hope Smasher, who could be more commonly known as Hugh outside Andrea's head, audaciously takes the space beside her feet, and now Andrea won't be able to stretch her legs when they cramp out of her body in five minutes. The rattling of the washing machine only barely dazes out the over-pressurised tension climbing in the air.

Hugh doesn't have boundaries. Perhaps if he did, they wouldn't be in such a fucked up situation. But it's real - he has the moral and empathetic capability of a toilet brush. You can eat his heart out and he will live for a hundred years. He starts, his hands interlocked in his lap, 'I usually work twenty hours a week. The past two have been eighty hour weeks.'

Andrea flickers her eyes to the washing machine, watching the dispenser shaking like every nerve Hugh just plucked with the inexplicably soft look in his eyes. A massive part of Andrea odiously wishes he doesn't taste sleep for at least a year. It could pay the debt.

'Sounds like a lot,' she rasps, getting up from her seat and maintaining a nitrogen-cold demeanour and glare.

M quietens suddenly, his cheeks sinking in his pale face. He freezes in his seat when Andrea leans on the other washing machine and the sternness in her eyes pours into his.

He fumbles with his pocket and pulls out his mobile. 'Look at what happened on the way to work,' he casually looks up photos of a busted train and a broken truck in a Shakespearean tragedy of a car accident.

Andrea ignores the anti-glare screen of his mobile flashing in front of her with the photos. Her eyes are on him the entirety of the time, peeling off with all resistance to blinking. 'At least you didn't die.'

He drowns inside himself, in his own pee and shit and blood and gunk. In his own feelings. In his own body. Countless times over and over. 'Not for lack of trying.' He gulps, his knees weakening and bones aching. 'No one died though. They're suing the truck driver.. Shitty luck.'

'Should've been angry with the human condition enough he had to smash his bloody vehicle,' Andrea seethes. For the clinical observer, Andrea is actually boiling and already radiating the amount of heat sufficient to melt the room into nothing.

Hugh furrows his eyebrows, tilting his head lightly as he fixes his glasses. 'It's such a pointless thing to do in this time.'

She arches a single brow. 'What should be pointful then, right now?' the sarcasm in her tone can drown them.

'Trying to.. take care of everyone the best we can, come together as a community,' he nods to himself as he talks, as if anything he was saying was making any sense or explanatory of his two-week nonsense disappearance that put Andrea's life through hell and shit and existential crisis. 'But,' he dares looking into Andrea's eyes again. 'people can't see the forest for the trees. And I've spent my time with sad kids and interest databases the past two weeks, so I'm just a bit jaded.'

Jaded, motherfucker? 'I just got out of hospital,' Andrea huffs the smoke in her mouth angrily and smashes her dead cigarette against the washer. 'I'm beyond jaded.'

Hugh's face earnestly changes, and Andrea wants to get this conversation over with without displeasing her over-blown ego. She can pass for a warmer bed tonight. Andrea's eyes, regardless, blare with rage.

'What happened?' he frowns. Andrea frowns too. What the fuck happened to his head? Why does he have a black fucking eye?

'Anaphylaxis,' she blurts, pushing through her mind into reality. 'Got a rash out of nowhere then stopped breathing. It was cinematic.'

'Oh wow,' he says. Oh wow. 'Was it in the middle of a busy street? That gets bonus points.' Andrea finds it a better option to put his head through the glass door of the laundry room then in a spinning washer.

'No,' she swallows down a pit of fire. 'I was at the the bakery.'

Hugh's face retreats from an asshole's face. 'Are you feeling better?' his question comes in unison with the washer's final spin and relieving silence.

The silence falls and it's pure horror. Andrea frantically looks for cigarettes. Hugh thinks she's looking for her basket, so he hands it to her. She frowns.

'Are you feeling better?'

She snatches the basket from his grip. 'Yes.'

She lowers herself carefully to the ground and opens the washer's small door with a shaking hand. Hugh kneels down by her side and leans in while keeping his safe space. He clears his throat quietly to make her look at him. Her eyes are solid and cold and blank. Looking into them puts chills down his spine.

'I'm glad you're better Andrea.'

Like clockwork, she looks away and focuses on the clothes.

'What happened to your head?'

Hugh's lips falter slightly before he shrugs his shoulders. His eyes glued to the floor, he hesitates, 'The truck hit me.'

Eye-water unwillingly accumulates in her eyes in frustration as she shoves a shirt back in the washer and stops moving for a second. She feels the truck hitting her head. Her head actually hurts now. She feels it blaze with pain. Her bones crash against the hard chassis and ground.

'What?' she snaps her head in his direction, narrowing her eyes.

'The truck hit me.'

'C-can't you use a pair of fucking eyes?!' she snaps, gesturing with her hand before she hastily clears away a tear that escapes her eye. 'Why buy fucking glasses if you won't use your bloody eyes?'

He fixes his glasses, gazing the ground and pressing his lips into a thin line to suppress his laughter. 'I'm sorry-' he's actually apologising, 'it really happened so fast.'

Andrea suddenly pulls him to her chest, standing on her knees and wrapping her arms tightly around Hugh's body. If anything, it has been the only thing on her mind when she saw him beside making him scream bloody murder for all the shit he put her through.

'You stink,' she blatantly says, her grip growing tighter.

'I have to shower, yes,' he rubs her back comfortingly. 'I stink.'

Her body softens into his, her face leaning into the crook of his neck. 'I have to shower. I feel awful.'

'All gross?' he plays with the ends of her hair.

'And greasy,' she cries softly. 'I haven't had coffee in ages.'

'We've gotta fix that, don't we?'

She pulls away to look at him, cupping his face. Her face blooming with rubescent features. Hugh's insides gain proper form again. Life looks normal again. Life is beautiful. Her fingers graze his face carefully. 'You must be knackered. You need to sleep.'

'A bit, I do,' he nods, tilting his head lightly to the side.

Her hands hover over his bandaged head. 'Does it hurt?' Like hell. 'When I touch it?' Like the hell inside hell.

'Just a bit,' he winces quietly, holding one of her wrists and pressing it to his lips.

'We'll sort it out,' she nods reassuringly, pecking his forehead. 'I love you. We will.' She hugs him tightly again. Hugh's knees feel like buckling under him in pure emotion. Life is great.