Marcelle is attractive.
Marcelle is a football player.
Marcelle is cliché.
Marcelle is a wolf in sheep clothing.
Marcelle is a Christmas fanatic.
Marcelle is just downright annoying.
Matthew Griffin is a certified theatre geek/video game nerd. And...
❝Joseph: I'm going to buy them their Christmas turkey.
Albert: Buy? Do you really mean buy?
Joseph: Yes, Buy! In the spirit of Christmas. The hard part's going to be stealing the money to pay for it.❞
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Matthew's hand clench around the steering wheel of his vehicle. His palms are sweat and his heart is pounding, but he's unsure why.
Maybe it's the gleaming lights from the echoing hallways he can see through the crisp windows. Maybe it's the smell of surgical spirits and cadavers [he pretends to know how the dead smells so death can be a material thing and not a fear]. Maybe it's the sun beaming at him malevolently over the red-roof prison.
He's mid-psychotic breakdown, sitting in front of the radiology building. He barely took two breaths since he stopped, his lungs ache and his bones are weak. He's been grinding and pounding on Marcelle's word. He hasn't accepted the fact that his mother is about to die and he hasn't seen her in weeks.
But he doesn't want to see her.
He doesn't want to see her bronze skin pale and pasty. He doesn't want to see her body shrunken down to cadaverous proportions, just because she doesn't feel obligated to eat. Because she's dying. She used to be fat [she'll call it robust or proportionate] and happy. Very fat and very happy. He doesn't want to sit in the room and look at his blank reflection on her bald head—he doesn't want to see her kill herself.
Cancer is the body's natural route of suicide.
The shrubs nestled against the hospital walls are crumpled, like litter, rotting slowly and dyeing the earth with stench and food for weeds. The paint chips from the walls, collecting dust in the open wound of sandstone. Just outside his reach is a board explaining directions and an old lady with shin like a crocodile stands next to it.
He swears she is looking right at him. She's forcing him to feel uncomfortable in the only comfortable environment he has. Centipedes rush to and fro beneath his skin. He's been scratching his arms for the veins to protrude in river-like streaks across his landscape of skin. He ate a few anti-acid-reflux chews.
He's stalling.
He's chewing on his lip as if it tastes like fucking corn chips and he's still stalling. He tastes iron on the tip of his tongue and his cuticles wash in blood, and he is stalling.
The radio's been buzzing white noise since he stopped here. He can't handle the infrequent silence—it's gnawing on him. Silence is cancer to the ear—the longer it lingers, the worse you get. You don't see suicides happening at concerts, they happen in the silence of your own mind.
