Frank: Chapter 1

The part of town where hard-looking women walk the streets well past the witching hour. The part of town where everyone is used to the occasional staccato of gunfire at three in the afternoon. The part of town where you can buy fried foods and hard liquor at the same store. That's the part of town where rent is the cheapest. That's where you can find a one-room apartment, ten by fifteen feet, with an attached closet slash full bathroom for $300 a month plus utilities. That's the type of apartment Joshua had.

He had moved there after his divorce, which he had taken kind of hard. Soon after it happened, he lost his job with the Postal Service for drinking on the job. During that whole fiasco, with his savings becoming extinct, he had found the shithole that he now called home. He had managed to quit drinking altogether, mainly becaue he couldn't afford any alcohol, and got a job stocking at a grocery store within walking distance. He had a car but the tank was perpetually empty.

Joshua hadn't been able to salvage much after his fall from grace. He had a twin mattress and box spring, no frame, in one corner of the room. There was a microwave that his friend had given him on the counter. An ancient manual typewriter was perched on the "dining table" which was really just half a table with the legless end bolted to the wall. And that was it really. No DVD player. No TV even. No phone. Sure, there were other things, magnets on the provided fridge, a couple of lumpy pillows on the flopbed, but nothing else of material worth. Unless, that is, one takes into account Joshua's creative output.

He had wallpapered his cramped quarters, from floor to ceiling, with ink drawings and pages of words. It was hard to say which there were more of. He had liked to write and draw when he was a teenager, but he had fallen in love, gotten a drone job, kept up with the Joneses, and his childhood desires had fallen to the wayside. Still, Joshua had always done his best work when he felt like crap and life had been given him a lot of inspiration lately.

He went to work. He went home. He sat down at his dining table and made stuff up until he was too tired to continue. Then he went to sleep and got up to go to work. That was his schedule for a little under a year now. He pounded out mostly sci-fi on that Smith-Corona on which the 'e', of all letters, stuck. Or, he'd use a plastic, neon green, watercolor brush and solutions of India ink in various concentrations to make pictures. He'd paint on the same paper he used to type on. He hung them up when no more words would fit or after they dried. He created his own little world with his own little worlds.

One day, Joshua came home to find that his upstair neighbor's water bed had busted, causing water to run through the ceiling down one of his walls. Luckily, the water mostly avoided the carpet and puddled on the linoleum in front of the fridge. A large swath of his creations had been damaged in the process. Cursing, ignoring the puddle for the time being, he began to pull the multi-colored thumbtacks out of the wall. Delicately, he peeled the affected sheets off one by one. As he did, one of them in particular jumped out at him.

It was one of the ink drawings and it was a gloomy scene. In the background, the sky was a swirling mass of gray hues with thick black streaks veining throughout. The suggestion of shadowy hills and a lone, lifeless tree reaching up to the sky. In the foreground, visible from the chest up, a ghost-faced brute in his gray leather jacket with the collar flipped up, white undershirt visible beneath. An abstract badboy with hooked nose and a black flattop pushing up from a widow's peak. Thick lips set in the narrow range between smile and grimace. And empty eyes, unblinking, maybe half-blind, set below dark eyebrows, eyes that seemed to follow you, watching Joshua as he moved about the room.

Even though it had given him the heebie-jeebies for awhile when he first hung it, he was glad that it was relatively unscathed by the flood. Water had only run down it in one spot, a small streak which terminated at the nose. The hooked nose in the drawing now seemed to be slightly embossed from the water damage. Liking that effect, he put it aside, atop the fridge, and cleared away the rest of the wet pictures and prose. After mopping up, he stared at the newly created blank spot on the wall. It would certainly have to be filled. But, for now, he grabbed the picture from atop the fridge. With the water fast drying, the figure's nose looked even more three-dimensional, the paper buckling so that it stuck out nearly half an inch. He took that picture and put it in the middle of the void that had been created.

Afterwards, he microwaved himself dinner and sat at the typewriter, adding sentences to his short story between bites of salisbury steak. Well, it had started as a short story but was fast becoming something more. He was a full twenty pages in with no end in sight. It was called '2095', in homage to Orwell, and dealt with a dystopian future where the government was called The Love. And there was this drug called Bandy Z that was enlightening people through voluntary near-death experience. And there were these creatures called Mindhummers which explained schizophrenia. It was hard to explain because, really, Joshua didn't know exactly what it was yet. He just felt compelled to explore that world further and further.

He wrote for five hours straight, leaving half of his tv dinner forgotten and recongealing. He wrote ten pages and, from that, salvage two that he was really pleased with. Back aching from an extended period hunched over, he dropped to his bed and pushed the clothing from his body. Sleep crept over him quickly. As he drifted ever deeper into himself, slipping into the limbo between consciousness and dream, he thought he heard a whisper in his room, someone grumbling, "...draw..." every few seconds. But Joshua was exhausted past curiousity and well into oblivion.

During the night, a residual pocket of water seeped down the wall, soaking the image of the loner in his wasteland once again. The face ballooned out even more.