Rooms

Ocher and quince wads pack gaps in particleboard walls. Yellow newspapers underlay linoleum. The apartment is smeared by nicotine When it rains, a paper-Mache atlas of a blotched sky can be read on the ceiling. The window-sill slants, he dares not lean out. He listens to street fights; imagines gore seeping into inky basement wells. Saturday nights bleed into Sunday. Sometime amid the gray hours he decides to leave, to wander vomit blitzed alleys to search a doorstep and steal a Sunday paper, then he returns to the grimy room to read of better places where better crimes get clean away. He has a girlfriend, one he sees only once a week, they sit on the narrow bed reading the news. She tells him that her apartment has thin walls, that at night strangers scratch upon them as if writing to her. Finally He lands a job in a hotel as a night porter. His allotted room is pure white and sterile, more a cell than a living space. If he puts the light on, all that white hurts his eyes, in time he gets used to it. His mind slowly sheds layers of brick-dust and smudged print.