The Waves at the Window
A
poor, bright boy; not athletic or gifted with size.
He made the popular girls – and the
bullies – laugh. Disapproving teachers believed he could do better.
A job in a warehouse, seventy-six
pounds a week; he never had so much money, but he was bored. They got him in
the office when they heard that he consistently completed half of the following
week’s orders every Friday afternoon.
A team leader at twenty-one, a
supervisor at twenty-three, and a salary exceeding twenty-thousand pounds – not
bad at all.
Anna, the girl he loved in school. They
married and she gave birth to his first child when they were twenty-five. A
second was born on his twenty-sixth birthday.
He bought a four-bedroomed house in
the village but had to drive, every day, into the city for meetings, meetings,
meetings.
He skipped lunch but gained weight
anyway.
For years his children would wave at
the window until the eldest turned ten and preferred the extra fifteen minutes
in bed, the little one always emulated his big brother. Anna ceased to offer up
that cold, hard pucker in the mornings, hiding her face behind toast and coffee.
She had an affair: a younger man
with a degree; a teacher.
On the same day his mother died his
eldest was arrested for possession of cannabis.
Cancer made him impotent but his libido left him when his
wife did. The smell of liquor was on him in the mornings. Nausea, like the
frosted oscilloscopic patterns on the glass partitions in the office, where he
spends too much time, churned and subsided inside him.
The itchy sting of piss on his
thighs. The full moon obscured by a great flaming rock. Anna’s face. The fire
bursts before it and tears across the sky, deafening. It strikes the sea thirty
miles out.
Beneath the fist of a furious god, the
far edges of the city collapse under the force as it roars closer to the tower he
occupies alone. The invoice in his hand becomes a futile mess in his fist. The
taste of glass. The sharp punch of death. The waves hit the window.
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