'Pavement' (A Very Short Story)

The following short story was originally published in Vol. 4, Issue 4 (July 4, 2021) of PunchRiot, a literary magazine.

PAVEMENT
by Cody Clarke

I’m a writer and the pavement hurts. I’ve got my feet planted in the earth I swear, but the planet is what it is. I’m hungry days. I go to the post office a lot. I’m always mailing out something or other. The daytime is hard on my eyes in ways most don’t understand. The night makes sense, indoors makes sense—the two together are like covers and pillow. I do my best work at night. I do my best living at night. If all of life were night, I could live forever.

I’ve never been to the post office any time before just before closing. For me it is as though the post office is only open a sliver of time a day, like a wormhole, and I must catch it. That is my bit of daytime. Then on the way home, the weather of light changes, and it is dark again. But going to the post office, I see so much—I see families so well off it makes no sense. So well off you could put a gun to their head and ask for a dollar and they wouldn’t give you anything, would swear they had nothing to give, and then they’d die and you’d open their wallet and it would be dollars of all kinds, so plentiful you could cry. These people are so rich that they are mentally retarded. You can see it in their face as if it were down syndrome.

I know everything about these fucking types of people. I know what the knees of the dads smell like. I know what the labia of the moms look like. I know every food the kids like and don’t like. I know all of this just by passing them in the street. It’s my writer seventh sense kicking in. I could be a nanny like a motherfucker. I could make twenty-something, thirty-something hot women obsolete. They would have to get a new job on a level seen only a few times in American history. They would be living on a reservation somewhere.

Every day I just want to stop one of these fucking families and ask them to take me home with them. Just let me live with them. Let me not have to worry anymore, let me not have to mail things just to live. Let me just live and be a part of their family, like a dog or a cat or a fish. There is nothing wrong with that. Just me, a man, not their blood, but just there. Rooming. They always have an extra bedroom. Their fucking houses, I swear to god. You have no idea. I can see their houses in my head. I can see their houses in the way they walk. I can see every digit in their bank account. I can see the way the grandmother’s cunt looked the night the dad or the mom was conceived. Opulence everywhere, even in the pubes. Opulence unending. The rich getting richer. I could write a book on their entire family tree that could fill a garden.

I wish it were socially acceptable to be accepted by and to accept strangers. I would be so good to them, just doing nothing in their lives, just living amongst, just enriching. I’d be like a television but better. Televisions you have to watch—me, I’d just keep to myself. I’d pay no rent, and they’d want none from me. I’d just be around. I’d guard the living room and kitchen and dining room and foyer at night while they slept upstairs. I’d just write and write, and fireplace and fireplace, like a mouse or something. I’d protect them on a level they would never know, yet always appreciate. I’d fuck robbers in the ass in their own homes, before they even reached this one, with my writing, my words. My books everywhere and nowhere at once. Fucking the collective consciousness into perfection.

I would get passed down. A daughter or a son would take more to me, and want me, and be let have me. I’d continue on and on, with them and with the next generation and so on. I don’t ever need to die, living like this. All death is a suicide—old age, the most so. I’d never reach it. I’d just keep being the shit. Happy as a clam, happy as if I ever had love. Happy like a seafood feast.

My feet continue along on the pavement. They grow lighter with every thought of this. The pavement gets more and more like dark grey wetness to draw your name into. Nothing has been put down onto paper but I feel like I mean something. I feel like I can mail something out today without dying. I can barely walk—I just want to collapse. Collapse until a family stops and sees if I’m okay.