Black Plant

Black Plant


And the sun will rise for another day across a city filled with hellish heathens. They are destined to flit about, drowning in themselves, doing exactly as they choose. Sometimes their lives will collide, even if only for a second, but never will they truly entwine because they were set apart. Their very conception was blasphemy.


The heat is unbearable at least, and the over indulgent, under established, operational woman with “high aspirations” loiters on every corner. It is thirteen minutes past four. Am.

The seconds tick as eyes lift to the small cubby-hole of an apartment on the 17th floor of a devastatingly tall structure. Number 174, Blakey’s Block, Central. 5 blocks from Mains Precinct, four from the South Side station.
  There is one miniscule window, a crackle of light through a comparable key hole. A small, shady window projecting no personality whatsoever onto the bedraggled, god forsaken sidewalk beneath.
At this window there would normally be a shadow. A broad, looming figure carrying plenty of menace. Tonight is no exception. He is a peculiar character, but no more peculiar than the building itself.


Two blocks away the Aspirational woman waves down a ride with a mystery male, his tinted Mercedes Coupe glistening in the night as the street light catches on the windscreen, shaving the wing mirrors.
It would be foolish to assume that she will sell her soul but who can really be sure that she will prove us wrong?!

He will continue along the way and straight through the T junction towards Masefield’s. She will ignore him during sharp turns and shady back roads until they reach their destination.

The likelihood that she will accompany him up to his seedy little apartment is inevitable so why procrastinate over her fate?…

The be all and end all is that the entirety of her life follows this tedious yet unpredictable format. She finds sanctuary in every man she meets and never hesitates to trust them wholeheartedly. For her, Promiscuity is the breadwinner; her sole means of survival. She knows nothing else and nobody will tell her any different.

The clock ticks away and the city finds itself in dawn. The shadow of a man no longer stands at his keyhole and the woman did not return to her lodgings this night. The Mercedes stands triumphant yet graceful at the end of the walk and creates a beautifully ignorant contrast with the destitute body slumped at its feet. The body is weak, disorientated and disgraceful.

All pity befalls this backslidden soul. What clothing there is, hangs pathetically from a skeletal frame. The material saturated with an indistinct matter which could easily resemble defecation.

What hope is there for this speechless creature, a motionless wreck deemed worthy of nothing but insanity?

He will breathe for two days more or so but his saving grace is black air. Thick, muggy, polluted and foul.…

So to put him out of his misery in a moment of sheer cold-blood would be criminal would it?!.

As for the woman who sleeps in the flat above, she has no reason to return home. Her night has been profitable but who is to say she cannot gain more. Her naivety will become her demon, but for now, it remains her confidence.
She will awake to her client dressed and ready for work. He currently stands above her catching her breath as it drifts up to him like a heavenly breeze. He encapsulates it and it saddens him for he knows that in a matter of days she will most probably be dead. Either that, or back on the street…

but aren’t these simply peas from the same pod?

She is Hollywood’s classic beauty, lying freely upon his silk woven sheets. Her slight frame and gracious dignity protected by an expanse of lavish crimson material. In her mind, he is her saviour. His money is her safe guard. but it would be cruel and torturous of her to stay and this man knows that he has to let her go,
no matter how useful she was to him…

And finally her eyes open to him throwing her coat onto the bedclothes. “You should be going” he says, “I paid you already”.
She gives a sigh of realised disappointment and starts to make a move for her scattered lace undergarments which hold quite an acquaintance with hungry men’s laminated floorboards.
“you know, I charged you before I realised”.

The comment causes him to jolt and turn. “What do you mean?” he enquires, somewhat unable to comprehend why someone of her “stature” would want to stick around long enough to initiate conversation after “business” had been done.

“I mean, I didn’t know how it would be, otherwise I never would have charged you”, she persists, whilst encountering a blatant struggle with the second clasp of her brassiere.
“Look Sweetcheeks, if you’re looking for service feedback, you were worth your dues ok?” comes his return, rather cold and discerning yet almost certainly obscuring an unavoidable hint of affection that he doesn’t wish to make public for the sake of his own reputation.
“Oh no, you misread me, I wasn’t looking for appraisal, I was simply letting you know how much it meant to me, I mean, sounds petty buy your money’s pretty much wasted here truth be told…. He cuts in …“you shouldn’t be here ok? Don’t you girls just skip the joint when the deeds done? What’s wrong with you?” The pause which follows allows his words to cut through her like sharp, icy blades before she summons the embarrassed courage to formulate a response; “I see. I just thought, you know, we…we kinda had somethin’ right there last night you know?

The man stares deep into her eyes, his heart is telling him to set this strange case straight and pluck her out of her own life, his head meanwhile condemns her “moral” standings and views of her business as hypocrisy, her affectionate conversation as mind tricks. After four or five seconds of precarious psychological warfare, his strong, law sturdy head rings true,, ”No, You misread, what we had last night was a major erection and a small, tight figure, hugged by very little, and that’s all we needed. People like you don’t do this shit. People like you don’t get a special “something” on business night. Are we straight?” …His brow lifts, widening his stare. His green eyes burrow deep into hers and for a moment it could be possible that their lives connect beyond the physical, although judging by her begrudging shift to his left to retrieve the remainder of her clothing, this would appear to be no more than a hopeful speculation.

He can’t help but wonder as she leaves, if this girl will think of him whilst she pleasures another sleazy man with more money than feasible sense?  was he too harsh? Too quick to judge and write off her affections as femme fatale trickery?.. She will most likely occupy his controversial mind for the main part of the day as he trundles though that hellish city, earning his keep.
The dark, exotic, picturesque beauty. The beautiful mind, drowning in her naivety as she struggles to keep her head above water, A soul so capable of love yet unable to attain it, A soul he chose to reject on the grounds of his own moral standing. Only, it is his lack of moral standing which saw fate bring them together only the night before,

so who is the real hypocrite there?…

“Fucking using asshole” she whispers under her breath as she hustles along, juggling her belongings between two very nervous, shaking hands. The focus will shift to a pugnacious ringing in her ears, presumably caused by the amount of wine she consumed the night before… Although where Dutch courage was concerned, she had needed none.
A sudden, sharp reflex jolt accentuates this pain as she steps recklessly out into the road before a fast approaching BMW. For a moment her heart stops as she just about realises how close she is to the bonnet of the car as it’s driver stabs frantically at the brakes to avoid becoming a murderer.

“Christ lady, look where you’re goin’ for the love of god, I coulda’ mowed you right down there..” exclaims the driver as he acknowledges the extent to which luck contributed to his escape.
“Why do people say that?” she thinks to herself as she recollects her thoughts and regains enough composure to enable her to walk away safely, “ok, he coulda mowed me down but what the heck to it. He’d have carried on drivin‘…”.

It is this attitude which sees her as she is. Her life is in a root, she follows the same, sordid, mundane pattern because the city she lives in heralds nothing more. Her aspiration stretches as far as her attributes and her attributes are only ever appreciated by a paying client.

Meanwhile, the peculiar figure retains his position at the window, casting a stern, contemptuous eye over the city in midday. He knows that there are people below him who have nothing to fulfil their lives. He sees their despair and chuckles silently to himself.. Compared to them, he has everything. The building he lives in is essentially his. There is no higher authority for a body who wishes to take command of his own situations like this man. His tireless pursuit of presumed eventual self righteousness leaves him very much alone in the world. There has never been such a subtle presentation of sheer arrogance that could challenge the fort of this man’s persona. Unlike our career woman, he follows an almost ritualistic routine, which forms the basis of his everyday life. He is much more fascinated by the plights and downfalls of those beneath him than concerned with his own flaws and blemishes. It is his overwhelming ignorance of his own darkness which has seen him fit for 67 years of the “blameless” lie that he calls life.

He is playing a seemingly frivolous game, watching the girl as she passes from his right some 136 feet below. She is still struggling to maintain the balance of several objects which she has been juggling to and fro since leaving the working man’s apartment around 47 minutes earlier. Noticing her heel beginning to catch in the gaps of the poorly maintained pavement, she stops promptly to free herself. It is at this point she will become very aware of a voyeuristic presence, but confused by it invisible ambiguity. Wanting to avoid the growing potential of a complex situation she decides to continue walking, his eyes burning through the back of her neck like the beaming rays of the midday sun. These eyes will undoubtedly track her progress as she turns at the next corner and continues down past the newly erected Irvington Complex, towards the small, shabby line of derelict bungalows on the right.
She has now left him, crossing an unusually quiet road and slipping behind the row, presenting herself at the foot of her home. A small, battered building with plenty of character but absolutely no compassion.

She cannot possibly believe that this is where she will spend her whole life. Not from the anticipated desire to scale the heights and make something more of herself but simply because last nights “wage” falls somewhat short of her rent.
She sighs in realisation of the extent of her problem, but her sigh is nothing more than an abomination of herself. Although considerably more valuable than anything she could possibly hope to conjure in words for her defence to the man behind the name. Every exhalation is taken and violated, choked into inevitable silence. A silence she doesn’t have the strength to break and fears to challenge. ...



(to be continued....currntly in process)