Evenings in the Night

It is on the nights where this is no moon and no stars and no singing of the drunks in the streets, no distractions of any pleasant light about that anything can actually be accomplished.  It was on a Tuesday, approaching the midweek and rather unpleasant as it sometimes is in Midwest in March, when everything, even the homeless and the tiny pink flowers that you can sometimes find in the interstate ditches are stumbling from their beds of newspapers or of snow and you can see them for the first time since what feels like your childhood.  It was on a Tuesday that Morley broke open the paper-thin ply wood door that separates her room from Jack and Beth's in the house and broke a nearly empty vodka bottle over Jack's head because he had been rude to Beth that morning as she was leaving for work down at the diner.  She left a great gash on his head, but it turned out to be nothing more in the end than a tiny scar and a bit of purple bruising beneath his unearthly black head of coarse hair.  "It was only a question!" he had protested, but she smashed the bottle none the less, leaving him, and Ty who was dozing in the corner, and who'd woken up from Morley's tyrannical screaming in a daze.  It was on this Tuesday that Jordan died.  Matty walked into the house that morning in a trance, slowly, like the walls were falling apart in front of him, and the earth was opening and he was trying not to be swallowed up by it.  He sat on the couch and asked for a cigarette, but his voice wasn't in it.  Ty was still sitting in the corner of the other room as was his quiet and solemn habit, watching Morley tear Jack apart like a carrion while blood flowed like a peaceful waterfall from the left side of his scalp.  I was the only one who even noticed that Matty had come in, so I gave him the cigarette he asked for, and offered a light to which he refused, and sat staring at a water stain in the opposite wall with the unlit cylinder dangling form his fingers.  He opened his mouth like a fish, several times in fact, but they were sealed with an invisible concrete and he couldn't say a thing, so he shut his lips and held them pressed like that for some time.  I poured him a cheap scotch since I had already drained most of it and it was barely lunch, which I hadn't had the desire to make, hence the scotch.  This he took, threw it down his throat like a javelin, swallowed hard and began to cry soft tears that barely seemed to escape the ramparts of his eyes and stroll mellowly down his young and rough cheeks.  He set down the scotch glass I had given him and help out the cigarette, now slightly moist from stray tears for me to light, which I did along with one for myself, and we both stayed there, him sitting like a defeated king who knows the final end is near and me standing as the bewildered fool who cannot intercept the agony that the man in front of me is feeling.  When he was left with the filter, the crushed it on the carpet absentmindedly, which isn't his habit being one of the cleaner younger men I'd encountered as of late.  He looked up at me, his grey eyes that had lost all of their joy and carefree attitude of youth, deep into my blue ones that were now full of concern and bewilderment, and unfortunately a touch of annoyance as to why this boy couldn't just say what devil had wrought this hell in which his soul now dwelt.  His lips moved, and wisping breaths escaped from their opening and words that were barely words pushed their way out.  "She's dead....she's dead...she's all the way dead and its over and its over, oh Jim it's all over.  She's dead...and she's not coming back to me this time..."  And I didn't need to know anymore.  That was the last time I ever saw Matty, he hung himself that night, a Tuesday night with no moon or stars, no distractions of any kind not even the singing of the drunks in the alleys to break the air.  It was on this kind of night that anything could actually be accomplished, and Matty accomplished the final and mortuary task that his beaten soul longed for, for it is love, this bitter cruel friend to lovers that was murrered that morning, and it was love that was surrendered to that night by Matty, alone in an abandon warehouse while the rest of the world was too incarcerated in their own prisons to even care.