The Park Avenue Hovel, page two

    "Mr. Penziero?"
    He pulled his head up, aware of a room full of eyes not on him. Four rows of heads stayed bent over a spelling quiz; the boy standing in front of his desk his only audience.
    "What is it, Jack?" Part of him hoped he'd remembered the kid's name.
    "Um. I'm bleeding, Mr. Penziero." Jack was holding his left arm awkwardly away from his body, a bare trickle of blood inching away from his elbow. Michael pushed upright in his chair and focused, watching it start to drip onto the carpet. Behind the boy an impossible trail of spreading red dots lead back to Jack's desk.
    "What happened?" Michael found his mouth dry around the words.
    In front of him, the boy seemed to fade in favor of the blood now coursing down his arm-- he realized the paper on Jack's desk was red, soggy with too much blood.
    "Did you cut yourself?" An attempt to bring sense to events, he knew it was a stupid question.
    Solemn-headed Jack peeled sticky fingers away from his arm, revealing something sinister and sharp glittering there. "No."
    Michael's eyes forced themselves open into rational darkness, the quiet room making nothings of his nightmares. He let his mind hang there, empty beneath the plaster ceiling, terrified to fall back into sleep, fearfully unable to settle fully awake. The quiet inhabited him.
    Eventually, though, the stiff sheets and soft mattress rubbed him, the old night sounds of the house alarmed him, the shallow variegation of shadow illuminated him back to himself. The clean anonymity of the room held nothing, reflected nothing to him, its cream colored walls and heavy wooden furnishings unperturbed by his presence.
    Michael had never lived in a furnished room before: the thought of living out of someone else's things made him ill. It was to his own surprise that he'd come to see the place, much less taken the room, but seeing it had relieved many of his fears. The furnishings, for one thing, were both too old and entirely too new to have seen real use: technically it belonged, along with everything else, to the landlady, but its long emptiness had sanitized it, and he could sit on the bed and use the dresser without feeling like a voyeur or a thief.
    In this old servant's bedroom, there was no trace of foreign intelligence, nothing watching him from underneath the old bedstead or inside the mirror above the washstand where he brushed his teeth and shaved every morning. He found it comforting, and had changed nothing.
    In the dark, the room was still a stranger.

Posted at Sunday, September 20, 2009 07:39 PM
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