The Park Avenue Hovel, page six

    Michael had spent half an hour that morning getting the blood stains out of the pillowcase. The nosebleeds worried him, he couldn't deny it, but there were other things that occupied his attention: the question of whether the stain had come out or the whole pillowcase was simply a uniform shade of near yellow had finally driven him out of the room. Returning in late afternoon, he couldn't remember what color the linen had been before the nosebleeds had started; in a saner light, the pillowcase looked untainted, safe to sleep on.
    The emptying aspirin tube, no more a refuge, demanded a decision of him: let it run dry or find someone to fill it. There was a difficulty there: he didn't know anyone in the city, not anyone who could find what he wanted. He knew plenty of people; he'd grown up in a neighborhood only fifteen minutes away from the house he was staying in now, had friends and family scattered evenly across the city. His parents still lived in the house he'd left for college. None of them, though, would be particularly interested in helping him score any speed, even if they'd known that he was back. His hands twitched in his pockets as he paced and he grimaced, looking up in time to see his reflection above the washstand.
    The other option, of course, was to simply leave it empty.
    He turned back to the envelope, found on the privacy-preserving clip beside his door, that he'd tossed on the bed when he came in. Ray had been writing him once or twice a week for nearly two months now, and he'd only managed a few letters in reply; he felt bad about it, guilty about not only his late replies but his reason for leaving, which only delayed his few letters further. As anxious as they made him, though, he didn't want Ray to stop sending the letters, full of news and jokes, updates on people and events which had been central to his life for three years; he'd read every one of them.
    Ray's handwriting hadn't improved any since Michael had met him, a fluid scrawl with little space between words, much less letters, more used to jotting down notes than composing epistles. There were times, sitting on his stranger's bed, struggling with a word that turned out to be two, or a 'g' that was actually an 'a,' that Michael wondered why the man hadn't just typed them out on one of the office's computers; still, there was something satisfying about deciphering Ray's messages. He hefted the envelope in his hand for a moment, weighing it against its content, before dragging his finger under the flap and pulling out a thick sheaf of smudged letterhead.

Posted at Sunday, November 22, 2009 10:24 AM
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