Poisoned Rose

One It was in the pale light of what seemed enough to me like morning that I awoke to the sound of someone pounding on my door. Outside my three front windows a steady rain was falling through the few yellow and red leaves that were left hanging on the trees that lined Elm Street, drilling hard into the already saturated lawn two floors below. It had been raining for days and I almost couldn't remember a time when there had been anything else but this. I preferred the sound outside my windows over the pounding on my door, so I let myself hear only that for a time. I was facedown on a bare wood floor, breathing in dust and damp, and thinking how the drops hitting the leaves sounded like rain falling on a hundred tiny umbrellas. My muscles ached and the left side of my face stung. I didn't think too much of any of it. Last night's drinking was still in my veins. I could feel waves of intoxicants moving like thickly clustered schools of tiny fish in my blood. A part of me was still asleep, and the part of me that wasn't wanted to join up with it again as soon as possible. Finally I got up off the floor. It took some doing but I made it to my feet. I wanted more to stop the pounding than to see who was there. When I opened the door I saw George standing in the dark hall outside, his arm poised for another bang. He looked pretty much half in the bag himself. He lived in the apartment below mine and served drinks seven nights a week in the bar one flight below that. The town we lived in was a small resort town that all but shut down between September and May, and the bar we lived above, the Hansom House, catered to the working-class locals who lived there year round, artists and laborers alike. There wasn't much to do at night during the off months out here but drink and gossip, and George was the man to whom most people came when they wanted healthy servings of both. When he saw me George lowered his arm. He looked a little dumbfounded, and then I realized that his eyes had shifted and were focused on the left side of my face. I felt the stinging again and remembered then the scratches and how they had come to be there. "Jesus, Mac," George said, staring at my face, "they look worse than they did yesterday." He whispered when he spoke; the dark hallway outside my door seemed to require that somehow. I ignored George's comment. I felt an urge to touch the scratches but didn't. "What the hell do you want?" I muttered. "There's someone here to see you." "You could have just called me to tell me that." "I tried, Mac. Your phone's out of order." "Oh, yeah." Service had been shut off last week because I hadn't paid my bill. Yesterday I received notice that the electricity was next. "What do they want?" "She didn't say." "She?" "Yeah." "She who?" "Didn't say." "Have you ever seen her here before?" "No, I think I would have remembered her." "Did she say what she wanted?" "All she said was that she wanted to talk to you. She said it was important." I had gotten up too quickly and was a little dizzy. It felt as if gravity were working particularly hard on me this morning. It took pretty much all I had not to just give in to it and lie back down on the floor for as long as it would take for things to lighten up again. "Just tell her I'm not here. Tell her I left town and you don't know when I'm coming back. Tell her whatever you want. Just make sure she goes away." "There isn't any harm in talking to her, Mac, is there? I mean, no harm in hearing what she came to say, right?" He stopped, then added, "She's pretty." "Just tell her I'm not here. Tell her I'm dead. I don'tJudson, D. Daniel is the author of 'Poisoned Rose' with ISBN 9780553584196 and ISBN 0553584197.