Jamie Iain Genovese Group 1.1 0560893M
When I woke up, everyone had gone and I was left completely alone. My flatmates, Phil, Alice and their associates seemed to have left like smoke from a cigarette or birds from a tree. They were all there just before I slept this afternoon. I then opened my bedroom window and the fresh gusts of air from the night sky waltzed into the confinements of my room. The sky was spotted with silver granules which winked and shimmered. It didn’t mean anything to me though; for the sky wasn’t real anyway. What was real was the note that Phil left me.
That was three nights ago, it is now the eighteenth hour of the thirtieth day of the eleventh month, and Phil and Alice still weren’t back. My name’s Alex Carol. Some privileged people know me by my pseudonym; Epilinge. I moved to Tokyo with Phil and Alice since we’re on the same journey, the journey to garner experiences, ask questions and hope for answers. We live separated lives mostly, seeing each other a bit every day at home and meeting up every few days at a park or a playground to recapitulate and not lose relations with each other, lest we ever need the company, aid or solace of one another.
I stared at my room, and it stared back. It was simplistic, the walls white and the furniture a deep mahogany brown or black. I picked up my coat, long and red and wore it. I donned my top hat, tall and black. I put on my vizard, smooth, unshaped and ceramic it engulfed my face in its white sheen. The only interruption on the white surface was a pixelated, smiling face in its barest form conceivable.
I opened the window to the outside world, and stepped out onto the fire escape, the night air invigorated me; I ran up the fire escape with the three tails of my coat trailing behind me, accentuating my gallop. Once I reached the top landing, I made my footing on a windowsill and hauled myself over to the top of the roof. Suddenly I saw beneath me the pulsing life of the Asian city, and I grabbed with my glove-clad hand the sturdy pole on the wall’s edge and swung myself around it, arms stretched; taking in the utmost of the night air. Phil instructed that I must take off to the southern district, find ‘The Lucky Bar’. So I made my way through alleyways and rooftop conduits to the southern area of Tokyo in pursuit of the Bar. I planted my feet onto the grimy concrete floor of an alleyway opposite the bar; hands in my pocket while I stood by a tree on the pavement to wait, and to whittle away the time I counted the stars; even if they weren’t real. Then, along the otherwise empty road was a dog, which walked with a spring in its step towards me. In preparation I crouched and welcomed the dog, rubbing its face and scratching behind his ears.
“How are you, Alice?” I asked, my fingers becoming slower in movement around her head.
“I’m good, Alex, thanks for asking,” Alice quickly looked at the bar and back at me again, “Phil’s still inside, you should go talk to him, it’s important.”
I rose and turned from Alice, taking myself to The Lucky Bar, and when I arrived I pushed open the doors with the back of my hand and entered. The bar was empty, with the exception of the bartender and Phil.
I sat myself on the stool beside Phil, “What do you want, Phil?” I asked impatiently.
“Alex…” Phil hesitated, and with an uncharacteristic anxiety he drank some more whiskey, the amber liquid swirling into his mouth and down his gullet, then he smacked his lips and began to speak, “… what if I told you we could make the sky real again?”
***
Jamie Iain Genovese Group 1.1 0560893M
When I woke up, everyone had gone and I was left completely alone. My world was seized by the ankles and devastated. In one foul swoop everyone in my family was stolen from me by a man called Death. My eyes gazed apathetically at the white-washed ceiling of my room. Then I rolled to my side, facing the side of the bed were my wife, Clementine, used to slumber, where her head used to dream and her body would rest.
My hair’s red and my name Irish. I live in Brooklyn, now by myself. My wife and daughter were taken by a drunk driver on their way back home from Clementine’s sister’s house, which was on the other side of town. It’s been two years since the incident, and to this day not once do I wake up with eyes that aren’t wet and red with tears.
I sat up and got up, and went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and washed my face; the bathroom where my wife and I would get ready to embrace the day or take solace in the night’s rest. The walls patterned with hand-painted tiles she chose and the tiles of the floor were now grimy and unwashed. The whole bathroom was dirty, bar the patches where water reached.
I left the bedroom and walked down the hall, opening the door on my left, the room where my daughter, Susie, played with her plush toys. I saw her candy-coloured room and plush toys, all instruments of colour and joy, but these instruments were guitars with no strings, pianos with no keys, flutes with no air and drums eternally ruptured.
My hand gripped the doorframe tightly, and I looked longingly with a burning pain in my chest. I pulled the door behind me and it clicked with a melancholic click. I heavily made my way down the dusty stairs, my hand sweeping off a thin layer of dust and grim from the banister. I looked around me and saw the living room in which we used to spend nights together watching films and eating buttered popcorn on Thursdays. Or the nights we spent with Suzie helping her with her homework.
I walked on, over to the kitchen which used to smell of bacon and eggs every morning, and meat and potatoes in the evening. I opened a cupboard and pulled out two glasses and a bottle of single malt Whiskey. I sat at the counter and poured the sorrowful liquor into the coupled glasses. I drank from mine and remembered when we unintentionally bought these glasses and made an inside joke out of it. There were, originally four, but two out of the set broke, so on the remaining two we painted “His” on one and “Hers” on the other. It was a happy memory, one of the few I had left. I then drank from hers and looked at the drapes, which let in such a faint and dead light. I then remembered how we had bickered over the design, I remembered all our little spats, even the tiniest of disagreements and I regretted it all. I drowned it out with more liquor.
These are both incredibly short, and they are so because they're schoolworks.
