Dreamlover

A short story by Daniel Verastiqui

© Daniel Verastiqui. All Rights Reserved.

So close to the end, with a gun to my head, and a paper cup under attack from a colony of ants, I could only stop to think how my life had been wasted in this small apartment, alone. Only the sound of the clock on the far wall, behind me and to the left, attested to the passage of time. For me, every day blended, swirled in moments of banal simplicity, into weeks, months. The window's blinds were caked in a layer of dust, thick from the many years of neglect. This was my room, my life, highlighted only by the stacks of Playboy in the corner and the towers of empty and not-so-empty Pepsi cans that stood as silent guardians in the northwest corner of the room.

The small amount of sunlight that made it through the dusty fortifications lived only long enough to be swallowed up in the grayish-black interiors of a set of old curtains. I relied on a dust-covered bulb in the ceiling to provide enough light to see. The curtains and a clock were the only objects on my walls, save a crooked nail from a picture frame that had long fallen to the ground. I still remembered the shards of glass breaking in the way I had always seen them break in movies, in slow motion and against a black background. I never knew why I let that nail stay.