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Short Story - Bad Days - G. Arthur Brown
Feb. 25th, 2011 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
burnvictimI.
Shards of the children's bones in his teeth, he attempted to claw his way from the sewer, but the walls were too slippery to find a hold. He kept coming back with fistfuls of slime. With nothing else to do, he scraped his palms as clean as he could on the rim of his bucket, allowing the filth to sluggishly drip inside it. He couldn’t remember why he had not brought a ladder, except that they are just too large to carry on one’s person, especially if you’ve got a girl under your left arm and a boy under your right. The candles guttered; he was nearly completely engulfed in darkness. The light of the sun was blinding as he attempted to stare up at the hole to the surface some two stories up. He tried again to climb the wall, to get his footing in the brickwork. His soles skidded back to the floor, his ankles absorbing the impact.
He looked around at the rats, the bones, the scum, the black water, or what little he could really see of them in the diminishing light. “This is the last time I take my lunch in a fucking sewer.”
II.
Kids with air rifles had taken over the Capitol, so he smoked a cigarette angrily in the farthest minaret. If he could dampen his handkerchief, he thought it might be possible to send tiny smoke signals to the elderly who still held most of the office buildings on the adjacent block. By the time he'd hacked up enough phlegm and spittle, his cigarette had burned down to the filter. Reaching into his coat pocket, he realized his pack was empty. He wondered why he had bothered to put an empty pack back in his pocket. He flipped the lid and looked inside. There was a lick-and-stick tattoo of a circus seal inside.
They must be watching me right now, he thought, and then blacked out from concussion.
( Read more... )
Shards of the children's bones in his teeth, he attempted to claw his way from the sewer, but the walls were too slippery to find a hold. He kept coming back with fistfuls of slime. With nothing else to do, he scraped his palms as clean as he could on the rim of his bucket, allowing the filth to sluggishly drip inside it. He couldn’t remember why he had not brought a ladder, except that they are just too large to carry on one’s person, especially if you’ve got a girl under your left arm and a boy under your right. The candles guttered; he was nearly completely engulfed in darkness. The light of the sun was blinding as he attempted to stare up at the hole to the surface some two stories up. He tried again to climb the wall, to get his footing in the brickwork. His soles skidded back to the floor, his ankles absorbing the impact.
He looked around at the rats, the bones, the scum, the black water, or what little he could really see of them in the diminishing light. “This is the last time I take my lunch in a fucking sewer.”
II.
Kids with air rifles had taken over the Capitol, so he smoked a cigarette angrily in the farthest minaret. If he could dampen his handkerchief, he thought it might be possible to send tiny smoke signals to the elderly who still held most of the office buildings on the adjacent block. By the time he'd hacked up enough phlegm and spittle, his cigarette had burned down to the filter. Reaching into his coat pocket, he realized his pack was empty. He wondered why he had bothered to put an empty pack back in his pocket. He flipped the lid and looked inside. There was a lick-and-stick tattoo of a circus seal inside.
They must be watching me right now, he thought, and then blacked out from concussion.
( Read more... )