Here He Lives - a writing prompt

Writing prompt:  a doctor, a car, and a blanket.  A gas station.

HERE HE LIVES

The Doctor took up his cigarette and pressed the car lighter to its tip.   He inhaled sharply and looked down the bridge of his nose as it illuminated in glorious red embers.   He deposited the lighter back into its slot, never taking his eyes off of the cigarette as he inhaled a tuft of smoke, and released it out of the free corner of his mouth.   He hadn't even twisted the key to turn the engine into starting.   He was simply alone in the dead of winter watching the small fire burn at the end of his paper.

The Doctor turned the keys then after closing his eyes and enjoying the sludge of additives that were filling his lungs.   His mother used to chastise him - when she was alive - that he should know better as a medical professional.  She would ask him if seeing all those x-rays, and scans, and deaths meant anything to him.   She wondered why that never gave him pause and he wondered right back why every other doctor hadn't picked up this habit.  He didn't understand how anyone dealt with all this shit and didn't smoke.  He inhaled and this time removing the cigarette first exhaled.   He twisted the heating nob on his console and set to defrost the lightly crystalline windshield, which was a shame because in its killing frost he saw a beautiful painting.

The Doctor rubbed his eyes with a greasy fist.   The only kind where sweat was the culprit and not edibles.   Just the stress on his human body, and the uncontrollable urge to sweat under controlled precision.  His body always betrayed that.   No matter how absorbed and orderly he seemed, his pores opened up floodgates and he kept gowns and gloves in ready supply.   After another exhale with cigarette between fingers he looked at the cracked skin over each knuckle, down each digit.   He envisioned his flesh eroding till a tenderloin of muscle stared back up at him.  Thin meat for bulky hands, and then eventually as the winds of degradation continued to skim from him his exteriors, and interiors he would be left with but a frail skeletal hand, and all brittle and hard, until it evaporated into the air like dust and nothingness.

The Doctor shifted into reverse and placed his cigarette hand on the top of his passenger seat and removed his vehicle from its place.   He moved to drive and twisted his wheel sporadically to one side with his one good hand and placed his foot to the floor.  The staff parking lot was nearly empty at that hour of night, or at least empty of people.   The cars were like gravestones waiting for their occupants.  Heavy pieces of metals sitting in silences and condolences against the loss of the occupants they had left behind to double shifts and call ins as they were almost out.

The Doctor found his way out onto the road.

The Doctor drove for some time along those early morning roads.   Where street lamps and stop lights held more use as decorations than guiding beacons.  No one was out to use them as such, most were tucked cozy upon their beds.   Most were working third shifts or on their way home from heavy drinking.  He hoped safely, if not they still were under heavy white lights on one of the ER tables, or in the morgue stuffed inside cold lockers where, well, they had no use for lights at all.

The Doctor took a glance into his rear view mirror and paused.   A cold green blanket with a picture of that mean green Hulk character twisted about it as though in floral patterns.  He quickly adjusted the mirror to its proper position as he puffed out the last drag of smoke he could from the side of his mouth.   He stubbed out the butt into the ashtray, and betrayed himself another glance into the mirror but saw in them only the pattered look of blinking cautions lights, as if synchronized into a pattern of their blinking yellows.  He didn't have to see the blanket though to know it was there.  He sympathized with its protagonists, pissed off and raging but he didn't have to see them because they were imprinted  on the back of his mind.  It was always going to be too.

The Doctor reached for his cigarette pack but knew the empty feeling that was awaiting him when now more than the past twenty hours of screaming and studying calm through sweaty palms had ever required.   He crumpled the pack in his fist and threw it against the floor.   A Mobil sign was illuminated ahead of him and he knew his poison could be found inside, and all he had to do was interact with one tired third shift attendant who was usually taking stock of the store when bastard customers came in to bother them.

The Doctor twisted his steering wheel.

The Doctor found his way to the empty space closest to the door.

The Doctor bought the cigarettes, he paid the attendant and he inhaled sharply at the lit stick.

The Doctor drove away, he would be alone at home tonight, the blanket a reminder.   It'd been back there for months, and for months his wife had left him, and for months he'd worked as much as he could.

The Fatherless can seldom reclaim that identity and nor that of Husband.  The Doctor was what he was, this was his identity, this and nothing else.   He drove back home, to some empty closet in the hospital, there was nothing waiting for him in that brick townhouse.  Nothing but the silence of loss, and the echoes of grief.   He would never face them if it wasn't necessary, he would choose instead to wallow in other peoples tears, and other peoples rage.  He would be their blankets.   His mind wandered to the child blanket, green, and mean, and he mumbled in half dead words, "Me too.  Me too."

In This Her Final Hate - A microfiction

Anita took the gun off the wall.  It was an antique hunting rifle, the sort that never had fired a shot in its entire life, and she fiddled about with its locks and trigger.   The hammers snapped down and made her jump and smile in intrigue.   She pressed its butt against her shoulder and looked down the sights and mimicked a firing motion accompanied by a very minor utterance of the word "boom."  She carried it with her down the cold, and intimidating halls of the mansion.  An estate so large that she had often found herself lost in its innumerable amounts of halls and rooms.   She held the antique tool in her arms like an assault rifle as though she could empty a multitude of shell casings upon the floor while the barrel flashed and released round after round at the imaginary ghosts in front of her.  There an old employer, there a man who had wolf whistled at her on 8th avenue while she went for her morning jog.  That was back when she was living in a studio apartment with other starving artist.  They had been for all intents and purposes more starved than artist but the old her deemed it the quality of life she deserved.  Another ghost, of her unstable father a shattered bottle in his hand where her imaginary round had fractured through and planted itself inside his ethereal body.  It wasn't too far off from the fate that had befallen him one drunken night at the tavern in midtown when she was twelve years old.  She remembered hearing the news with a cold indifference as though she knew it was going to happen, and she felt it with a vague happiness that she knew only meant that she had hoped it would.

Anita turned another hallway into the grand expanse of the foyer.  She said aloud, in little more than a whispered joke to herself the word, "foyer" and marveled at the absurdity that her house even had such a room.   Below her from the handrail she finally rested the rifle.  Sitting stock down against the marble, and she planted her fists against its flush stone, and gawked like a gangster at all that was hers.   She previewed the glass chandelier decked with fragments of cold nothings falling among the non-existent party goers below, and so she made it real.   She picked up the heavy rifle - but not so heavy as not to able to be thrown - and she hurled it with some trouble out and over the cold nothing, and it connected and broke apart.  Not all of it, only the pieces vulnerable from that angle and it did not have, she was disappointed to find, the same deafening quality its entirety possessed in the back of her mind.  As the small mementos of glass impacted against the floor along with the blunt snapping of the antique stock on the priceless artifact she sighed.   Her fists gripped the railing again and she screamed out into the echoing void and it screamed back.

When Anita threw herself from that spot, she wondered - in the way that only imminent death allows one to wonder - just what it was that made her so unhappy.   Nothing she had determined, at least nothing so awful.   She had spent her life in exhausting pursuit of happiness, of solace that she had not considered her surroundings.   When her husband a particularly well to do mogul pronounced his undying love to her, she knew it was a lie, because he would, and did die.   And with it his love.  What she was left with was an empty house, full of empty rooms, full of empty things.   There had been but several places that memories were ever made between her and the "man of her dreams" but there were so many others where she sulked that she could have done better.   The splatter pattern among the stone flooring just moments away from her skull would probably be more fitting a painting than any she had thrown together in her studio life.  She figured the drab gray could use a little more color, a little more vibrancy, that the house itself deserved more life.  She heard the snap in her neck before the end even came, and there was something sweet and tragic in that noise, but she was gone before she had time to contemplate, and contemplation was one of the greatest assets to being alive.

An Attraction of Words

Intimidated by your sheer vocabulary
I stand,
Not in utter fear but in utter wonderment
I stand,
Because to hear it pronounced I am attached,
Stricken to daydreams of the detail you have to say.
My mind is wrapped in your enigma,
Not the sort that opens up into a Pandoras box,
But otherwise,
A plethora of delighted songs,
I stand,
Because the image that I've found,
Is a personification of what it was I dreamt,
Oh, let not the fates resort of fending me off once again.
Intimidated into admiration,
I stand,
In utter wonderment, because
The leaf that falls from the tree
Or the pedal from the flower
Is another example of a scene you could have spoken
I would blink
But then I'd miss sight of you for the fractions of a second.
I will be fearful of the laws of my life
Which appear bent to break me from that which I sought.
As though the rules are written that I should not
Capture that which I admire,
But if in truth the snare is real I hope that it does not hurt,
And if it does I'll nurse the foot that was captured,
And I'll welcome the bedside manner
And note how soothing the cooing of your forgiving quality
Heals me as I heal you and we heal each other.
I stand,
In intimidation of your vocabulary
Of your knowledge and your joy,
You entertainment in entertainments,
And your skewed and perfect vision of this plane,
I stand,
Unwillingly to sulk away defeated,
Lord no,
I do not want to be defeated.

Assassins

They attack like gremlins pillaging and tattering

all the pages of this story.

They gnaw and scratch the foundation of the staggering

structures conceived only as thoughts.

And everything crumbled into an abysmal little

dedication of belief and little glory.

And it stuck out in sour bricks upon a salty earth

that already suffered through plots.

Stories of sickness spit out from the mouth of

full grown screamers, bleeding and glory.

Stories of lost woods and fractured sticks and 

twigs imitating ugly flowers in feeble pots.

These gremlins snickered all snide, and grinned in disgusting little biting smiles before they died just like the earth they had killed.

Any Arrangement

Wake up and send me the flowers
You've been sitting in your own shadows debating your very own conscience.
So, wake up and send me the flowers
You've been talking to your wallpaper and communing only with the silence.
Please, wake up and send me the flowers,
You've eventually made it as far as your door planning but not committing to a twist of your wrist.

My eyes have met your own

I've laughed at your jokes, just me and me alone

I'd go forward with you to the movie show,

My feet are dressed, ready to go.

Still, you've made excuses and made convict everything you had hoped would do.

Wake up and send me the flowers.

So, wake up and send me the flowers,

Please

You've got to get up and bring me the flowers.