Disclaimer: Title is non-figurative. Do not read if the topic bothers you.
It’s 1995 and the sky hangs heavy with rain. Long bolts and vanes of raincloud stick close and threaten to make more grey the vast grey expanse of greyness that is the city below.
Lys stands on a rooftop, only nominally separated from the grey.
It was a pretty perfect day for it, he had to admit. Bleak, and cold in his thin jersey, just like the soul of one who was getting massively tired of life, as Lys was. He squinted down at the town square, hoping his meeting instructions had been clear enough. He’d said ‘pig statue’ in the forum but now that he looked at it, the statue on top of the fountain was more like a contorted cow.
This city’s square harboured what was perhaps the ugliest gargoyle ever to have been crafted by human hands – and that was saying something, because all gargoyles were ugly. It was also the meeting spot that Lys planted himself in after descending the stairs of his apartment building and crossing the square, which was almost bald of a pedestrian crowd this early on a Sunday.
He leaned against the most bird-poop free patch of the fountain he could find and listened to the water chug sluggishly as he waited. Waiting wasn’t a difficult task for him; it involved remaining still, which he could do very well, because for years now his body had felt horribly slow and heavy all the time, even though as a man he really was quite thin. (Though that was because the task of feeding himself, in comparison to doing nothing, would often seem insurmountable).
He waited, but began to project ahead. He reminded himself that he wasn’t ‘Lys’ today, but ‘000Denominator000’, a screen name which he hadn’t thought through as well as he should, so he wondered what the person he was meeting would call him. Perhaps something like “Zero zero zero”, or just “Zeroes”, or maybe “Denny”. Or maybe they would do the unfathomable and ask for his real name.
He wondered what they’d be like.
It’s 1995 and the sky hangs heavy with rain. Long bolts and vanes of raincloud stick close and threaten to make more grey the vast grey expanse of greyness that is the city below.
Lys stands on a rooftop, only nominally separated from the grey.
It was a pretty perfect day for it, he had to admit. Bleak, and cold in his thin jersey, just like the soul of one who was getting massively tired of life, as Lys was. He squinted down at the town square, hoping his meeting instructions had been clear enough. He’d said ‘pig statue’ in the forum but now that he looked at it, the statue on top of the fountain was more like a contorted cow.
This city’s square harboured what was perhaps the ugliest gargoyle ever to have been crafted by human hands – and that was saying something, because all gargoyles were ugly. It was also the meeting spot that Lys planted himself in after descending the stairs of his apartment building and crossing the square, which was almost bald of a pedestrian crowd this early on a Sunday.
He leaned against the most bird-poop free patch of the fountain he could find and listened to the water chug sluggishly as he waited. Waiting wasn’t a difficult task for him; it involved remaining still, which he could do very well, because for years now his body had felt horribly slow and heavy all the time, even though as a man he really was quite thin. (Though that was because the task of feeding himself, in comparison to doing nothing, would often seem insurmountable).
He waited, but began to project ahead. He reminded himself that he wasn’t ‘Lys’ today, but ‘000Denominator000’, a screen name which he hadn’t thought through as well as he should, so he wondered what the person he was meeting would call him. Perhaps something like “Zero zero zero”, or just “Zeroes”, or maybe “Denny”. Or maybe they would do the unfathomable and ask for his real name.
He wondered what they’d be like.
