Clove

It was a cold February morning when I woke to find not one, but two large rats staring up at me from my tattered, down comforter. I brushed them off and watched them scurry into one of the many holes the landlord felt so inclined to not fix. Tenant’s duty, my ass. Of course, after three months without a reliable source of income, I’d gladly live in a rat hole, let alone in an apartment sporting them.

The water was cold, like everything else in this gray city, and as the shower head spit and sputtered cloudy water across my face and gooseflesh chest, my voice resounded loudly off the moldy tub walls as I rubbed what was left of three bars of soap across my body. The song was for my spirits—the soap, my stink.

As I sauntered down the creaky stairwell, I passed a cute little girl I had been eying for the past few weeks. She was always standing in the stairwell at 7:30AM, and she was always smoking a clove cigarette. The smoke wafted into gorgeous curls about her pale face, and something about the clever carcinogen made her seem just a bit more real than the day before. Just a bit.

I managed a solemn, “Good morning, miss” before I stumbled down the rest of the steps and pushed boldly out into the bright, dirty morning.