Night and Day

Mia and Lisa leave after dinner. Mia, taciturn, mentioning something about an exam she’d forgotten. Quick hugs and goodbyes are exchanged before the pair’s hasty departure back to school.

The house seemingly shushes quiet once the front door clicks behind them.

The night is quiet too, blissfully uneventful, for Jim. He loves the quiet. The absence of sound. The older he gets, the more he appreciates the clean beauty, the purity of silence...

His new neighborhood is wonderfully quiet, save for the occasional trundle of a passing semi-truck from the highway nearby, and the chirping crickets.

Gazing from the bathroom window, into the misty night, Jim can spot a singular star hanging meekly in the gusty, dark sky. Lowering his eyes, he recognizes the patterned light of the city. He knows and hates the city. He knows that everything is in motion. But here, in this house, it’s quiet as outer space.

Jim opens a drawer and picks out a bottle, twists the lid open, and shakes out and eats a handful of white pills. The pills’ bitter taste is replaced by mint as Jim brushes his teeth and tenses up, suddenly worrying for a second that his teeth are missing and that his electric toothbrush is tickling bare gums, empty tooth sockets.

Jim spits out the foamy white toothpaste into the sink. It swirls like a raging sea, twirls and spins into the drain. But he sees no blood or lost teeth. This calms him. Yawning his mouth into the mirror, he sees his bleached white choppers are still intact, and his serenity is restored.

He blinks, then finds himself under the weight of blankets. The silk sheets kiss feathery to his skin, and he worms in the bed, tosses his head back, and rests his hard skull into the foam memory pillow. Then he drifts off, warmly, into the undercurrents of a deep black watery sleep.

There’s a roaring crowd in his ears, a white noise that fades as he wakes. He figures it was another football dream that’s gladly been forgotten...

Jim rises, lifts his heavy bones and tight limbs, pushes out of bed.

It’s cold in the morning. The heating in the house must be on the fritz. He gazes out the bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows and sees the sky is the color of cream. A touch of white frost sits on a cluster of reddish leaves hanging from a nearby oak tree.

Jim is first to wake, as usual. He trudges into the bathroom and sees himself, naked, in the mirror over the sink. He looks so old, he thinks. His face is a cold web of creased skin. There are white hairs growing on his chest. There are even white hairs on his balls. And his penis, once so virile, hangs limp and lifeless, like a dead bird.

He’s old, and he’s battered. Gazing at his numerous scars from surgeries, he sees the scars running deep, like ski tracks in fresh snow.

Mechanically he brushes his teeth, shaves, washes his face. Steam surrounds his hulking body in the shower. Holding soap, he doesn’t remember stepping in the shower, but the massage jets and the rain shower, the hot water blasting and cascading at and over his skin feel soothing. The liquid heat loosens his tight, old man muscles.

He doesn’t remember toweling off. But he’s dry, naked, and limping into the bedroom. He then thinks he hears the distant sound of a ukulele. The ukulele being played in horrendous, tone-deaf fashion, more slapped than played, but the sound soon disappears.

He grimaces and bends and steps into his typical designer label, business casual attire, which today is a white open-collared button-down dress shirt, stiffly creased black slacks, blue wool socks, and light brown leather wingtips that gleam, hint of wealth. He looks himself over in the closet’s mirror, smooths his shirt, nods somberly...

His wife is curled into a ball of sleep. The tip of her head, a tangle of flocculent blond locks jut out from underneath the covers. He considers kissing her goodbye, but his knee seizes up with a sharp sting. He lumbers back to the bathroom, where he again hears the ukulele, this time louder, and sounding even worse.

Jim pulls open the drawer under the sink, where he’s started a pharmacy, and he picks out one of the many pill bottles, screws open the lid and shakes out three little white circles and tosses them into his mouth.