An Unused Bit

Sitting in the Daison Lounge of the newly renovated Sanatine Center for the Arts, I’ve come to realize that my life is really less of a walking autobiography and more of a historical fiction piece written by smooth talking Lit students. I picture the person who wrote the things I’ve done as a hunched young man with a face dashed by pimples and marred by the rejections of a hundred or more women. He leans, each day that he wakes up in time to do so, over an old style typewriter and logs the hours that make up my life like someone might pay him for them and then drinks himself back to lonely sleep. With gnarled hands he lashes at the keys, gently saying to himself that it will all be ok, that tomorrow is the brightest its ever been, that he might get laid at any time some time. He is the phantom writing my opera, the shadow in my life who, lonely member in hand, writes about my incredible sexual escapades as though it were film noir.

The woman in the red dress lurched beneath me and I reached for the gun beneath my pillow. There were three shots in the chamber, just like the woman in red.

I like this young man very much.

Sitting in the lounge, staring at the lime green walls where brass light fixtures had been lazily tacked up next to modern art finger paintings, I started to really believe that maybe all of this was a dream I lived. I wondered if tomorrow I would wake up in a mental institution from a thirty year coma famished and insatiable. Maybe Sanatine's Golden Son was little more than a garbage collector who got hit in the head by a stray recepticle and now hallucinates a grandiose lifestyle of women and invention. If it hadn't been for June's softness that morning, the real warmth of her sleeping flesh, I might not have simply laughed that thought away. I need a drink.