In Parades, Pt. 2

This morning was the same as any other morning. The sky was the same bluish grey color of illness, and still unnoticed by everyone walking underneath it. Alan walked in an unconscious rhythm that mirrored the walks of everyone around him. His fingers clutched impulsively at buttons on his jacket, pushing them through their holes and them removing them just as swiftly. There was something in the way that the wool of his jacket slid abrasively over each plastic button that comforted Alan's hands, and starting from there, it comforted the rest of his body as well.

When Alan walked into the square it seemed for a moment that he was the last person on Earth. There were no other pedestrians to be seen and the silence was coal black and heavy. The air seemed thick and cold, and Alan gasped once, his exhalation an exclamation point towards the heavens. He looked up and looked at the sky for the first time in what seemed like eternity, and the lack of sound began to close its many fingers around him. He looked desperately around him, the cobblestones slithering, scales on the back of the world serpent, whose teeth bite into its tail with the savagery of lust, of the instinct to rut with flesh against flesh. Alan's feet stopped for a moment, next to each other, and his eyes closed momentarily. he could still see everything around him. He could still feel the square folding its corners together like an origami crane, ready to flap into the center of the sky.

Alan began to run. The ground became a blur and his vision wavered with tears - of joy or fear or sorrow, he did not know. He ran, holding his leather briefcase aloft with one hand, the shoulder strap biting into his bicep, straining to pull himself forwards. The door to his office building loomed in front of him and he wondered if perhaps he would make it, if the world would stay solvent long enough for his fingers to find the door. His hand grasped the handles and for a moment he was shocked by the cold, before he wrenched the door open, stumbled through, and turned to close the door with all of his remaining strength.

His breathing, which had been ragged and blood red upon entering, began to slow. His shoulders straightened. His hands came up, still in their gloves and smoothed the hair which now seemed in a spray of disarray. Alan turned, his face a collection of tightly held muscle, and began to walk to the elevator. His heels tapped echoes on the floor, tap, tap, tap. Nobody noticed the deep stain of his eyes, until the elevator doors closed, and Alan stared with mournful intensity at his own reflection.

-Rich
the summer if we were deathly ill