I drank half a bottle of El Presidente and decided to start writing a short story in lieu of doing my homework. Here is the beginning. Please don't be mean : (




Within a few deliberately difficult puffs of his cigarette, all of the anxiety melted away into the depression from whence it belonged. The air thickened with the stench of poor self-medication, he followed the rising smoke as if it were his very soul, wandering away elsewhere, anywhere but where it belonged. His husk, however, remained to trouble the decrepit old rocking chair, which also should have seen its graceful retirement years ago. Now, however, there they both were: used and outdated, dutiful to the very end, and then after.

He was called Matthias Mire Jr.; the chair preferred anonymity. Under the poorly thatched porch they sat, day after day, harboring, for the most part, startlingly similar thoughts. Matthias had never cared for a pet as a child or as an adult. This was, in part, due to Matthias’s belief in the philosophy which his father, Matthias Mire Sr., had so eloquently shared with Matthias Mire Jr. as a boy.

It was, essentially, “You love ‘em, they get worms, an’ then they die.”

This laissez faire attitude toward pets that the patriarch of the Mire family had steadfastly kept for so many years (mainly after the exodus of his fallen, Rahab, from the lives of both her husband and son), had also trickled into his dealings with others, and, eventually, into his son’s dealings with others as well. It was mainly because of this, but also due in part to his own perceived shortcomings, that Matthias Jr. had lived a decidedly simple existence, tucked away from all organic life, save his own personage.

Throughout the years, the old wooden rocking chair and Matthias had so tightly grown their bond that it had become plainly clear: they were made for each other. It could even be said that Matthias had entered into that hallowed stage in which Masters and pets begin to become eerily similar: both were advanced in age, white, worn-down, and creaking. Every afternoon for the past fifty years, excluding the days of the hurricanes, they would hold communion at the porch of the Acadian House, gazing out into the metropolitan abyss. It was at this point that Matthias would occasionally wade into his deeper, more deciduous realms of thought:

“In the Bible, Matthew ten, I believe, Jesus says that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the Lord’s knowing it, yet, they fall just the same. It also says they don’t have to worry about what they will eat or wear the next day," but he soon remembered that he was a man, in possession of a man’s brain, and the bird, as a bird, did not worry, because he could not. Such is the plight of the non-bird-brained.