Fiction: Routine

Routine

Every morning, the old man’s routine was the same. Alone in his maintained but careworn house, he’d be awakened by the sun spilling over his windowsill; decades ago his wife had insisted on a bedroom facing east, and since her passing, also decades ago, he hadn’t had the heart to change rooms, or even to replace the threadbare curtains she’d picked out.

He would open his eyes slowly, blinking the sleep from them and the dreams from his mind, and pull himself upright in bed; slowly he would swing his two feet onto the hardwood floor, letting them fall there like weights coming to rest on the ocean floor. Here he would pause and run his hand up through his thin hair and then down over his face, over the tired eyes, with their full murder of crow’s feet, the bony nose, the drooping lips surrounded by five days’ unshaven beard.
Outside the window would be stillness. A few birds would call to each other, not especially pretty or ugly songs, but simply the noises one would expect to hear from dull, familiar sparrows. Sometimes a sleepy car would drive past, barely bothering to announce its presence, or the muffled footsteps of some neighbor walking a dog could be heard.

Neighbors, however, were infrequent; while the road was only twenty feet from the unsteady front porch, even closer with the broken sidewalk, the area contained only a handful of other houses. In the property to the south was a family of three that kept to themselves, and the lot to the north was empty, home only to some overgrown rubble and empty cans that boys used to shoot at with slingshots. Across the street was a collage of forgotten chain link and telephone poles and a few other tired houses.
After several moments, the old man would rise from bed and walk to the bathroom, where he would use the toilet, brush his teeth, and take the few pills he kept behind the mirror, with the automated motions of someone forgotten not only by the world, but by himself. Eventually, he would find his way downstairs.

Today was no exception. After a cold breakfast of oatmeal and milk, the man pushed back his chair, stood, and put his feet into the slippers he kept at the edge of the living room. He was about to perform the most sacred rite of the morning rituals: getting the newspaper. Reading it was one of the few things that produced a spark of life in him anymore; he held few opinions on current affairs, but relished the news itself, the knowledge that the world outside his Rust Belt suburb was still continuing on. He kept up to date on a few sports teams even though he had no television and hadn’t been to a game in years, and read the comics section despite most of his old favorites having been replaced. He was especially looking forward to today’s paper, hoping the hostage crisis in a Tennessee Wal-Mart had been resolved.
He shuffled towards the door, opened it after two feeble shoves, and stepped onto the porch; a creak sounded as the door swung shut, although it could just as easily have been his old bones. Across the street several boys were sprinting, and were almost instantly out of sight around the corner. The day was sunny, but a film seemed to hang over the entire place, giving the area a graininess that contributed no warmth to the already run-down scenery.

Seven paces away from the mailbox, the old man’s world exploded with light and sound. The roar of forgotten battleships colliding in foreign seas, the hammers and anvils of childhood thunderstorms, penetrated his head and embedded themselves in the space behind his eyes, reverberating; he felt the earth slip away underneath him.
Dimly he became aware of a tickling sensation on his skin, and knew he would die: it was radiation poisoning, or nerve gas. Several seconds passed, his breathing slowed, and he gradually realized the tiny pricks were caused by grass touching his bare arms and his neck, and that he was on the ground, with his eyes shut tighter than the vaults of a fallout shelter. The pain of the noise was replaced with a lesser throb above his right eye, which he opened slowly and reached his hand to; he’d gotten a small cut when he’d fallen. Around him lay scattered black shrapnel, twisted pieces of metal no bigger than playing cards, and a thousand bits of paper.
The mailbox had been blown to pieces by the neighborhood boys’ crude bomb, undoubtedly more powerful than they had intended; the wooden post atop which the mailbox had sat now ended in splinters and a few bent nails. The old man got shakily to his feet, coughed, and started towards the house. There would be no mail today. He crossed the porch, stepped inside, and shut the door quietly behind him.

~ By Mike Cook ~
mcook6@pratt.edu