Trigger Warning: The content may not be suitable for children or those with a fragile psyche

Using

Mike knocked on the door and waited for the answer. Mike would lose his job soon. He would stop showing up for work one day and start shooting up again. It was very close. It was right there.

The house was an old thing with peeling paint. The front yard was scattered with broken toys like fossils, left there to rot for years. The children had left, and those toys had stayed. There was a broken tricycle, a deflated medicine ball, and a pogo stick covered with rust; the useless junk collected over a lifetime.

The owner answered the door.

“Hello.” He was an old greying man with a large stomach and a face that had caved in on itself.

"I'm here to install the grab bars,'' said Mike.

"Hahaha," said the owner.

There was nothing funny. Nothing to laugh at. The owner laughed like tears falling from a mother who had lost a child.

Mike followed the owner inside. There was an ancient dog wearing a diaper and an old woman sitting in a chair looking up at the ceiling as if it were the sun. The house was cluttered, full of empty boxes, and Styrofoam, and broken upended chairs, and books no one had ever read, and radios everywhere. The radios were old. They seemed to be from the 1940's.

The old woman said, "you will die. You are dead. The rabbit has five legs, and one wing. The other wing is lost. The other wing has been sold. The other wing has been sold for gold. Gold. The train runs at night. Margret you bitch, you owe me five dollars. And not in chocolate."

The old woman was saying these things into the air. She was covered by a thin blanket. Every once in a while she made as if to sit up, pushing her hands on the sides of the chair, lifting her chest upward, but she always thought better of it and fell back down onto the cushion.

"Where do you want them installed?" Mike asked.

"Here, I’ll show you, hahaha" said the owner, and Mike followed him into the bathroom.

There was a piece of blue tape in the shower, and another piece of tape just above the toilet.

"Sure thing,” said Mike.

Mike went back to his car and grabbed his tools, and the bars. He walked back in the house.

"It was a dog with five teeth and each tooth was a wish and each tooth was a wish for the end of the world. I can count them on my fingers. I went out to the street yesterday and the sun was boiling. The sun was boiling in my pocket, and I had lost it among other things, like a toothpick, or a piece of paper with the face of Christ drawn by a four-year-old. Yes officer. He touched me there, and his hands grew like roots around my body, until he was everywhere, and I was just an ink dot fading away, drowning in the rain," said the woman.

Mike walked into the bathroom. He took the shampoo, and the shower chair and the plastic mat attached with little suckers and removed them from the shower and placed paper towel below where he was going to drill. He put the bar up to the tape and drew two small holes on each side of the bar with a pencil. He took out the diamond bit and drilled through the tile, then changed to a normal bit to drill through the drywall. Under the drywall were studs and he drilled small holes in the wood to act as a path for the screws. He placed the grab bar back on the wall, using a level to align it, then screwed in the wood screws with a flat head drill bit. He placed the metal cover over the ends and hammered it taught with a rubber mallet. He went out into the living room, to ask the owner how the grab bar looked.

The old man was standing next to the woman, he had grabbed each of her hands in a tight grip and was moving them around as if she were a puppet.

“What do you want, Mary?" asked the old man. He had bent the woman's arms back in such a way that looked as if she was getting ready to give a hug to no one.

“I'm looking for my son. He still crawls on four legs. He crawls on four legs to the edge of the world where there is a large hole. He takes out a line of fishing wire like a spider web strand and lowers it in the hole. He is trying to catch the abyss fish. I caught a fish once. Two days ago, when I was twelve with my father. It was large and tried to breathe the air. We gutted it and threw the corpse in the trash. It was still alive. It flopped its way out, and back into the ocean, a gutless fish, made of bones, swimming to the center of the world," said the woman, whose name must have been Mary.

 "You aren't making any sense," said the old man.

He was getting very frustrated with the woman, he was acting as if there was reason in what she was saying, when there was none to be found.

"Is this what you want?" he began to bend the woman's left pinky finger back.

"I can't find him anymore. He was right here. He must have shrunk his soul down till it was just a blip, a broken pixel on a monitor. I looked for him under the couch, but all I found was a cockroach. We used to race cockroaches. We set up a track using those wooden blocks our parents gave us for Christmas. When a cockroach won, we piled books on top of it. One book, two books, three books, until the cockroach was flat like a pancake. My daughter ate too many pancakes. Her stomach became its own thing. I could hear her stomach cry at night when we were all supposed to be asleep,” said the woman whose name must have been Mary.

The man bent the woman's finger back till a faint pop could be heard, and it hung there limply like a dead beige worm. The woman just kept talking away, as if nothing had happened.

“What do you want?" asked the man turning to Mike.

"I want to show you the grab bar," said Mike.

"Sure."

They walked into the bathroom.

"That looks alright to me, what about the other one?"

"I can't put it in. I scanned, and there's electrical behind the drywall."

"There shouldn't be any electrical there, it's just an empty wall."

"There is, I scanned.”

“I wired the house myself, there is no electrical there.”

“I can’t do it.”

"Alright then," said the man.

Mike gathered up his tools and went back to his car. In his car, he called Kinky. He hadn't talked to Kinky in four years. Kinky was very thin and had perpetual bags under his eyes. His eyes were blue and hollow, they were empty snow globe eyes. Kinky would look exactly the same as when Mike had last seen him. He hadn't aged or changed in any way. He hadn't taken a step in any direction; he was a statue in that way.

“Mike, it's been a long time, how ya doin?" asked Kinky.

"Are you holding?" asked Mike.

 "Sure, sure," said Kinky.

They sat in Mike's car, right by the water, looking across the way at Bellevue, as the lights from the tall buildings blinked faintly in the distance.

Kinky took the powder out of a small bag and placed it on a burnt spoon. He poured water from a plastic water bottle onto the powder. He put a flame under the spoon. The stuff was yellow and boiling, just like how the world looked when it first started out. He drew the liquid in with a needle, shot half of it, then handed the rest to Mike.

The sun was just beginning to set

and the water reflected a dull orange glow

as the clouds overhead darkened

biding their time

drifting their way towards oblivion

END