Untitled – By: Sharla Rae Alvarez

Most people don’t go through what I go through, which in turn means that most people didn’t have to numb themselves the way I have to.

I woke up to the sun beaming into the stranger’s bedroom shining onto me, making me warm. The sheet that seemed to block most the morning light out of the room seemed to fail just a line up the side, which by some sort of miracle managed to mark its way down my face and body. It took the average moments to piece together what I had gotten myself into.

Again.

Clearing the back of my eyelids of yet another dreamless night, my hand ached as if it had been slammed against something. Or under something, like a concrete block. My knuckles cracked loudly and painfully as I bent my fingers to rub the sleep out of my eyes and run my fingers through my hair. I could only imagine what I had gone through the previous night before my alcohol induced amnesia.

Turning my head to the side slightly, just enough to look at the naked character next to me, I realized one thing. I loved alcohol. No matter how old I was, it still reacted to my body the way it would react to everyone else’s body when they consumed too much. No matter what I was, being an alcoholic took a toll on my ability to recollect something or make good judgment calls or any controlled judgment calls at all, or just something simple as to having a hangover, alcohol was the answer to all my prayers. Always have been. At the time, I found no sense in stopping something I had been doing for years.

He wasn’t a bad looking character, just one that I wouldn’t have chosen willingly. A thick mat of black or dark brown, both of which didn’t seemed to matter since I lacked the light to tell the difference, covered his head and subtly at his jaw line. The few hairs he had on his chest and his eyebrows were thick of the same color.

The curious side of me, which never seemed to fade no matter how much I went through in spite of it, lifted the sheets to examine the damage I had to him and vice versa. Long scratches from nails rode down our sides and back on both sides of the bed; bite marks seemed to reflect their brothers on both of the boy and I; there were even a few spots of dried blood that came from nails or teeth or whatever else I was too drunk to recall. He looked as if I might have had fun with him. It became obvious I had fun with him when I felt a shocking pain rampaged through my body from my sore lower body.  But I couldn’t help but to smile, half chuckling at the trouble I had gotten myself into.

Again.

My hard earned smile quickly faded when I realized that he probably wasn’t much older than twenty-three or twenty-four. He was a baby. It was quite obvious that he hadn’t experienced much since I couldn’t see any scars. Well, scars that I didn’t cause.

I could feel myself losing the feelings that I had gained in the moments of my awakening, draining from my head, heart, and stomach, out of the tips of my toes. Another wave of emptiness spilled over me like it always did when I realized that I was attempting the impossible.

If I had a spare moment like that moment, I would compare myself to a doctor. I felt a doctor that had come to the conclusion that the patient that they favored, could joke with, had hours to live, and I was the one that had to tell them they had such hours. To tell the family that their son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother, friend, or acquaintance didn’t have enough time to finish living their lives to the fullest. No matter what I did or how I did things, I always felt like that doctor.

I ran my hand through my hair again as I strained through the pain of my tender body to sit up, quietly to not disturb my night’s cuddle buddy. Biting my lip seemed to be the only way to muffle the whimper that wanted to escape from me as the mind jolting pain of sex tore through my body.

My feet placed themselves on the cold wooden floor, sending goosebumps all the way through me that I had to bite down harder. I automatically searched for my clothes. There was one event my clothes had disappeared from the place completely, leaving me to the conclusion my clothes were off before I was even in the place.

“Leaving so soon?” a groan made me jump, nearly falling on my ass getting off the bed.

Pulling myself together, I looked at the boy on the bed. His mat of black or dark brown, whichever, was still facing me. At first I wasn’t even sure if it was him in the first place, on which event I would have shot, stabbed, or thrown someone out of a window. But when I saw his arm was where I laid, feeling for another round, which round it was going to be, I knew he was conscious.

“‘Fraid so babe.”

When my dress and underwear were nowhere to be seen in the room, my eyes well adjusted to only having that strip of light, I started to get aggravated. Why couldn’t I just be a normal drunk and throw my clothes messily at the bottom of the bed?

I decided to take action into my own hands. Walking down the road naked is frowned upon in normal societies unless I had decided to lay a nude colonist man, which is what I almost thought until I finally saw clothes. Jeans.

“Dude, I feel like I was hit by a train. What the hell did you do to me?” he groaned again. I heard him move more, him body coming to life. I found his dresser draw and started to pull on his briefs that seemed large on me.

‘Dude’? Oh hell. I had become a fucking cradle robber.

Like he knew what it felt like to be hit by a train. HA!

I blew through the self-esteem blow with a chuckle and replied with: “I’m probably in just as much pain as you are.” A pair of his jeans slipped over his briefs with a mental note that I needed to find a belt or a piece of string before I left his place so I wouldn’t go around accidentally mooning people.

“Do you have to be somewhere? Or can you go out for coffee? Wait… what time is it?” He asked, as I found an oversized shirt that seemed to had faded from black to a near blue shade. As long as it hid the fact that I was going out into public without a bra and meant no value to the boy since there were going to be holes in it, I was going to wear it. Since it was so well worn and near falling apart anyways, I took the opportunity to steal and slipped it over my head.

When I turned to glance at his alarm clock that was on the side of the bed that I woke up on, I saw he was sitting up with his feet over the side of the bed, his back broad and bulky like his shoulders and arms.

 “7:39.” My teeth needed to be brushed but that could wait until I got home.

“AM?”

“Yep,” I added like someone his age would. Looking around there weren’t any mirrors or pictures. So I kind of just swung at it. As long as people didn’t mistake me for a whore I was good to go. I pulled my hair into something similar to a bun since I couldn’t see what it looked like.

“Than what in God’s name are you doing out of bed? The world isn’t even awake. In fact the world doesn’t even know what waking up is.”

I wasn’t going to argue with that. If I wasn’t trying to escape I would have still been sleeping. That I knew for sure. Especially since I was a sucker for Saturdays and to my belief that day was a Saturday.

“Have to be somewhere kiddo. Maybe coffee some other time.”

I lacked shoes, but I could survive without shoes. Lack of shoes wasn’t the problem, I assure you. It’s the lack of belt. My mental note needed to become real, written down, on bright yellow post-its. I had a bunch of them at home, but I wasn’t at my house. Instead I was at a baby’s house that had either been really talented with his tug toy or had no idea what he was doing.

Guessing at which door was his closet and getting it right on the first try, I plucked a belt off the wall and turned to see a line of sunglasses. They were all the same. Black aviator “hater-blockers”. He wouldn’t notice if one set of his like twenty went missing. Why did one person need that many sunglasses anyways?

He seemed to have gotten the clue. I was leaving and there was large possibility that I was never going to see him again.

“Ah.”

Looking at the streak of light that had managed to wake me up, I then realized that it belonged to a set of slider doors instead of what I thought was a window.

“Do you have a balcony?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks kid. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

Slipping on the stolen pair of sunglasses, my eyes didn’t take as much adjusting as they would have if I wasn’t wearing them, as I opened the sheet that blocked the sunlight. Clicking the lock down, and pushing the door over, I took another glance of the boy like I do of all my victims.

He was in full stance by the time I was looking at him. He had to around six foot or so. He was tall. I couldn’t help but to smile at all the bite and nail marks that rode down his body. From the way he was looking at me I thought he was sad that I was leaving. But then I noticed something.

He couldn’t see me. In fact he couldn’t see anything at all. I had bedded a blind man.

All the better to escape unseen.

The morning gust swept through me, a slight push as if trying to push me back into the room with the blind man. I closed the door behind me, but I was a good several stories up from the looks of the buildings around me. What made this apartment even better was that it was the tallest one and that someone would have had to be looking for me to see me.

Half of me didn’t want to leave the way I did. But I had to or I’d pay for it later.

I placed my hand on the railing of the balcony to help start the process of climbing onto them.

Like all people that managed to balance themselves on the railings of balconies, it meant freedom. It was the same to me except unlike humans, I wasn’t going down. Growing up with the habit, it wasn’t hard to balance, especially being so small and light.

The first ripple ran through my body like an electric shock. Underneath my skin, I could feel them activating, coming to life like baby bird being hatched for the first time. My fingers tightened, preparing and tightening my arms for the brief agonizing pain that was to be occurring to me. My heart pounded extra to get blood through to the other limbs that hid under my skin beside my spine and between my shoulder blades. The real pain was when they broke skin and sprouted to full wing span for the first time in a few hours.

They weren’t as simple as on TV. They were bitches to get out if one did not know what they were doing. It wasn’t like close your eyes and poof they were there. They had to grow from somewhere. Good thing people that didn’t know what they were doing didn’t get them.

With a twitch of my back muscles, I was off, becoming yet again another mystery of the world.