The soda was warm but Mickey drank it anyway. One long pull, carbonation gone flat and syrup-sweet against the back of his throat. He held the can loosely, dangling it off two fingers the way you'd hold something you weren't quite committed to keeping. He'd propped himself in the corner of the couch with one knee up, back to the wall. The couch itself was decent enough. Somebody had dragged it in from wherever and called it furnishing. Mickey called it somebody else's couch that I'm sitting on. The room didn't have much else to say for itself. High ceilings, bare bones, concrete floor with the ghost of where display racks used to stand. You could still see the bolt holes if you looked close enough.
Whatever this place had sold, it was long gone. Clothes, probably. The vibe said clothes. Gap, maybe. Banana Republic if whoever ran it had aspirations. The only thing left was a naked mannequin poking out from behind a column in the corner, and Mickey had turned it to face the wall on his first night because he didn't need that kind of company. He rolled the soda can slowly against his palm. He had been quiet for almost eight minutes, which was long enough that someone had probably started to hope he'd gone to sleep. He had not gone to sleep. "Okay so." He sat up straighter on the couch, with the energy of a man who had prepared remarks. "I've been thinking." Someone nearby made a sound. Mickey pointed at them without looking. "Don't. I know. But hear me out." He cleared his throat. Fully cleared it. Like he was about to address a boardroom.
"We… and again, I mean all of us, collectively, as a species had one fucking job." He held up one finger. "One. Don't die. That's it. That was the whole assignment. Billions of years of evolution, opposable thumbs, the Renaissance, jazz music, the internet. All of it, every single bit of human achievement, pointed toward the singular goal of: continue existing." He let that hang. "And we fucking fumbled it." He shook his head like a disappointed little league coach. "We fumbled the whole thing. Dropped it on the one yard line. And now I'm sitting here eating..." he looked down at whatever was in his hand "What I think used to be canned refried beans, and watching fucking Derek over there sharpen a knife for the fourth time today." He gestured at Derek. "Derek, buddy, it's sharp, it was sharp two hours ago, we all see you." Back to the group.
"Anyway, I just think somebody somewhere owes me an explanation. That's all. Not even a good one. Just something. A pamphlet. A sticky note. Anything." He played with the flat soda in his hand. "My therapist would have had a field day with this, by the way. She always said I had trouble 'sitting with uncertainty'." He made aggressive air quotes. "Shoutout to Sharon. Wherever she is. Hopefully not outside. Anyway. Nobody has to respond to any of that. I just needed it out of my body." He settled back onto the couch and stared at the floor like he hadn't just said all of that. "…The beans aren't bad actually."
@staticandstitches
