#s0ftpining

Jimmy’s remaining hair sweats under the ugly cap they make him wear. The moustache feels heavy and fake on his face, even after all these years. He’d settled into Saul like a warm goddamn bath, but this--he feels like Jonah in the whale. The ground is spongy flesh beneath him, the air thick and stale with something else’s breath. It’s odd to exist as a creature, consumed.

Jimmy trudges through his white bread and spam abomination as he figures out the scene on the other end of the mall. A new stall’s there every week, seems like, selling weighted watches or flashing necklaces or whatever fad’s bringing in a quick buck this minute. There’s no display case this time, though: just an empty stall - one of those old-fashioned, kissing-booth style things - and a couple people weighed down by optimistic levels of leaflets.

Religious freaks, he guesses. Gentle explanatory pamphlets about hell.

Jimmy wonders what it must be like to burn for eternity, or even for a minute. He remembers how the smell of ash had lingered for days--coating his hair, plugging his pores, plunging into his ears and throat, blackening his teeth with grime.

Chuck would love to see you like this, says Kim, shutting off the shower and throwing him a towel. All this ‘out, damned spot’.

Jimmy scrubs his face dry and when he opens his eyes she’s still there. Here she is, arm in plaster, cheek garnished with scabs, trying to comfort a man whose only ailment is that he--how was it Kim put it? Tore down a sick man. You show the emperor he’s got no clothes - in front of his kingdom, no less - and you’ve killed him. You looped a rope around him and brought him down so hard he shattered.

Jimmy, she tries. It’s not your--

Spare me, he says, and brings the towel to his face once more.

Distant past. Literal lifetimes ago. Now he’s just a nobody who happens not to like char on his steak.

His sandwich wrapper’s in the bin--three pointer, nothing but net--and he’s off on his daily constitutional round the mall, feeling the cracks in the vinyl through his paper-thin shoes. Every time his bunions ache--standing at the Cinnabon counter, lying on the couch watching shopping channels until his brain shuts off, but especially when he’s mall-walking--he thinks of the shoes he’d bought Mrs Landry. Well, for himself, really: an investment via Mrs Landry. They’d looked like the product of an unholy union between the Michelin Man and a pair of sneakers, but they really had felt like walking on air. And then, every time, he thinks God, Mrs Landry. She’s gotta be dead by now. And the barb on the belt, flicking in at the end of every strike: just like me.

Here’s a pathetic one for you, okay? Picture the scene: dead of night, four am maybe, and he’s lying in the centre of a bed that’s far too big and staring at a blinking text box on his laptop screen. What do you write in a profile when you’re living someone else’s life? The plywood of people, he types. He stares at it awhile, closing the tab. On balance, it’s no surprise his mind’s constantly shooting him in the face with all this old crap. Livens things up.

But he walks, and as he walks he forgets his selves. He’s used to keeping a roving eye and a fast pace, but he finds himself standing by one of the mall’s pillars--no, leaning on it, as though he’s finally getting struck by that cardiac event he’s been waiting on.