Cage

There are three doors leading from this room. Behind one, there is an old bed, hard and impersonal with uneven springs; behind another, a bathroom with a sink that drips in a steady heartbeat rhythm; another, a hallway with dusty carpet, cobwebs hanging about the ceiling like streamers. Stairs lead from the hallway to a lobby with a coffee machine and a table with big armchairs that people sit in to read or look at their knees.

This is the man's third apartment in as many years.

He thinks of slaves in factories with smog in their lungs and bags under their eyes as though they have ascended to a place beyond sleep.

On the mantel there are many objects, artifacts of another life, one that has too much power for a dead thing. There are anonymous smiling faces caught in gold and silver frames, there is a nondescript vase with nothing but stones at the bottom, there is a case that might once have held some magnificent piece of jeweled excess but instead holds an old brass locket.

There is one part on the chain of the locket where the links have melted together, from when he still wore it and it had gotten caught between the slabs of his welding. There are places where the metal is worn and dull, where it was held tight like some sacred relic. There are places where links have broken entirely and have been painstakingly repaired by weary, calloused hands, leaving red bruises and pale raised scars.

There are people who go through their lives smiling and die in their sleep.

He remembers standing in front of the mantel, wooden slab jutting out of the empty wall like a broken bone. He remembers standing there holding the locket and looking at the case that used to hold a diamond necklace that's dangling between some wealthy woman's collarbones somewhere in the world, now, the packaging lost in a dumpster and forgotten. He had come home from work at seven at night and taken off the locket and stood there until three o'clock in the morning just looking at the soft, faded velvet and thinking about things he'd never thought about before, things like life and death and love and the picture in the locket and how green that eyes can be when the face they are in is smiling.

He goes to work every day and watching tired faces is like someone holding up a mirror every time he meets another pair of eyes.

Published in Walking Away, May 2008, as 'Untitled.'