2 Matches & a Cigarette

I Promised you all a new story so long ago and here it is, I hope you all enjoy it and I hope you don’t whine that it’s too long. Now read bitches read.

Life – Wtf is it

In Life as in death…that phrase has been haunting my mind for the better part of a year and just recently it suddenly finished itself in my mind. I come to 2 conclusions here although they are not portrayed as such because as you can see ever sentence here is a question. This has no doubt been brought up before but I thought I needed to bring it up my own way.

In life as in death, we are just the fabric that holds us together, that ever changing fabric. So are we really who we were yesterday or our memories of a person Identical to us who has moved on to become other things.

Are we our memories, or are we the matter that holds us together. Am I the current form I inhabit or am I the steak I ate yesterday and the sweat I will be tomorrow. Are we even individuals or part of a greater whole, each of us in this whole having his chance at being a conscious being?

If we are the memories that form who we are? Would we still be aware if we moved our consciousness to a computer, replaced our fragile brains with more sturdy electronic ones? Would we still be the same person or a direct replica? Is it really possible to preserve your own existence or are we stuck merely preserving the existence of our genetic code?

A word causes as much pain as a knife

I was going to try send this one into a magazine but I haven’t updated in a while so i decided to post here and see what people think of it instead. It is a bit longer than my other post so long but still relatively short.

We are all creatures of emotion, some to greater extent than other. Some learn to control that aspect of themselves while others are governed entirely by their current emotional state. In any case we all learn in one way or another to deal with them.
For Albert Samson he spent his life ignoring his emotions, every insult tucked away into a box, every failed relationship he pretended didn’t affect him and every rejection didn’t faze him. He spent his entire life ignoring his emotions and this is the story of just one of those days.

It started out as a pleasant Sunday morning. Albert woke up early to get breakfast ready for his wife. He sat on the side of his bed and stretched, tired muscles slowly waking up. He made his way to the bathroom his feet dragging along the old musty carpet and stopped in front of the sink, grabbing his toothbrush he put a generous squirt of toothpaste on then as he started to brush his teeth, he then turned on the shower to give the water some time to warm up. He spat into the sink then rinsed out his mouth with a cold cup of water from the tap. Slowly he stripped down, his old muscles making the activity more strenuous than it used to be in his youth. Eventually in the nude he steps into the near scalding shower and starts scrubbing himself down, in every nook and cranny. Satisfied with his handiwork ten minutes later he is out of the shower and dresses himself in his Sunday outfit. Kissing his wife on the cheek, he then makes his way out of the house leaving a note in the foyer telling her he has gone out to get breakfast.

As he made his way down the street, he whistled to himself a pleasant tune he’d heard many years ago. Waving to neighbours as he passed the houses he reminisced on his life as he always did on Sundays, seeing only the good that had happened to him all his time on earth. If there was something people could say about Samson is he didn’t hold a grudge, heck he probably wouldn’t hold you accountable for what you said mere moments ago, people liked that in mister Samson, they didn’t feel like the horrible people they thought they were when they were around him.

So Mister Albert Samson walked down the street looking at the fine marks in the pavement, signs of age and use. Similar marks riddled his face, creases, wrinkles and liver spots signs of a long life. He looked up from the pavement to see he had made it to the village corner store. He greeted the boy at the till, suddenly thinking of his own children and just for the briefest of moments wondering why he hadn’t heard from them in so long. He made his way to the back of the store where a small bakery resided and asked for 2 croissants, thanking the baker as he took the small brown packet proffered to him. He stopped at the fridges and grabbed a bottle of milk, remembering for a moment his short stint as a milkman and the abrupt termination of his job, for a reason he had forgotten.

He laid the items down on the till, pulling out his wallet as the till boy scanned his items. He pays in cash, 25 rand for 2 croissants and a bottle of milk. He looks back fondly on the days when you could buy the same items for only 2 rand. He takes the plastic bag offered to him and he leaves the store, taking the same route back home, admiring the houses on his street and imagining what those still being built will look like.
He was soon in front of his house again, the house he had lived in for over 25 years and spent nearly half of that time paying off. He remembered how the bank had given him the worst possible interest rate on his loan and how each time he thought he was nearly done paying it off, the interest was calculated and added to the amount owed.

He opened the door to his house entering quickly and closing the door behind him so as to not let any of the warmth out of the house. He noticed the note had been read and thrown in the small waste basket in the foyer, so he made his way to the kitchen where his wife would be undoubtedly getting the table ready for breakfast. He made sure to take off his shoes first and to put on some slippers. As he reached his wife in the kitchen, he kisses her lightly on the cheek, jolting her slightly. She turned around immediately a look of irritation plastered on her face, she put down the knife she had been using to cut fruit and gave her husband a look of annoyance “I told you that I wanted to go get Breakfast this morning, you were meant to wake me up if you got up before me. Can you do nothing right you lumbering oaf” she spat this out in a high pitched squeak and Albert looked on in disbelief at his wife, surprising considering she did this practically every Sunday. It was at this moment that 65 year of oppressed abuse from everyone in his life came back.

Albert was found that afternoon sitting in his kitchen covered in blood and crying. Pieces of his wife were removed from the garbage disposal system and the rest had been hacked up and thrown in the bin.