Evan ~ A short

What a day it had been for Evan. The day had started as any other as he stood from his resting place. He looked at the room and found a sense of comfort.

This is how people living on the fringe live, he thought.

Evan had sunken into a pit of complacency that could have taken the life of a weaker man. As he looked around, he saw in the small bedroom space people laying next to each other on nearly every flat surface available. They were cuddled up; man and woman, girls curled like they were in love, and men doing their best getting comfortable with each other.

When clothes were visible, they were the best the worst used stores had to offer. The occupants hair was matted to their head in places or just a plain mess. Knots and braids appeared randomly on the heads of the people he looked at. Strewn in piles were clothes that had once been worn, but now only offered an odiferous assault.

He walked through the human mine field to get to the living area of the apartment. There he found an old wood square, low sitting coffee table littered with ash trays, beer bottles, two metal pipes, a bong, three candles, and several spoons.

Such were the makings of a heroin house, he thought.

More humans were crashed on the floor, sofas, and chairs of the small apartment living space. He looked around at the disgust of the environment and shook his head. The low he had allowed himself to get to this time was the lowest he could remember. That thought brought no comfort for he had so many memories, so many different people that had come in and out of his life.

When his low was as it was now, he did not have the ability to bring about clearness of thought. His body was so depleted, so worn down, that the internal workings of his mind skipped too many beats and often left him confused. The memories became jumbled with no more meaning than the feeling emoted from looking at pictures from someone else. These lows brought him a strange mental sensation filled with periods of déjà vu.

As Evan looked around the apartment sensing he had seen this all before. He believed this was not a new experience for him; there was an unnatural familiarity with the environment. He wandered over to the lone window of the room and peered through the dirty, smudged glass. He watched the fog of the morning permeate everything covering it with its thick airborne moisture. The flat surfaces collected the dew-filled air and caused drops of water to run from the edges of the surface to land in micro-puddles near the vertical rise of the object. The day looked exactly like his mind felt, drippy moisture collecting into puddles of clarity.

He did not acknowledge that a woman had walked up behind him as he watched the slow soaking that took place outside. She stood behind him trying to see what he was so intent at looking at. She saw nothing out of the ordinary as it was just another bleak, overcast, foggy day. It was the kind of day for her that kept her soul locked down in a perpetual funk. She had decided to take it easy last night and only shot up twice during the time in the apartment, and was not now entirely sure of what all had happened last night.

He could see her reflection behind him in the glaze of the glass in the window. The single pain glass was so old that the image he saw was of an overly thin, washed out, bra and panty clad, figure that morphed into a melting image as he shifted his perspective on the view.

“What do you want?”, he asked keeping his back to the woman.

“Is there any coffee made,” she whined at him.

“I don’t fuckin’ live here, how would I know if there is coffee?”

“Do you need to get laid or something?” she said walking up behind him and wrapping her arms around him to squeeze his chest.

The rage instantly ran up his spine to collect in the muscles of his jaw that were now as taught as a drum head. Sinewy muscle contracted and relaxed with the grinding of his teeth. His bottom had been reached and that one simple question from an innocent addict had pushed him past the edge of his limit.

“Though an enticing offer, I will decline dear,” he said as he turned around to face her. The anger had left his face, and he appeared to be as calm as any other day. He placed his hands on both sides of her face and leaned down to meet her lips. Kissing her gently on the lips he opened his mouth to probe the taste of her lips. Had there been anything on his stomach he would have heaved it directly into her open mouth. She tasted of a thousand things that were not natural in a human mouth. Combined with the left over bile from her fix induced vomiting, she had a taste that could only be described as horrific. Luckily, for him he was immune to any of the reactions his body should have produced.

With his right hand on the left side of her face, he moved his hand around to the point that his hand was on her right cheek. Pushing only slightly on her face, she turned her head, exposing her overly thin neck. All he could see from the view she offered him now, was a throbbing ascending aorta.

He opened his mouth as he lowered his head to taste of her neck. Her pasty white flesh was so thin that the closer he came to her skin he could see the blue of her veins just below the skin. As his lips encountered her skin, he smelled the rancid sweetness caused from not bathing. His rage boiled in the background, waiting for him to take the cover off his emotional pressure cooker and release the burden held long in place. As he kissed her neck, the images in his head started to swirl as the self-control was gradually released; sweet, vertiginous, release.

***

Over the course of his years he had risen to power more than once, only to become disgusted with it all and drop out. During those periods of obscurity, he would reject his nature, throw his gifts to the wind knowing that one day they would return to him. Their return was never planned, never contemplated, and never sought; they simply would just return. It was as if the gifts needed the break more than his physical self did.

One hundred years ago, he had gotten disgusted with the direction the family wanted to take. Rather than fight the battle for control he simply disappeared. He fell off the social map, vanished from the requisite functions of the leadership, and went as far into hiding as he could. To distance himself even further, he set aside his nature and remained abstinent with the exception of keeping himself alive.

He drove his life into completely new paradigms, ones that he was not completely certain existed before he found them. His fall from the cliff of excess was long and tumultuous. The bouncing he made during his fall did nothing more than remind he was not yet far enough in the shadows.

When he had dropped out last, the best place for him to stay hidden was in the dredges of society. He purposefully gave up the lavish life he had built over the preceding decades, and took his place among the unknown of the street. Evan slept where he could, fed when he needed to, and hid in the shadows while the world around him spun out of control.

The cause of his disappearance had been the reaction of the family over the death of his latest wife. The two had been together for over sixty years when she succumbed to the natural causes of old age at the tender age of one hundred sixteen years. The family had belittled his emotions, chastised him for his choices, going so far as to make jokes of Evan’s fascination with food.

The familial view of street walking humans was that they were nothing more than an easy supply of high quality nutrition, nothing more. Evan on the other hand viewed humans as having a closer connection to the world they lived in and a higher understanding of exactly what it meant to live.

***

He pulled his lips together into a kiss on the nape of her neck. He savored the pungent taste of her fermenting flesh as his spit mixed with the collected sweat deposits on her skin. He softened his lips then opened his mouth to lick her skin. With his open mouth, he pushed his teeth into the skin directly above her carotid artery. The tunnels of his incisors pulled directly from her artery feeding his long dormant inner structure. The cellular level feeding created in him the sensation of rising from the dead.

The blood he could not take in was left to spill down the front of her chest, soaking the fabric of her bra as it ran down. His rage had subsided with the wakening of his cells, his mind began to clear, and his former sense of self was being replaced with the greatness it had once known.

He drank from her as deeply as he could while her beating heart could provide fresh sustenance. The conversion his body was conducting on the nutrients of her blood woke up his desire to feel alive. The friction of her blood flowing through her veins had crawled to a stop as her heart quite beating. The lack of blood flow and the temperature creating friction caused her temperature to begin to drop, and he stopped feeding from her.

Too much dead blood would throw him into convulsive seizures, and with two rooms full of fresh supply, there was no need for him to take a chance. He felt the tension leave her body once her heart stopped. That very short time between when she stopped bleeding to the time rigor mortis set in was very short. He enjoyed the feeling of a human that relaxed. He dropped her dead, limp body to the floor and stepped away.

“And again I will say, No, I don’t need to get laid,” he said looking back at her now horror locked face.

His body was feeling more than it had in over a hundred years. He had allowed himself to wither away so long ago in revolt of what he was; what he had become. The feelings that coursed through his body drove him to want more, he had to have more feeling. That exact feeling was what had stopped his traits in the past.

Evan walked into the small living area and found the next course in his awakening celebratory meal. None of the people in the room were in any better physical shape than the woman he had just drank from. The choices here were slim, but he was too hungry to be selective. So, he fed; systematically, one by one he went to each sleeping body and gave them each his special kiss.

Each time he felt their hearts stop he would immediately stop feeding and move on to the next subject. Each time he became stronger; more alive himself. [expand this]

Once taking all he needed from each of the inhabitants of the apartment, he began the preparations to remove himself from this place. He grabbed the bottles of alcohol used to fuel the burners for needle sanitation and heroine preparation. Removing the top of one bottle, he poured some of the content on the next of each of his victims.

Ensuring he missed no one, he went back to the kitchen area and opened the face of the old gas stove, then set the temperature to high. He took a wad of paper towels, soaked them in the alcohol, and placed them in the middle of the rack in the oven. He took a cigarette from one of the many packs that lay around, and lit it. Stooping over, he placed the lit cigarette on top of the wadded paper towels, then left the apartment forever.

He exited the building and walked down the broken sidewalk toward his new existence. In the distance, he heard the explosion of the gas-filled apartment caused by the time delay device he had left.