We Are the End by Gonzalo Garcia

Author:Gonzalo Garcia [Gonzalo C. Garcia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910296851
Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
Published: 2017-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

11

Single Drops

He’s smoking out the window in the dark.

Last night he was too excited to sleep and ordered a tent and a sleeping bag and some DVDs about the Antarctic, and he binned all his cigarettes (after splitting them in two at the filters) as well as all the lighters he could find around the house. But then Amazon sent him an email about the purchases not going through and Tomás remembered his dad’s cheque still hasn’t come through, and he was glad he hadn’t gone to the mall instead and had his card rejected in public. Having said that, he still felt embarrassed by the email and so he went to the kitchen, opened the bin lid and dug out four cigarettes he found between the trash Fran had emptied on the floor.

Smoking without filters is so unpleasant to him and he knew he’d feel so rough later, so he thought he might as well smoke a couple instead of just the one.

So why is he smoking in the dark? Well, when Tomás got home after all the running, he was laughing real loud and he felt so young he punched the air boxing-style when he opened his apartment door, and then he flicked the lights on and there was a tiny explosion and then all of the lights in the apartment started to flicker. So he turned them off. He used his phone to get to his room and noticed the ceiling was leaking. The leak must have screwed with the circuits or something but it was so late, or at least too late to fix, and so Tomás used his phone light to look for the cigarettes in the bin. He couldn’t make new coffee, so he drank what was left in the French press. In the dark. By himself.

Now somehow it’s 7am and Tomás doesn’t shower, doesn’t shave, and he gets dressed to go to work. But before work, he’ll go see Yiyo and tell him about the trip he’s planning. He wants him to know that despite him not being in a band, he still has dreams that take time, that take work and commitment and he wants Yiyo to wish him luck, just so he can then answer that it’s not about luck but about time, work and… But does it matter? Does it make a difference to him if someone’s watching? He doesn’t know or care about the answer to this, but what he does know is that the more people he tells, the more he’ll feel he has to do it, like when people tell their colleagues at work that they’ll bungee jump or parachute out of a plane or do something extreme like that. As he once said in class, once the ending of a story is a possibility, then the beginning and middle become certainties. And so, as he buckles his belt, he also decides that he’ll go to Abdul’s shop and e-mail his dad’s solicitor about that inheritance money on the way so he can start buying the things on his list.

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