Working Not Working by James Sandham
Awoke with a start only to find myself exactly where I was. Beside me the papers lay exactly where I’d left them. The room buzzed with cold fluorescent light and the radio, on the ground beside my desk, murmured vague portents of simmering calamities forthcoming, as it always did, and as it always had done. I looked about me. As usual, there was no one else around. They’ve forgotten me, I thought, for perhaps the tenth time that day, the hundredth time that week, the thousandth time that month; they’ve forgotten me here as I willed them to; I am a prisoner of my own design, enslaved by misshapen aspirations to security.
I left the office. I passed through empty halls of light and dark and climbed the winding stairs. Emerging by the building’s back door, I entered the alley, trash-strewn and languorous. On loading docks of adjacent restaurants sat kitchen staff, superfluous in the hot afternoon’s idle, flaccid ash perched on cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Debris crawled the curbside, propelled by faint humid breezes and the odour of putrefied refuse. I lit a cigarette and joined their loneliness. High above, the sun shone but gave not the warmth I craved. My soul was cold and moaning gently. I smoked sullenly, seated on the dirty curb. My mind wandered. Into consciousness I let drip desperate recollections of years gone past, of childhood: the escarpment’s edge I played along, the waterfall at Bramley Glenn, the rolling fields beyond the wood – false idylls that nostalgia brings. Quickly these radiant eruptions faded. Like raindrops splashed against the puddle of my mind, they were here and gone in an instant, consumed in muddy, quivering pools they themselves created. Detachment left me feeling empty. The distraction of my thoughts discouraging, I pushed them heavily aside.
Returned indoors. Stereo still murmured. A cold despair hung about me and in my heart I felt an icy sinking. There was nowhere to go. The prospect of many days and many years ahead stretched tauntingly before me. Infinity and I stood face to face; the disparity destroyed me. There were no answers here, nor were there questions, save one: a wandering, rambling doubt. Some part of me had ended. And from this certainty I understood permanence.
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About the Author
James Sandham
Born: St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
Now Resides: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Online: www.clarknovabooks.com
Bio: James is a writer and the author of The Entropy of Aaron Rosclatt (Clark-Nova Books) but prefers the term “wordsmith” for its more utilitarian connotations because, in the end, it is, for him, a utilitarian endeavour, a sort of reverse archeaology in which an ever growing pile of words reflects the ever deepening exploration of what exactly he’s trying to write about. It’s an evolving understanding. He tries to pursue it as best he can.
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image by TiViD.
