Everlong

A short story I started to write last year, sidelined for another work that I am currently moving on with in favour. I'd love to get any thoughts on this for when I pick it back up agian.

(I have selected 'Romance', but its more of a tragic romance)

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Everlong

Sometimes things can happen just like that. Sometimes it can take years to reach that one moment in time, that one specific moment when everything changes, but when it does, things can happen. Just. Like. That.

Today was that day, today was a day that Kriss was going to remember for the rest of her life. The day she fell in love.

1.

A chill hung in the air as she opened the door to her apartment. It ran up the inside of her skirt and instantly brought goose bumps to her pale skin. She’d left the window open again! She dropped her tattered rucksack on the floor beside the door and rubbed her knees through the hem of her skirt, trying to flatten her goose pimples into submission. She winced as she pressed against a bruise on her left knee she’d gotten earlier that day. ‘Just another thing’, she thought to herself.

She kicked the door closed behind her with the heel of her foot and marched across the room to the window. Keying in her four digit code on the pad, the window fell down with a smooth ‘thunk’, blocking out the cold night air. She reached down and motioned her hand above the small metal lamp on the little table under the window. The lamp sprang to life filling the corner of the room with a puddle of light and made her blink as she held her gaze to the light strip for a second too long. Another day finished.

She sighed deeply as she turned around and slumped on to her tatty brown leather sofa. She had managed, three months previously, to pick it up at a decent price of fifteen pounds from a flea market downtown. The stall owner had kindly offered to help carry it up to her flat for an extra three pounds. Money well spent in her opinion. The sofa had that old soft feeling from years of usage. Fraying on the arms revealed a cross hatch of cotton underneath a thin layer of leather. She thought it added a sense of history to her apartment, a sense of normalcy and something real amidst the minimalistic decor she hated in these cut and paste apartments. She rubbed her hand along the arm of the sofa and gazed up at the ceiling, blinking away the small dots of light that had been temporarily pasted to her vision.

Her name was Kriss. Kriss was a twenty year old junior nurse at the local hospital where she scrubbed the shit and spit from the bodies of all the ancient folks that were there taking up residence. More often than not the old folks’ offspring never went to visit, they just went about their lives, oblivious to the parents that had brought them up, and when the time had come to repay the favour; ‘into the home they went’. The problem was, was that the old folks never seemed to die. The average life expectancy was one hundred and twenty five years, and the hospitals were packed with the left behind parents of the new aged power hungry drones of 2079.

Five years ago Kriss’s father had died unexpectedly of a stroke. It had affected her, perhaps more than she would have thought. Her father was a depressed man, had been ever since Kriss’ mother passed away when she was three. Since then her father hadn’t been around much. He’d spent most of his life moving from small time job to smaller job, eventually falling into a realm of obscurity and a hermit like approach to life. Kriss had moved into her grandmother’s house at the age of seven. She rarely saw her father but when she did he was nearly always drunk. She both loved and loathed him for he was never there for her but she knew that he was, in actuality always there. A symbol of her family, albeit hidden away within his own thoughts and his own non-existent life. He’d died alone in his small apartment in Earls Court.

Soon after Kriss’ father had died she’d decided to give something back, to give something back to all those old folks that were cooped up in the hospitals, waiting to die. All she did was tidy up after them, wipe their arses, change their bed sheets, pour away their old festering pots of piss in the morning. It never ceased to amaze Kriss that in this age of cleanliness and clinical living (for the most part at least) that the old, forgotten people of today, would live the rest of their lives in substandard quality. There were not enough nurses to look after the ancient and nowhere near enough inclination to ensure that this generation were loved or cared for. The government had re-outlawed euthanasia and slowly but surely the old were packing to the rafters.

Kriss didn’t really love them, but at least they offered some response of thanks, when they weren’t wiping their own faeces up the wall or dribbling spittle down their chins. She just needed to feel needed, to feel like she was making a difference, but above all she felt relief at seeing people that were lonelier than her.

Kriss’ fingernail snagged on the stitching of the sofa arm, tugging at her nail and pulled her back into reality. She stuck her finger into her mouth and snipped the offending shard of nail with her teeth. She wondered momentarily how many places that finger had been that day but pushed that thought aside ‘no use in worrying about that now’, she thought as she tucked the piece of nail into the front pocket of her nurses skirt.

Kriss turned and looked out of her window again. The lamp on the table had brightened slightly in relation to the darkness now growing outside, she motioned her hand at it in a downwards movement to lower the intensity of the light. The sounds of electro-mobiles and the hustle and bustle of night living was starting to fill the air. Friday night in Soho was a manic place to be. Even through the plexsteel-glass she could hear the dull drone of activity outside.

During the day Soho was filled with the highflying business types of whatever corporation, moving from A to B like worker bees, buzzing around, filling the small needs of the mega corporations they worked for, the life blood for the mega corps, the plasma and oxygen for the monsters of today. During the night Soho came alive.