Three Word Wednesday prompt this week is:

care
unexpected
weekend

ROCK BOTTOM

This was the last thing I wanted to do. The last place I wanted to be. But it wasn't like I had any choices left. They say that your family has to take you in when you go back home, but like a lot of things people say, that is not strictly true.


“Can I stay, man, just a few days?”

Thomas immediately tensed, and moved to block the doorway to his apartment.

I beg “Let me stay just for the weekend. Monday I’ll be off your couch and you won’t hear from me again till Christmas - like usual. Come on, man, I need to get off the streets for a couple nights...”

I know I sound pathetic, look pathetic, smell like a dead body that was left at the dump for a month and then got up and walked down the street. I reeked of desperation.

The second Angie kicked me out, throwing my duffle bag at me on the stairs, I’ve been steadily sliding down to this place till I finally landed right on rock bottom. It took a little over three months of crashing on friend’s couches till the last friend on my list stopped returning my phone calls and didn’t answer when I pounded on his door- though I know I heard someone moving around in his place.

Who can blame him really though? If I saw me coming- this man with ratty hair and clothes, and eyes that looked a little too angry and defiant to trust- I would not merely look the other way, I would run the other way.

But Thomas is my brother. He don’t have that option. I shove my foot in between the door and the frame, so he can’t close it. After a moment, where his dark eyes meet mine in a silent warning, he sighs and motions me inside. “What the hell happened to you, Eric?”

I tell him, “I hit an unexpected run of bad luck, is all.”


What am I supposed to say?

I wasn’t always a screw up. I graduated college- unlike Thomas- and had a decent entry level job with room for advancement. But the waiting to get there, up that ladder, was like a rest stop in Hell. No man with a fully functioning brain stem and my sense of ambition could have put up with it for long without relief.

So I let loose every now and again- just a few drugs, a few pills, staying up a little too late once too often- but it was enough to get me canned. Angie didn’t like a lay about boyfriend and soon me, the duffle bag, and my ever growing addictions were tossed out the door.

Thomas doesn’t know about any of that. We don’t keep in touch and I wouldn’t be here right now if I had anywhere else in the world to go. He knows that and seems to resent that I have fallen so far that I am now forced to burden him with my situation. Maybe he wants to be concerned, thinks he should, but it is obvious to both of us that he just can’t work up the energy to care.

“I was online,” Thomas says, with a wave of his hand toward his office.

“Sure. Go back to it. Don’t let me keep you.”

“There’s not much in the fridge. I eat at Gina’s a lot. But I’m sure there’s something you could make a sandwich out of.” Thomas walks off, closing the door to his office, while I am still standing just a foot inside the apartment.

He doesn’t want to deal with me. I can’t blame him. I am now at the last place I have to turn and he wants me gone as soon as possible. All I can think as I stand here is This is what being completely alone in this world feels like.


THE END

Note- I am thinking of continuing this next week with the Three Word Wednesday prompt, because I have an idea for how to change Eric’s luck.