Of Clutter and Courtesy

I sat in my apartment, wondering vaguely where the light was originating. I had no lamps or bulbs, though the room was clearly visible as though by some ambient source of luminance. I lamented the clutter, the mess, the piles of unidentifiable junk and filth. My home looked as though it had been ravaged, and left awash in a dirty glow of gray and brown.

A knock at the door.

I scuttled toward the handle and, in the interest of feigning courtesy, pulled open the door. Before me stood a stranger, much taller than myself.

"Hello there! I am a friend of your friend, Jason! We met last year, when we all traveled to Georgia together."

In the murky gray light, I could make out his facial features, and they were wholly new to me. "You're not. You look nothing, absolutely nothing like him."

"Oh," said the stranger, visibly distraught. As though willed by my denial, his facial construct contorted and shifted and changed, reshaping into a more familiar presentation. "Is this closer to his face, then?"

"Yes, I suppose you're close enough now," I conceded.

I stepped into the hallway and shut my apartment door behind me. We were in near-darkness; a short distance from ourselves, we espied a beckoning glint of light from under another door. I threw open the door, its shuddering creak wailing and echoing inside the vast room into which it led.

A huge room, bathed in natural light from massive windows all around. The ceiling was magnificently high, and the windows seemed to extend from our floor level, to untold and unseen heavens above. Into the room rushed beams of light from outside, also despondently cold and gray and pale. It was then that my stranger-friend and I laid eyes on the table in the center of the room.

Lined with cloth and expertly presented, the table was set for some wondrous feast; silverware and glasses, plates and bowls were situated in front of each magnificent black seat, and each seat around this impressive table was inhabited by an impossibly elderly person. With ancient sunken eyes, every one of these silent turned to us in unison, their hands placed flatly on the table in front of them. As we approached, I beheld their loose and craggy skins, dangling precariously from skeletal structures that were illuminated ghastily in the soft, cold light.

There was no food on the table. In its stead, was dust, thickly caked and grimy and undisturbed. With unexpected trepidation, I stepped hurriedly toward the windows to glance outside, away from these living skeletons that were also inexplicably covered in the same thick, grimy dust, as though it had long ago become their second skin. As my stranger-friend and I traversed the room, their sullen stares followed our every step. Not a word was uttered.

My stranger-friend and I looked outward, our backs to the room. An expansive forest loomed before us, exhibiting not a single sign of life. Blanched trees arose from the ground, pale and beautiful, reaching upwards in their evident attempt to escape their own beginnings. Their boughs and branches grew up and up, until burdened by their own weight, and were slowly diverted and forced to plunge back down into which they had begun. The tips and ends of their branches resembled severed hands and arms -- without sense or reason, they were bloodied severed hands and arms. The tips of these trees bled and reached with human hands, clawing and tugging, grasping in futility. Bones from these arms and hands grew outward, splintering into different paths, seeking to escape their own beginnings.

In disgust, my stranger-friend and I turned back to the large cavernous room, which now seemed colder than before; our ancient skeletal audience still glared at us, as though studying us with as much fascination as unfathomable hatred. "Let's...get out of here," I said quietly.

We hurriedly left the large, cavernous room, and made our way back to the hallway; believing I had feigned courtesy quite enough for this stranger, I quickly hurled myself back into the apartment, shutting and locking the door behind me. My stranger-friend made no effort to follow me.

A creak. That creaking noise from overhead.

What was that?

I looked to the low ceiling of my apartment, only in time to see it wholly collapse, annihilated under an untold mass of rat feces. The feces flooded my apartment, as legions upon legions of rats swarmed down from above, falling through the ceiling and into the horrible, horrible scene below. In vain, I tried to push through the dense pile of crawling rats, fighting and biting and tearing at each other, to reach the top of the pile that they each had wrought...


...When abruptly, I was genuinely awakened by my cat vomiting on my apartment floor.