Sam Pink - Person

One day I will figure out which stop the junior college is at and then I will go there and meet this man and we will help each other through life.

When I return to the apartment tonight, the first thing I do is I wash my hands in the sink.

Usually I forget.

Any time I don’t wash my hands after riding the train and then touch my eyes in my sleep, my eyes burn real bad.

It’s terrible!

I dry my hands on the couch and then I go to walk down the hallway to my room.

At the dark entrance to the hallway I almost bump into my roommate.

He’s just standing there quietly.

“Hello,” he says. “Did you just get back.”

“Yes,” I say. “You know that. You just said that because you had nothing else to say and you wanted to say something.”

“Did you find a job,” he says. “Anything. Where did you look today.”

I put my hand against the wall, blocking the kitchen from my roommate.

And I position my face close to his.

“Yes, another good day,” I say.

He stretches and uses the stretch to step backwards a little, somewhat into the darker area of the hallway.

He is looking at my mouth.

“Well, good,” he says. “I knew you’d come back.”

“Of course. I pay rent here.”

“Oh,” he says, “I forgot. I have a job for you. I totally forgot about this but I have a job for you if you want it. Can’t believe I forgot about this.”

I laugh.

“Oh yeah — what’s the job.”

“Uh I have, an opening for, someone to uh—” He sniffs, then he yells, “Eat my fucking shit.”

He yells it right in my face.

He laughs and I laugh too.

And yes, we are people.

He says, “So, if you are the right person for the job, let me know.”

We laugh together.

Everything looks exactly the same except we are laughing.

It is good.

I like it.

Then my roommate slowly stops laughing.

“Hey, but really though,” he says. “I do have a job for you. No joking now.”

I’m still smiling.

“What is it,” I say.

“No really, I have a job for you,” he says. “I will pay you five-hundred dollars to kill my dad. I can give you the address and a little under half of the money right now. He lives like two hours away from here.” He points between us and he says, “So if you’re that person, let me know.”

There is a pause in which I imagine a puppy falling out of the ceiling onto my head, then landing in my loving hands.

“I’m being serious right now,” my roommate says. “I will give you the money if you kill him. Make it hurt too.”

He pinches at his t-shirt, scratching his chest.

He yawns.

“Hey,” I say, taking my arm off the wall.

I allow a pause.

“Give me a hug.” I say.

He smiles.

We hug.

The hug is somewhat long and it feels nice.

Then when it’s over I walk down the hallway and go into my room and I call it a day and it calls me something else.

Sometimes I can hear my room laughing at me when I go into it.

The Blue Line train stop by my place is the stop I like the best because it smells the most harshly of piss.

There is no equal.

All the other stops aren’t as harsh.

It’s like, this stop has the best piss smell, because no other piss smell tries this hard to be so condensed and so — just so new.

And I get off the train to walk home, enjoying the piss smell.

I made sixty dollars doing a study on smoking after lying about smoking.

At home, my roommate is sitting on the counter in the kitchen playing a video game on his calculator.

He sets the calculator down on the kitchen counter.

“Battery died,” he says.

I’m with this girl I had sex with a few months ago (and then now again just recently).

She lives in a first floor apartment here in the same building.

I have my head in her lap, and we are on the couch in her livingroom.

Her apartment smells like garbage, just like mine.

It’s afternoon and the room is lit but not too bright.

It’s nice to be with her.

My head is burnt badly from trying to shave it last night without shaving cream and her legs feel nice and cool against the skin on my head.

“Your head looks bad,” she says. “Does it hurt.”

“It hurts.”

She leans in different directions to see more of the flaking.

She is nice to me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

That’s probably why I mostly avoid her.

And anyone like her.

“Why didn’t you put lotion on it,” she says. “Or like, you could’ve dipped a t-shirt in water and then wrapped it around your head.”

“I don’t think I’d like having a wet t-shirt over my head, even in private. When I think about doing that, I mean, I see myself shrugging,” I say.

I wince.

She takes her hand away.

“Did that hurt,” she says.

“Yes, pretty bad.”

“It hurt when I touched it just now,” she says.

“Yeah that made it hurt,” I say. “What did you do.”

“I pressed my finger into it a little. I’m just trying to fix it. Do you want me to fix it even?” She presses her finger in again and she says,

“Boop.”

“That makes it hurt more. Much much more. Think ‘badly,’ but even more.”

She presses her fingers lightly into my head.

“Boop. I can’t imagine anything more than badly,” she says. “I get lost after that.”

I move away from her hand.

“Think of a piece of black construction paper,” I say. “And like, someone jabbing a pen through it a lot, all mad.”

I stare at the carpet between her feet.

“The flakes peel right off,” she says.

She drops a piece to the carpet, past my face.

“Did that hurt.”

“I couldn’t feel it, actually.”

She lets another piece of skin fall to the carpet, past my face.

“You were being a baby then before,” she says.

I watch the piece of skin hit the carpet and become a part of the carpet.

“Yes I was,” I say. “A big baby.”

“You fucking baby,” she says.

I begin to make up a song in my head.

The song is about being a big fucking baby.

She continues to peel off pieces and drop them to the carpet and I watch each piece fall.

“It’s a snow-day,” she says.

She drops a few more pieces.

She laughs.

The laugh is small.

It seems like she did it out of fear no one else would.

“It’s a snow-day,” she says. “Let’s have a snow-day here. We’ll stay in.”

She peels off more flakes and I see them fall in front of my face, to the carpet.

This is the moment I realize that she is a real human being and I will never be what she needs to have.

This has happened before.

Another piece falls.

“Soon I will be too small to see,” I say.

“Be thankful for what’s left of you,” she says.

I watch more flakes.

I say nothing.

Which means I agree.

Yeah, and we are there for three-million years.

Still there right now, three-million years later.

Yeah, and the room is still the same size.

And so am I.

I can’t sleep.

I’m too hungry.

It’s really late but the way the traffic is starting to sound outside my window means it’s almost going to be light outside.

In my dreams now I walk through fields populated with much smaller versions of myself and they are easy to smash with my feet.

Waking up hungry is shitty I guess but it doesn’t matter.

I leave my room and go down the hallway to the kitchen.

All we have in the fridge is some peppermint ice cream.