Cleaning House
The ceiling still looked as it always had. It still drooped in the one corner with the tea-stained water damage surrounding it. The bed was much the same. Though his form now dominated what used to envelop him. Batman now starched with years of stasis, a small layer of dust sprinkled like midwinter snow.
He lay looking up with his boots hanging off the edge of his childhood bed. He looked around the room, studying a moment in his life frozen in time. It was so distant from him now he felt like a historian studying cave paintings. His basketball trophies on top of his dresser, plastic stalagmites venerating a player the game forgot. There was a picture stabbed onto the wall with a yellow thumbtack. Two boys in front of a lake holding each other and laughing with crooked red smiles painted on with the melted remnants of popsicles in summer.
On his bedside table was a blue lamp and beside it a pack of playing cards that read “Perdido Key.” He sat up, picked up the pack of fifty-two mementos of a forgotten vacation. Without willing it, his right hand held it and tapped it on his left palm like tamping down tobacco in a pack of cigarettes before the superstitious smoker designates the “lucky.” Looking down at the pack, his thumb rubbed across the cardboard tide, one great blue wave crashing down onto a perfect white beach. He dropped it back onto the bedside table and a puff of dust sprang up like tweens on a rusty trampoline.
His arms hung low, past the bed itself. His hands rubbed along the underside of the frame where the monsters lie in wait for nervous boys who fear the dark. As his fingers grazed the wood they came across a small, hardened lump. He knew right away what it was. He smirked remembering getting detention for being caught putting gum under his desk. His fingernails started to pick at it as his hand grabbed the frame for leverage, an archaeologist collecting samples. His nails continued to excavate until finally it all came off with a crack.
He held it in his hand, this small black lump of decades old bubblegum. It looked almost like the shell of a small beetle. He turned it over; played with it, let it roll through his fingers. He knew the old saying about swallowing bubblegum and how it takes years to digest. Assuming it were true, that bubblegum did take that long to digest he wondered which would have lasted longer, the one he stored under his sleeping quarters or the one he would have choked down. Without thinking, he popped it in his mouth.
It was a rock. His teeth weren’t strong enough to break it down. He’d need stronger tools for that. He spat the tasteless object back into his hands. And in an odd way, he wished he could chew it, just once more.
And with that, he finally cried.
