The Living Room

Coping (badly) with a strange obsession with the filthy woman who sleeps on her couch, a writer shares her thoughts, observations and a few of her fears while hiding from her responsibilities in a dusty room.

Excerpt:

"Are you still writing shit?"

She asks between inhalations of sour Russian smoke, body thrown like a plague victim on my red sofa. She is gaunt like a skeleton, with eyes that long ago lost their shine and a body that bragged of glory twenty years back, but now no longer even whispers. She is staring, those faded blue eyes like a blanket sewn by a loved one to waste away in a dusty attic, she is staring like a whore on a corner with an objective, but i've nothing to give her, and no desire for what she sells. She reeks of those cigarettes she sucks like the other things those overfull lips pull on in dirty hotel rooms for the centimes she's tossed on my table. I turn from the computer and feel my mouth form a smile that never reaches the eyes. "Are you still sucking dick on the boulevard?" She grimaces, then lights another smoke, nodding as a fresh odor fills the air and chokes me. I've been staring at her for the past hour now, her raspy voice from years of smoking all day, every day, the flesh sucked onto the bone from the lack of proper nutrition and excessive use of opiates. Her body is a wasteland. Naked and disgraced, it adorns my couch like a grotesque reminder of all that i would never want to be... And what i may be if this writing fails me. I turn to her question, which i have escaped for the moment, but it strikes me, because i am still writing shit...