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"People can't wait to be brain-dead."

I’ve noticed my days have become the same. Mostly, I mean there’s differences – one day  of the week is pay day (if there had been any work) and sometimes the women change. But it’s all mostly the same. We were poor. Well, I was poor. Everyone else seemed to be doing alright. Except they looked like wankers for the most part of the day. Even the shit-kicking telemarketers dressed up their living-dead corpsebodies to con the elderly out of their government cheques. The ‘financial crisis’ is just to be something to be feared by us young people like senility, grey hair and Viagra. The only people who really care are the racists and the home-owners. Racists worry about jobs being stolen and home-owners worry.

Nobody lived like they were poor though! Only worked like it. I guess that’s where everyone’s arrogance comes from. Being better than a global problem. Debt accumulated for necessities like giant, futuristic televisions. People can’t wait to be brain-dead. As long as their jobs, home and morals were secure they could become one with the couch. The cable reception was the celebrant and the fat kids were the wedding party. The debt was justified. Education. Be damned if they are going to teach their kids, ‘what else do I pay them teachers for? Those teachers… I pay for them by working all day and god-damned week.’

I just fucked. Global warming is about to cook us (or freeze us I can never tell) and to me the best way to pass off this existence as something pleasurable was pleasure itself. I said the women kept changing and I didn’t like this. Television and modern day romance have it wrong. A man’s heart is one thing a woman does not want to be given, she must earn it from you. If you want women, you need to hide your heart and fill the hole with guts and ego. Stifle those sweet nothings being pumped through your body like a disease. Be an arsehole and you’ll have meaningless sex for years.

My problem is that I can’t run from the truth in meaningful sex differentiating us from the rodent. Not that I have any right to pass judgement on the common rat, but having an opposable thumb to stick up your lovers’ arse comes with a weighty price that we all must bare: love and attachment. If it’s going to be real then you can’t just let those flags fly, no matter how tall your pole is.

Like this one time, I managed to drag this girl back to my place. She was cute in tubby way. Short deep-red hair cut into some kind of a bob, but a DIY job so you know she was hands-on. She seemed out of place. Antiquated. She had a face that reminded me of my mother’s era, but I doubted that she would survive in a time so sexually depraved. In public, she would sometimes waddle ahead of me and lift her skirt. She’d wriggle a little bit more and slide it down again, shooting a wink behind. It seemed like a routine she practiced in front of a mirror. I didn’t give a damn, and over who else saw neither did she.

She led me to my room. She’d been there before. It was dark and the globe had blown. I lit candles that she thought were silly. She kissed at me, biting my lobes and tugging down my jeans. After getting the desired response from my better, lower half she looked up at me with her big brown eyes and asked if I had any condoms. I wondered if Jagger or even Bukowski had been asked to be protected from their junk but my mouth shot out a ‘Yes, of course,’ instead. She clapped her hands together excitedly while I rooted around, procuring a prophylactic just in time. We screwed the night away like we were the only ones awake and alive enough to enjoy it. It was afterwards, drunk on the smell of the room and the cans that littered it, that I let my adolescence slip past my bravado.

‘This means something to you, right?’ I searched the ceiling for something better but it wasn’t there, ‘It means something to me,’

She let out a deep, breathy sigh. ‘We should leave this for the morning, when we’re not drunk,’

She didn’t mean what she said. She just hoped I wouldn’t remember. I fell asleep and chose not to. She left in the morning, saying it was fun.

It was months until I saw her again. That night wasn’t the first time but when it’s not regular it’s nothing. She was at my front door, scared and dishevelled. Her eyes were wild, like an owls but without the strength of a predator. Her pouty red lips practiced the beginning of her sentence once or twice before they had the confidence to round out sounds.

‘I… I’ve burnt a house down,’

‘You burnt your house down!?’

‘It was an accident. I… I didn’t mean to. And it wasn’t my house, I was just staying there. I’ve lost everything. All my things…’ she looked down and started to cry. Her full-moon face had lost it’s strength and fell.

‘Was… anybody hurt?’

‘No, thank God, I was the only one home, and no the owners didn’t care, they have another one. I think they have a few,’

Serves them right, I thought. I didn’t ask anymore, I simply took her in – her one set of clothes and all. We slept together that night but I bit my tongue. Instead I thought of the house. The flames, her flames, licking the paint from the walls and biting wooden frame work in two. The fire swallowed everything she was, from her outfits to her music to her tampons. I imagined my heart as the house, but soon realised that it was burnt long ago. Long before she said it was fun. Long before she came here for the first time and long before I moved to this city. I refused to rebuild it because I knew the flames would be back.

I got rid of all my candles and wondered how many houses they had left.

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© David Canellis 2010

A twenty-year-old writer based on the Gold Coast in Australia but have served time in Brisbane City, Sydney and various country towns in the middle of nowhere. I draw influences from my real life, my adolesence and my imagined life if I had the guts to truly be free from cultural and social restraints. Some influencing authors are Hemingway, Bukowski and Ben Elton. I write poetry, short prose and attempt novels.