“The Tragedy of Mr. Verdaguer”
Stains plague the surface of a polyester button up, the stitches that hold in the doughy-flesh of the waist are weak and unsound. Mr. Verdaguer smears jam off his finger to accompany various other blemishes over his trousers. Grease oozes from under the nail of this finger. Mr. Verdaguer lives in an apartment in dreary Trowbarrow, England. Trowbarrow is well known for its inhabitants afflicted with unwavering misery. With rain that seeps its dullness into every surface it touches, the town seems as if it has been embalmed.
Mr. Verdaguers apartment is packed densely with unusable furniture of low quality. Each floorboard creaks and the building itself leans uncertainly, exposing the black mold coating its foundation. A living room was built by the back door, the walls adorn a pale yellow wallpaper with the texture of wet newspaper. A bedroom that reeks of rats is on the second floor, furnished with mostly with overflowing ashtrays and garbage from the week before. The bedroom has three windows, all tainted from years of exposure to smog, and by the window closest to the street there was a grand bed. The mattress had been found in an alley, along with the mattress came a strange odor of bird. Every door moaned and needed physical persuasion if one wished to leave or enter a room.
In a life of thirty years Mr. Verdaguer stole and lied his way into an unimpressive life. Then in ten years more, he smoke, and drank away what little pleasure he accumulated. It seems impossible to remember Mr. Verdaguers first name. It may have been it never existed, and it can be assured it was never used. From when he was conceived through the day of his death he remained permanently friendless, making a first name redundant. This is true for many people in Trowbarrow. Life was viewed as a metaphorical dead end street, where the end can never truly be reached.
In Trowbarrow there is real dead end street, nicknamed by frustrated teenage boys the Midnight Road. On this road women, in the early hours of morning after midnight, pace under fluorescent street lights. Children call these women Verdaguer girls. As the objects of his kind heartedness, they can be seen taking a lift or lending grocery money from him. Verdaguer girls were some of the unluckiest women to have ever been born. In town men and women would pucker their lips as they passed. A particular Verdaguer girl was named Clarice, she is a young woman with chipped red nails and heavy eyelids that sighs like a dog in heat.
On this very bland Tuesday, in heavy rain, Clarice's white legs shake beneath her. Blue veins form a maze under the pale skin of her hand as it grips onto porcelain. Her body heaves forward and back and a sound similar to the spilling of rotten milk onto pavement echos from one room into the other. In the other room a women called Elena stood with her shoulder digging a groove into the bathroom door. Elena was born three years before Clarice, but appeared to be ten years older still. After years of self medicating abuse the skin of her forehead sagged deeply into her eyebrows, giving her a lasting look of displeasure. Upon conquering her assault on the bathroom and breaching through the door her hands flew to the shelves. Like birds picking apart a carcass her fingers scrutinize over the label of every bottle. Finally satisfied with a vile of colorless powder in her sweating palm she looks aloofly over Clarice kneeling on the floor. Elena placidly shakes her head and steps out of the bathroom. Although Clarice and Elena lived in the same negligible flat there was only a single mattress. It was a childs mattress covered with a gray duvet, and no matter how timidly one lay a hand or foot was always left intimately with the floor. The women never shared the mattress; it was a rare occurrence both were found home often enough to sleep. Elena dragged the mattress over to a desk and tipped the vile over. Her head swung back and her shoulders tensed. Dazed and smiling in a comatose state, her back slouched into the wall as Clarice continued the eviction of the contents in her stomach.
...
After acquiring a strange characteristic of drastic roundness, Clarice found herself to no longer be a Verdaguer girl. Mr. Verdaguer,s affection, or perhaps affliction, had easily been distracted by new pursuits. Men and women had gone from puckering their lips to shaking their heads mimicking dismay and muttering “its a shame, its a shame,” just loudly enough to be audible. It was at this time Mr. Verdaguer sat in Myers bar. The table had a fine layer of spit and dirt covering its surface and the hand marks of past patterns decorate the wall like a morose kindergarten project. Three then four then five empty glasses sat before him. His fish eyes darted from the floor to the ceiling as a milky haze coated his pupil. It is not all impossible to believe Mr. Verdaguer,s fate had brought him to his situation, as if the heavens themselves condemned this coal miner's son to a life of inadequacy and this bar was only a unavoidable checkpoint of his life. Elena rested her cracked elbow on his shoulder, blowing rings of cigarette smoke into the air above his balding scalp. Ignoring the wanton beside him, he glared passionately between his palm. On the counter a name was carved with brute force. Bruce Verdaguer had carved his name on this bar counter the day his son was born. His son took his first breath as Bruce was in the third bathroom stall, slurring profanities and feeling his memory slide away. This situation was true for the rest of Bruce’s life until he was hospitalized for black-lung. As Mr. Verdaguer’s thoughts raised with remembrance, Elena’s elbow met the beer pitcher on the counter, knocking it into Mr. Verdaguer’s lap. Flying into a rage, his mouth foaming like a mad boar, Mr. Verdaguer’s cracked palm grasped onto Elena’s narrow shoulders. Shaking her like a cat shakes a mouse between its steel jaws, he swore lucidly. Elena escaped his grasp and weaving through crowded tables surrounded by blank faces, disappeared through the back door into the alley way. Mr. Verdaguer, feeling abandoned and not yet having quenched his fury, followed. Elena, being the cunning witch she was stood posed behind the door wielding a plaster brick. Her skeleton arms held high above her head, triumphant before the fight had begun. As Mr. Verdaguer stepped into the alley the plaster rained down upon his scalp. Elena’s eyes flashed red like a fox. Plunging onto the pavement he lay limply as Elena shifted through his pockets and spat on his face.
Drool leaking from his open mouth, Mr. Verdaguers blood pooled underneath his head. His eyelids flickered open and were filled with a terrible blackness. Before him was death, reaching its cadaverous palm outward to caress his face. Its black mass hung suspended underneath the luminous bar sign. Flooding the alley was a obscene feeling of grief that was only survivable to those that had become tolerant after years of catastrophe. Petrified, Mr. Verdaguer let pitiful sobs rock his body. His chest shaking and his shoulders falling like a great avalanche salted tears ran clear pathways through his dirty face. Then as suddenly as it had come, like a thick fog death was blown away. Mr. Verdaguer was left weeping into his hands. In exhaustive misery Mr. Verdaguer recalled his tragic life and the man he had become because of it. The tears having washed away the grime on his face they appeared to have washed away his sinisterness. In the alleyway behind Myers bar sat a deserted boy that had struggled through adolescence into a poisonous adulthood. Cruel fate had determined his failures, causing each decision to be a painful one. The disgusting face of a villain was only that of a ruined child. In the depths of his crumbling life, a pathetic man that might have been godly hid away. Having reached a philosophical epiphany, Mr. Verdaguer was reborn. His soul had been cleansed as if his sobs had been repentance. The fisheyes that were sunken into his skull had been giving a new light, and they emitted a view of hope. Inspired by a new found purity. With a vivid realization of spirituality, a murmur began in his chest. A faint echo of his heart began, resounding through the cavity of his ribs.
Clarice, a snow capped mountain under starched sheets, groaned on a mattress impressed by plastic handle bars. A assembly of beeping and buzzing played from electronic attendants with pixelated faces. This scene unfolded in Mr. Verdaguers consciences, suddenly the murmur of his heart had be recognized.
His feet, like bloated hooves that had sprouted toes, connected with the pavement and sent him in a hurdle. Lips stretched across a tear streaked face yellow teeth flashed in euphoria. Like a preacher who had found proof of god, static delirium flooded from him. Out of the alley and into the street, not a bead of sweat dared to mar his vicade. Jumping and lunging through crowds of breathing yet lifeless wanders, golden light seemed to dance around his pathway. Clarice glimmered in his mind, the murmur in his heart quickening. Across a crowded road a red X glowed on top of fortress with white painted brick. The murmur of his heart deafening him to outside influence his feet graced the pavement of the street. A brilliant white intruded into his consciousness, suddenly his torso rammed with a metal grill and a smashed glass fluttered like snow around him. His feet cracked onto the pavement, following his head. In the white building four stories from the ground and three rooms to the left, the murmur of another heart became a beat.
Stains plague the surface of a polyester button up, the stitches that hold in the doughy-flesh of the waist are weak and unsound. Mr. Verdaguer smears jam off his finger to accompany various other blemishes over his trousers. Grease oozes from under the nail of this finger. Mr. Verdaguer lives in an apartment in dreary Trowbarrow, England. Trowbarrow is well known for its inhabitants afflicted with unwavering misery. With rain that seeps its dullness into every surface it touches, the town seems as if it has been embalmed.
Mr. Verdaguers apartment is packed densely with unusable furniture of low quality. Each floorboard creaks and the building itself leans uncertainly, exposing the black mold coating its foundation. A living room was built by the back door, the walls adorn a pale yellow wallpaper with the texture of wet newspaper. A bedroom that reeks of rats is on the second floor, furnished with mostly with overflowing ashtrays and garbage from the week before. The bedroom has three windows, all tainted from years of exposure to smog, and by the window closest to the street there was a grand bed. The mattress had been found in an alley, along with the mattress came a strange odor of bird. Every door moaned and needed physical persuasion if one wished to leave or enter a room.
In a life of thirty years Mr. Verdaguer stole and lied his way into an unimpressive life. Then in ten years more, he smoke, and drank away what little pleasure he accumulated. It seems impossible to remember Mr. Verdaguers first name. It may have been it never existed, and it can be assured it was never used. From when he was conceived through the day of his death he remained permanently friendless, making a first name redundant. This is true for many people in Trowbarrow. Life was viewed as a metaphorical dead end street, where the end can never truly be reached.
In Trowbarrow there is real dead end street, nicknamed by frustrated teenage boys the Midnight Road. On this road women, in the early hours of morning after midnight, pace under fluorescent street lights. Children call these women Verdaguer girls. As the objects of his kind heartedness, they can be seen taking a lift or lending grocery money from him. Verdaguer girls were some of the unluckiest women to have ever been born. In town men and women would pucker their lips as they passed. A particular Verdaguer girl was named Clarice, she is a young woman with chipped red nails and heavy eyelids that sighs like a dog in heat.
On this very bland Tuesday, in heavy rain, Clarice's white legs shake beneath her. Blue veins form a maze under the pale skin of her hand as it grips onto porcelain. Her body heaves forward and back and a sound similar to the spilling of rotten milk onto pavement echos from one room into the other. In the other room a women called Elena stood with her shoulder digging a groove into the bathroom door. Elena was born three years before Clarice, but appeared to be ten years older still. After years of self medicating abuse the skin of her forehead sagged deeply into her eyebrows, giving her a lasting look of displeasure. Upon conquering her assault on the bathroom and breaching through the door her hands flew to the shelves. Like birds picking apart a carcass her fingers scrutinize over the label of every bottle. Finally satisfied with a vile of colorless powder in her sweating palm she looks aloofly over Clarice kneeling on the floor. Elena placidly shakes her head and steps out of the bathroom. Although Clarice and Elena lived in the same negligible flat there was only a single mattress. It was a childs mattress covered with a gray duvet, and no matter how timidly one lay a hand or foot was always left intimately with the floor. The women never shared the mattress; it was a rare occurrence both were found home often enough to sleep. Elena dragged the mattress over to a desk and tipped the vile over. Her head swung back and her shoulders tensed. Dazed and smiling in a comatose state, her back slouched into the wall as Clarice continued the eviction of the contents in her stomach.
...
After acquiring a strange characteristic of drastic roundness, Clarice found herself to no longer be a Verdaguer girl. Mr. Verdaguer,s affection, or perhaps affliction, had easily been distracted by new pursuits. Men and women had gone from puckering their lips to shaking their heads mimicking dismay and muttering “its a shame, its a shame,” just loudly enough to be audible. It was at this time Mr. Verdaguer sat in Myers bar. The table had a fine layer of spit and dirt covering its surface and the hand marks of past patterns decorate the wall like a morose kindergarten project. Three then four then five empty glasses sat before him. His fish eyes darted from the floor to the ceiling as a milky haze coated his pupil. It is not all impossible to believe Mr. Verdaguer,s fate had brought him to his situation, as if the heavens themselves condemned this coal miner's son to a life of inadequacy and this bar was only a unavoidable checkpoint of his life. Elena rested her cracked elbow on his shoulder, blowing rings of cigarette smoke into the air above his balding scalp. Ignoring the wanton beside him, he glared passionately between his palm. On the counter a name was carved with brute force. Bruce Verdaguer had carved his name on this bar counter the day his son was born. His son took his first breath as Bruce was in the third bathroom stall, slurring profanities and feeling his memory slide away. This situation was true for the rest of Bruce’s life until he was hospitalized for black-lung. As Mr. Verdaguer’s thoughts raised with remembrance, Elena’s elbow met the beer pitcher on the counter, knocking it into Mr. Verdaguer’s lap. Flying into a rage, his mouth foaming like a mad boar, Mr. Verdaguer’s cracked palm grasped onto Elena’s narrow shoulders. Shaking her like a cat shakes a mouse between its steel jaws, he swore lucidly. Elena escaped his grasp and weaving through crowded tables surrounded by blank faces, disappeared through the back door into the alley way. Mr. Verdaguer, feeling abandoned and not yet having quenched his fury, followed. Elena, being the cunning witch she was stood posed behind the door wielding a plaster brick. Her skeleton arms held high above her head, triumphant before the fight had begun. As Mr. Verdaguer stepped into the alley the plaster rained down upon his scalp. Elena’s eyes flashed red like a fox. Plunging onto the pavement he lay limply as Elena shifted through his pockets and spat on his face.
Drool leaking from his open mouth, Mr. Verdaguers blood pooled underneath his head. His eyelids flickered open and were filled with a terrible blackness. Before him was death, reaching its cadaverous palm outward to caress his face. Its black mass hung suspended underneath the luminous bar sign. Flooding the alley was a obscene feeling of grief that was only survivable to those that had become tolerant after years of catastrophe. Petrified, Mr. Verdaguer let pitiful sobs rock his body. His chest shaking and his shoulders falling like a great avalanche salted tears ran clear pathways through his dirty face. Then as suddenly as it had come, like a thick fog death was blown away. Mr. Verdaguer was left weeping into his hands. In exhaustive misery Mr. Verdaguer recalled his tragic life and the man he had become because of it. The tears having washed away the grime on his face they appeared to have washed away his sinisterness. In the alleyway behind Myers bar sat a deserted boy that had struggled through adolescence into a poisonous adulthood. Cruel fate had determined his failures, causing each decision to be a painful one. The disgusting face of a villain was only that of a ruined child. In the depths of his crumbling life, a pathetic man that might have been godly hid away. Having reached a philosophical epiphany, Mr. Verdaguer was reborn. His soul had been cleansed as if his sobs had been repentance. The fisheyes that were sunken into his skull had been giving a new light, and they emitted a view of hope. Inspired by a new found purity. With a vivid realization of spirituality, a murmur began in his chest. A faint echo of his heart began, resounding through the cavity of his ribs.
Clarice, a snow capped mountain under starched sheets, groaned on a mattress impressed by plastic handle bars. A assembly of beeping and buzzing played from electronic attendants with pixelated faces. This scene unfolded in Mr. Verdaguers consciences, suddenly the murmur of his heart had be recognized.
His feet, like bloated hooves that had sprouted toes, connected with the pavement and sent him in a hurdle. Lips stretched across a tear streaked face yellow teeth flashed in euphoria. Like a preacher who had found proof of god, static delirium flooded from him. Out of the alley and into the street, not a bead of sweat dared to mar his vicade. Jumping and lunging through crowds of breathing yet lifeless wanders, golden light seemed to dance around his pathway. Clarice glimmered in his mind, the murmur in his heart quickening. Across a crowded road a red X glowed on top of fortress with white painted brick. The murmur of his heart deafening him to outside influence his feet graced the pavement of the street. A brilliant white intruded into his consciousness, suddenly his torso rammed with a metal grill and a smashed glass fluttered like snow around him. His feet cracked onto the pavement, following his head. In the white building four stories from the ground and three rooms to the left, the murmur of another heart became a beat.