Milk & Oranges: Short Fiction

Milk & Oranges
by Brian James Spies

He walked up into the musky attic, mainly to get away from the people below who did not understand. He went to turn on the light only to discover that it was too dusty to do its job. He cleaned it off with his bare sweaty hand. The dusty residue felt good on his bare hand, why, he didn’t know. He heard the hard oak floor boards creak beneath his old mud-covered work boots; to him it sounded like a banshee screeching. Someone had once lived here, he could still smell him, his scent left lingering even after he wasn’t. He walked over to the mini-fridge; he took out some milk and began to drink it before he realized the power had been shut off. It was sour, sour as his insides felt. It reminded him of late nights spent with him, late nights spent talking, bull shitting, eating oranges and drinking cold milk. He chuckled, it always amused him, how the oranges made the milk curdle. But it was what they liked, it was what they did, it was how they bonded. He heard people downstairs, laughing and shouting, like nothing had happened, like he wasn’t gone. This enraged him; it consumed him, their ambivalence, their complete and total coarseness. They acted like savage beasts, he thought to himself. This thought was interrupted by a passing jet flying over the house, its scream like star fire hurt his soul. He spotted an old projector by the window. It was rusted over; he wondered if it still worked. He hunkered his old, tired body over towards the projector. As he grew closer, he felt a breeze blowing from somewhere unseen. Then he saw the source, a broken window; it must have let dew cover the raw, unburnished metal, causing the oxidation that corrupted the projector like life had corrupted his memories, like it had corroded everything. Like the oranges and milk had curdled in his stomach. Everything is metaphor, everything is gone. But in its place there was a kind of patina, a reflection of what had been and would never again be. This gave him something, something he could hold onto, something he could build upon.