Empath

The clock read 2:14 AM. Moonlight poured into Mark’s room from between dusty Venetian blinds. It might as well not have; it really wasn’t much to look at. Tacky green carpeting – generously stained and threadbare – stretched not quite from wall-to-wall, upon which rested a smattering of furniture. In one corner, an old wardrobe stood forlorn and decrepit, stooped under the weight of its contents. Along the same wall was a well-used desk half-buried under a mountain of papers and textbooks. Excepting the plain metal office chair tucked under the desk, the only other piece of furniture in the room was the single-sized bed tucked under the lone window. The overall effect was not a good one.

It was impossible for Mark to sleep. He’d long since given up trying, and was now lying in bed fanning himself with his shirt while mentally constructing a list of the myriad forces keeping him awake. It looked something like this:

One: It’s goddamn thirty-three degrees out. What the hell? It’s September, for Christ’s sake!
Two: The gothic couple upstairs are fucking. Again. Noisily.
Three: I’m hungry.

With a sigh, Mark heaved himself out of bed and decided to do something about the last one. He stretched, and with much lip-smacking and head-scratching, plodded off in search of food. The loud snoring echoing through the apartment told him that his roommate was asleep, so he made a cursory effort to stay quiet. He needn’t have bothered, though. If the borderline-frightening screams from the two upstairs paired with the guttural screeches of the mood music they’d put on hadn’t woken him up, nothing would.

Mark tried to will himself deaf as he rummaged around the kitchen cabinets. This was the third night in a row those two had kept him awake with their nocturnal activities, and it was honestly getting a bit ridiculous. They’d go at it for hours at a time, blasting death metal at absurd volumes throughout. One had to wonder how such a feat of endurance was even possible. After a brief search, Mark found a can of soup lurking at the back of one particularly warped cabinet. So warped, in fact, that the door had long since come free of its hinges and was now just propped up against the frame most of the time. For what must have been the thousandth time, Mark wished he could afford moving somewhere less shitty.

Deciding he needed a change of venue, Mark fished a can opener and spoon out of a drawer and took them out into the main hallway of the floor he lived on. Clutching everything in one hand, he opened the door to the stairwell and made his way out the building. He sighed with relief as he stepped into the slightly cooler air outside. Taking a seat on the doorstep, he set can opener to can, and within moments he was enjoying the delicate flavours of preservative-filled beef stew. Suddenly, a triad of noises broke the silence: a deafening crack, a less-deafening clang, and a pained cry of “Shit, ow goddamnit motherfuck!”

Mark nursed his bruised toe. He regretted the waste of stew almost as much as he regretted leaving his shoes in the apartment. “Christ, what the fuck was that?” he swore, wondering why the night wasn’t filled with the sounds of triggered car alarms and panicked voices. “Am I going crazy?” He remembered something he’d half listened to in psychology class about some disorder where people heard extremely loud noises apparently originating inside their heads. He discarded that idea though; the noise had clearly come from somewhere down the street. So why wasn’t anyone making a fuss?

After the pain in his toe had subsided, Mark decided to investigate. As far as he could tell, it wasn’t a bomb that had made the noise; there hadn’t been any subsequent sound of rubble spraying the area. As he got closer to where he thought was right, he saw that he was correct. None of the shitty, rundown buildings were any more shitty and rundown than usual. He turned into an alleyway, figuring that maybe the damage wasn’t visible from the street. The closer he got, though, the more he got the feeling that there was something not quite right.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathed as he looked behind the lone dumpster. An oddly clean-cut man was slumped against it. His expensive clothing and immaculately trimmed moustache were bizarrely out of place among the surrounding refuse. He didn’t seem to be breathing, but there were no visible wounds indicating his demise. In fact, if Mark had found him in a better neighbourhood, he would’ve figured he’d just come from a cocktail party and had passed out drunk in the alley.

Somehow, though, that didn’t seem likely. “D-dude, are you okay?” Mark reached to shake the man’s shoulder, just in case he really was just unconscious. As soon as his hand made contact, however, the world exploded into a white starburst of pain. He screamed in agony as something forced its way into his body through his neural passages. A barrage of earsplitting cracks boomed around him, but the only thing he could register was the impossible amount of pain he was experiencing. His perception of time began to shift, making mere moments seem like an eternity of suffering.

Then, the world went completely, blissfully blank.