Ex Nihilo

His head is pounding; that’s the first thing Mathis notices when he gets up, eyesight clouded with sleep. He could swear he’s heard something – some kind of a crash. He’s not surprised, not really, because this is a neighbourhood like that; things like this happen all the time, even though he and Anya have never been robbed before.

Still, groggy and tired, he gets up and goes to check the commotion, just to be sure. Before he gets out of his own room, he digs through the bedside drawer, pulling out a gun. It’s been years since he’s used it; years since he had the need to. Still, Anya had an unusual liking to them, so he’s kept them around. A man with a gun, she would often say, a man with a gun is a man who can handle himself. He did a lot of stuff to impress her.

And after everything, Mathis shakes his head, shrugs the thoughts of Anya like he removes the dust from his own home. He’s too hung up about her, letting her haunt him even though he has convinced his troubled mind that he did correctly. That he did the easy thing. That it’s hard now but it’s going to get easier later.

Mathis’ movements are short, but steady, and he moves towards the source of the sound. It’s in Anya’s room, of all places. He knows that he won’t call the police – he can’t, because if they look around they’ll see the blood bags and besides, he doesn’t want to spend more time in ‘sad fiancé’ act than necessary.

The doorknob twists beneath his hand easily, door slides open and a wave of chilly air hits him.

Night is cold, even though the weather is moderately clear and there’s no wind. There’s a double window in Anya’s room, open fully. The thick curtains around it aren’t moving. Mathis flips the light switch and lets the light flow inside, for better clarity.

His eyes drop on the open closet, clothes thrown from it haphazardly on the floor nearby. He grips the gun a little bit tighter, because that’s not how things were before, not how he left them. He grits his teeth; now’s really not the time, but it seems like things weren’t going his way, not like he imagined them. After all – Anya’s father claimed she came to visit him and well, Mathis got hooked on a scrap of information that means nothing. Man is surely over ninety.

Nonetheless, he moves towards the closet, trying not to be disturbed. He would’ve heard the door open if somebody had tried to leave Anya’s room, so the burglar is either here or they left the same way they got in.

Fancy that, he almost mutters to himself when he takes better look at the window – it’s broken, glass splintering like wood, and yet opened, no doubt from the inside.

He can’t help but feel his skin rise, something seeming so ominous about the whole ordeal, but he forces himself to look back at the closet. Nothing seems to be taken; blood bags still hang among Anya’s coats, even though there’s a sizable hole in one of them, her jeans are still thrown over each other in hurry. Nothing seems to be taken.

Mathis is awake entirely, almost hyper-aware and he barely hears it – some kind of scratching, almost too light to be noticed. He thinks, for a moment, that he’s made it up, then he lowers his own breathing and concentrates on the sound. He remembers, perhaps in the wrong moment, that he’s being robbed; there isn’t much of a chance for imagining things.

Rigid and at the end of his nerves, the blonde turns around, hand around his gun getting sweaty. He’s not sure he would be able to use it properly without injuring himself or it simply falling out of his hand.

There, at his window, is a person; he’s not sure how he missed them, where they could’ve hidden for him not to see them. But they’re there – lanky, tall shape in black jumping on the floor (jumping from where? Mathis thinks he might fry himself over this) with their back to him.

“Hey!” He shouts, although it has no effect. The burglar sits on the window sill for a second and then descents, two floors down. There’s no crash this time, nothing to notify him of their discomfort and let alone injury, so he rushes to the window after all, now seething instead of paralysed with fear. “Hey!”

The person’s now down on the street, leaving, with hand clasped around object Mathis can’t recognize from the distance they’re at, but the gesture they’re making cannot be mistaken. They’re flipping him the bird.

Now determined to catch them, Mathis rushes towards the door, almost falls over himself in rush to unlock his door and leave. There’s a part of him, some rational thought worming its way to the surface that tells him that they’ll leave. But something else, perhaps the same instinct that alerted him of scratching, that tells him they won’t.

That they’ll wait. That they’ll gloat.

He’s only partially wrong. When he gets to the street, the figure has retreated to the shadows. This part of the city is a maze – one wrong turn and you’ll come face-to-face with the dead end. It could happen to the burglar – the thief – if Mathis decided to chase them. It could also happen to him.

“Get back here, asshole!” He shouts, although he’s aware that his shouting falls on deaf ears. He sees what the thief is holding now – the phone. It must be Anya’s. What would somebody need her phone for? He gets closer to them, to the mouth of the street they’re sending in. It’s the one with dead end; Mathis knows this. He pursues the thief.

The person walks backwards, letting something akin to a laugh; the blond grits his teeth, sure he never looked worse than he does right now, but he needs the phone back. There’s something else following the laughter, although he’s not sure how to describe those sounds. Clicks or hisses, or something between both, and he’s not sure where they come from. There’s pungent smell, too, from the street around them and he assumes there’s some sort of animal there.

But fuck it all – Mathis will risk it. After all, he’s the one with the gun in his hand, in a neighbourhood that doesn’t ask too many questions.

He runs after the person into the darkness. Sooner than he expected, he’s faced with a wall, graffiti looking uncharacteristically dull under the yellow lamp close by.

With just his luck, Mathis finds no one there.