catalyst: chapter 35
The Old Man
She had left him lying on the floor, his blood splashed across the old carpet in the living room. They had talked for years about replacing it, of taking the chance to put something with more traction down as they aged. They had the money; she had said to him plenty of times. Now he was bleeding out on carpet that she would have grimaced to lean down on. He had seen the lack of care in her eyes, her utter disregard of him or his suffering. He was just another thing in her way, and the woman he had wanted to get back had been gone long before she left.
He didn’t have the courage or strength to sit up and see what had been done to him, he wasn’t even sure it would be physically possible, but a cursory touch of his torso let him know that it wasn’t good. He wondered how long it would take him to die, and more importantly, he wondered how long it would take someone to find him. Certainly, his wife wouldn’t be calling anything in, but he had to assume the young woman that had escaped would notify the authorities. That was, as long as she had managed to escape his wife.
The old man pushed himself up onto his elbows, taking care to not investigate too much, and started to drag himself towards the cupboard across the room. He tested for strength in his legs, but nothing happened despite his will to move them. He knew he didn’t have that much time left, and all he wanted was to make it to the cupboard.
The journey across the living room took longer than he could have imagined, his strength fading from loss of blood, internal and external. At the cupboard, he twisted at first to open the door, but the pain brought his arm back down, so he laid on his back and clumsily fumbled to open it with the closer hand. From inside he pulled out a bottle, something he had hidden for the last ten years. After a bit of a struggle, he managed to pop the bottle open and took a large swig. This was meant for glasses, two glasses specifically, but he didn’t have time, nor did he have the company.
The bottle of wine had been hard to find, but after years of searching he had finally gotten the perfect anniversary gift. The vintage was from the same year they had gotten married, the same vineyard their wedding wine had come from in the first place. The red liquid swarmed his mouth and left behind notes of something he couldn’t place. His wife would have jibed him for being uncultured, but to him all wine was the same. The only thing that made this bottle different was its sentimentality to him. He swallowed down a couple of gulps, the bottle draining in tandem with his body. The end was coming closer, the blackness would take him, and he was sure he'd be held accountable to something the moment he closed his eyes. Time didn’t slow, he realized; the writers had gotten it all wrong. One moment he was there, the next gone.
The wine slashed read across the carpet as the bottle rolled from the old man’s hand, the dark color kissing the edge of his blood.