Parents Gone
It was meant to be a brief, two-week vacation. That’s what my parents said, at least, in the note they left behind for me. Off to the beaches of Cornwall, just an hour away. In the meantime, I was given the freedom to do whatever I liked, eat healthy, sleep at a reasonable time, keep up with my studies, etc. Naturally, I did nothing like that, instead gorging on chocolates, finally finding sleep at 3 am, and abandoning my homework until it piled up in a small hill in the corner of my room.
At least a week had passed, and my father rang me every day, asking what I was doing, how I’d been, if I was still going to school, and I would answer back everything they wanted to hear. Truthfully, I was deathly ill, no doubt as a result of the multitudes of bad habits I had accumulated. One morning, my headache became so bad that I slept the entire day, catching up on the hours of sleep I had lost.
My father stopped ringing on the eighth or ninth day, I stopped keeping count. I didn’t really care at the time, and continued with my egregious lifestyle. To combat my illness, I walked over to my local pharmacy, picking up their strongest bottle of painkillers with a handcrafted note from my parents, who would regularly visit to pick up other prescriptions. Regardless, I had to pay a hefty amount, with some of the money left to me for the two weeks.
The painkillers stopped the illness in its tracks. At least, I stopped feeling like shit every time I woke up. Taking this as a sign that it was okay to continue on my destructive path, I ditched school for the day and ate yet another pudding from the fridge, which was looking scarcer by the day. I noticed that there was much less food than usual, but ignored it, I wasn’t going grocery shopping anyway.
The painkillers became ingrained into my daily life too. I took them before sleeping every night, I had to lest I wanted to spend another set of hours awake. And so, the fridge emptied itself, the shower stopped working, the electricity finally cut and the last heaters stopped working. It was week four, and I decided then and there to call. No answer. Something was smelling putrid.
The neighbours paid no mind to the dirty, hungry boy outside, picking blackberries and chewing grass. The painkillers kept it all from tumbling away, I went for a second batch with what was left of my money. One pill, two pills, three pills a day. I saw shadows walking to and from inside the house, and I could only moan lightly in response.
I finally caught the intruder on week eight, a homeless man who had been in our attic. Eyes bloodshot, crazed, pale skin. His breath stank to high hell, and I could barely make out the two corpses rotting behind him. The flashlight I brought bore into those red eyes, and I meekly cried in the corner as he made my house his.
Week ten. My parent’s bodies are the only thing warm here. Downstairs, I hear him eating, gnawing at the flesh I give. I weep softly. I swallow my last painkiller. It will be week eleven soon.
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