The Shelf Life of an Insomniac When Faced With Danger

It was not what clear at first glance once it emerged into view, but the legs were less artful the closer he looked at this new form, feel that his entire nerve from top to bottom shrank into abject terror as the butchered bottom half of the form was nothing but a bunch of floridly threadbare tendons pulsating largeish only at the kneecap and thighmeat rounded until it terminated in a white, ringed circle of bloodless heel arcs that came inflexible on twofold feet that were without hindrance of skin or tissue and pronged toes jammed crookedly forth with debris-frosted that looked almost like the rhinestone the store property owner, The Chexmesopotamian himself in the frilled get-up all landscaped from loose, inauspicious foreign beginnings, which wholeheartedly are inconsequential to the matter transpiring at hand, are still interesting enough to elaborate on during the meantime his subordinate photocopy clerk is fleeing in absolute terror from the form aforementioned; this man who left the night shift of the store solely under the entrepreneurship haggardly as though by migration and mitigation of some landmark once his ancestral homeland was demonstratable as better acceptation into a half-persuasive cowboy as many of his conservatively cannibalized countrymen who ran from blooded sands and trafficking cabals only to be fitted down for an imitation of the lighter devilry who chased them down and wore on their internment fondly as if awaiting omnivorous subsumption of an ignoramus polyglot cultural standing as the American southwestern individualist of brawn and cunning against all ugliest turn points-- his name, Chester Hambraelaz, an outstanding pseudo-citizen of the most sternfisted plutocratic quarry unchained, wore over himself a patriotically-glittering poncho and had an outsized cigar stub wedged without a single puff uttered from his ulcerating lower lip which continues sucking out browning discards of tobacco strings so little on his enormous mouthpiece, whereupon above his snarled desperation frowning on his shoulders was a five-o clock shadow sharp enough to rub his hireling's face into a longish corn husk stalk for how much his narrow squint of meaningfully acrimonious business ethical practices, altogether fashion him through what characteristically on his entire outfit as if a cheapening jewel of a caliphate ruled by pompously impish rubes robed in cooking foil and then grafted under a wide leather canvas which replaced the oxygen of the skin with the seething riddles of a constricted Sultan amassing ambassador value by choking his proportions throughout his fashionable harness of deathless turbidity in flesh and bulk heaving numbly away the hostile roll of his eyes backwards into the bliss of his own palace beyond where decapitated, he could seize the throne aglitter for what his lapiz-latticed eyeful on both left or right he would think about a Western man who embodied his gauche regalia and it would leave this man who left someone as new and inexperienced as Randolph by themself, because it was a low-risk expenditure for labor it was estimably took in his high-up giving him the keys after clean-up and earnings were safely deposited across from where now this form , undulating into prominence the upper half of a hairless albino with no eyebrows, no nose except two slim dots that heaved heavy where the mouth was fat-lidded as a floundering boxer beaten almost to a fistulous underbite-- he will watch the form continue shuffling downward the low-walled alleyway striped in paper and glass crushed near thin enough to drink out of the abscessed rainwater that evening at the end of that last hour on a Thursday custodial tidying, and then Randolph will be petrified long enough with the intensities of what he was seeing approach him. However, it was that form doubled, advancing the distance like a kiss of sewage is in a fiery mood when it comes down to a massive increase in the swelling of street trash strewn ricochet riotous and come at his nosehairs as an eskimo of an escort eaten by this game hunted at where betwixt straightaway this gauntlet of a proportionately mutilated lifeforce produced a fear that brokenly shot him hauling his acid-damaged suede pants and blue-photocopy printer apron with a laminated name tag Velcro necklace, the letters O B E S T, R A N D O L A P H were misspelled and only grew disfavored under the sheen of the door he banged with strengthening hopelessness, it sought him silent that made him stop and dart in the opposite direction again, throwing himself out of shape and forcing his own brute agility to vault the boundary of mesh-wire chain fencing. At the other side of what could of been the trepidation of him panting, released by escape from the form that came from nowhere and gave no impression of having inhabited the background of this building other than the exsanguinated, mangled furs of stray cats that had once overpopulated to the point of being listed as potential verminous problem for the waste disposal of this municipal district. The citylife, something Randolph once idealized as a comforting reward for this job’s routinely onset monotony, now paled as though it took him through the surface of the constructed outline of what a city shows to those who are alive and only viewing it as from their own proximity to the sprawl at large. The city ate him from having been struck by a creature that felt to be something that did not dwell in the dreams of himself, or the populace: it did not create sound because the sounds of the city when the form approached Randolph at work was only the sounds of traffic going without him, sensing that the city throb underneath the pavement thrive with the pollution of his fears, the fears of a city so distinct from the fears he was born with that it could never be cemented to his uncomprehending familiarity with the symptoms of what is identifiable as to be warned of during this deepening into the nightlife.

The form stayed with him and then flew from the shadow that crumbled fainter where it floundered next to the unopened doorframe that was unable to prevent the store owner’s assurance that the store would be kept in safe hands since Randolph no longer could stay at the threshold of where he was supposed to be last seen, missing from the surveillance footage, a vanishing. The form then took him within the underarm of its larger half so to place his legs to be gathered under, past the sewers, and let Randolph find calm in the den that it kept fortified with hardening walls of slime, and then placed him petrified among the undercity’s flotsam.