Time Flies South

Pre-Post; So I’ve been reading Stephen King for a while now. His descriptives are legendary( that guy deserves the cult following he has, I’m telling you), and I tried this to see how much of it had rubbed off on me. Ehn so please read.

Mr. Denzel Danful, reputable accountant of 20 years, stood bent over his bathroom sink and stared intently at his right arm, as he had the night before, and the night before that. He wasn’t a man of discipline, but he was a single unattached man, and he’d been working the same paper shuffling job the last ten years; there wasn’t much to distract you from a routine. So he was home at 7 every day, and at eight every night he stripped and stared at his reflection for an hour or so.

Probably no one in the town had ever seen much of his arm- he was near fanatical about wearing only long sleeved clothes- but if they had, they’d have noticed a faded tattoo a bit high up on his right forearm . It read “Tempus Fugit” in a leisurely scrawl, or at least it used to; hard work at sea in another life had faded it out till it was barely visible, some letters less so than others. The “E” and “G” were completely gone, so it appeared “T PUS FU IT”, like those old neon signs with broken off letters.

He’d got the tattoo when he was 16 and living in America. His mother had sent for him to be brought back to Ghana, because his philandering American father “was a disgrace who shouldn’t ever have to take care of any person.” Ghana! He was being sent to some backwater cesspool and there wasn’t shit he could do about it. He could still remember the impotent rage he’d felt. He begged, promised everything he could(and things he couldn’t) but you couldn’t change Elizabeth Danful’s mind with a gun. Once she said something, good luck trying. So a day before he was to leave, he’d gone to a tattoo parlor and gotten that done, in a last silly effort at rebellion. His mother hated tattoos; they were a symbol for everything that was wrong with the youth. But even then he’d chickened out, and tattooed on one of her favorite sayings. He figured she’d be mad but eventually forgive him. “Eventually” turned out to be two years- the woman was bitter- but it was worth it. For years afterwards, he’d looked at the tattoo as his own personal sign of rebellion.

But the tattoo was faded now, and looking at it didn’t remind him of his mother; she’d been dead these last 20 years. It didn’t even remind him of America. He hadn’t ever returned and his father had called exactly twice to ask how he was, all in a week. Nowadays he looked at the tattoo and he remembered that he was 56 years. He might not believe it, but the mirror did not lie. He looked at the tattoo, and it seemed to look back at him like an old man with missing teeth, laughing at a bad joke. Tempus Fugit, huh? Ain’t that a good one. And where did your time fly to, huh, buddy? What exactly have you done? And why not? His life had been a joke, and not even a very funny one. He’d wound up alone and with too much of his dear mother in him. He was bitter, and that impotent rage he’d felt as a child, it lay deep in his belly like a constant ulcer.
He wondered if today was the day he killed himself. He decided it wasn’t, and he stepped into the bath.