The following is a short fiction piece incorporating several
 of the items and concepts from a scavenger hunt list 
that I completed in the month of September.

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John was a man with many demons. Since childhood, they followed him around no matter what lengths he went through to escape from them, no matter how many oceans he crossed. They knew exactly how find him, how to toy with his mind, how to slam his self-worth through a cheese grater and successfully convince him that he was still whole—that he was still a man.

At the age of twenty-five, John couldn’t take the torture anymore. Every day it was the same sound. The ticking of the clock as the seconds went by, the ringing of telephone lines, the aggression of the typing, the gulping of the coffee, the desperation of the sighs, the confines of the walls, the people—the shells. The cycle was so loud, that he would put a probing finger to his ear every hour, always surprised when he never felt the dampness of blood. He was a man slowly dying, and no prayer would provide him any solace. So he found it at the bottom of a bottle.

For a time, alcohol inspired him to put off death for a while, but then came Rose, and she inspired him to live again. She was a face cloaked in a shroud of silk painted to her specific shade of black, parting only slightly to reveal ears armed with silver hoops. Although she may have been a sight, it is when those two lips parted that he found her to be the most heartbreaking woman he had ever come across; without her voice, the carcass that was her body would have just been a sack of wasted material.

They both fell, but gravity just pulled him down harder. The promise she had made to him, the day he was deployed, turned out to be no more reliable than his failing psyche. When he returned home, in every bit Pandora’s Box, it was that heartbreaking voice of hers, saying “goodbye”, that unleashed all his demons, and again he was at the mercy of the bottle.

John blamed the demons for his predicament, and he was right in doing so, but it seemed that other people didn’t share the same views. They thought him a drunk, lost, broken man—just another veteran—but John was so much more than his inhibitions. Despite being an alcoholic, he had an ironic innocence about him. He was a man that sang of beauty and dreamt of a Rose; he was a cautionary tale. John’s inability to deal with the realities of life proved the destructive nature of innocence, emphasizing that it had no business in a place like this.

John, however, was exactly where he was supposed to be; it felt like fate. He felt like he was flying, as the wind blew down the river in sync with the current. From his seat on the edge of the bridge, the refreshing caress of breeze fanned the scorching trail of his last drop of Absinthe every time he inhaled, causing an inferno to rage within him. Luckily, the absence of the sun provided no light to reflect his hopeless image on the bruised indigos and vibrant blues of the retreating river; the company of his reflection would have be an unwanted distraction for his more pressing thoughts—thoughts of being reborn.

As he swung his legs back and forth, the wind tickling his bare feet, he thought back to the pictures of him sucking his toes as a child; he thought back to how malleable he had been. He wished that he could adapt now, like water, and just simply take the shape of his container, of his society, but he wasn’t a baby anymore. John was wise enough to know now that such a fate was an impossibility for someone like him; his demons would never allow it. In all honesty, John had better chances of being reborn than he did of ever finding peace in this reality. And so, without any further hesitation, John jumped.