It had been weeks since the apartment was this eerily silent. Often times everybody would sleep long into the afternoon, stumbling out occasionally in the shadows to slip into the bathroom, their piss trickling against the inside of the grubby toilet bowl that had sat bolted and unwashed for weeks. In passing they would stub their toes on the tiled steps that framed the shower, cursing and hacked-coughs scoring a sick symphony that would permeate across the rooms and give noise to the thoughtless space. It was a dysfunctional household that looked like a dysfunctional household, rather than a mimicry of the orderly workings of a functional one. The wooden shutters that offered a portal into the kitchen from the side walls were scratched, indented from frustrated outbursts, slammed and slammed and slammed off their hinges more than twice, thrice, four times. The walls bore bruises from the kicks of oppressed men, rabid with the strains of fever that come not from infection of a bacterial kind, but the infection that possesses all young men with no ambition, no comforts, no lights leading the streets they walk on. The glasses were cracked and whiskey-stained. Underwear and wet towels made impromptu carpets as the cotton desert dragged on out to the balcony. If only one rule remained, it was that there was no smoking inside. Crumpled cigarette butts overflowed from the greasy ashtrays on to the stained table, smeared across the playing cards and binders of paper filled with nonsense scribbles and words. The bathroom door opened, closed, the toilet unflushed, the bedroom door opened and scuffling feet were heard as it closed, again. [Buy.]
Sounds like the place I call Home.