Bam. Bam. Bam.  Loud knocking on my door.

“Hey, you!  Sam.  I know you’re in there.  Open this door, you hear me?”

Half in, half out of my apartment’s third floor window, I started to climb onto the fire escape to avoid him, the super, not having paid my rent this month, again, for the fourth time in six months, due to having lost another job, my third in a row, if you force me to be honest.

The latest HR dude said in the exit interview, “You’re neither here nor there, are you? More absent than present, more exit than arriving. Just a no-show in general, huh? We feel like we hired a fleshless phantasm, an aura of irrelevancy, an apparition of indecipherable angst, a sort of 3-D person, more spectral interference than substance. When we asked your colleagues about your work ethics, they said, ‘Who?’ We couldn’t find anyone who remembered working with you. All I can say, Sam, is good luck.” Then he ushered me to the door.

So here I am, in ether, not in a building, not on the ground, just hovering in midair, this time on a rusted, rickety fire escape barely bolted to my tenement’s crumbling, 50’s, post-war brick facade. I’m swaying.  I’m wavering.  Light beams from the surrounding buildings are reflecting through my nothingness.

I’m looking down at the weeds smothering the building’s façade.  As an expert on imbibable analgesics, you know, booze, I see relief, the glinting telltale signs of broken beer bottles, shards of glass sharp as scalpels honed against the rough edges of my anxiety.  “A few stab wounds, a stinging laceration might help.  I’d rather be a mess of self-injury than what I am now, a hologram.”

Through the open door
Motes drifting in death spirals
The empty room screams

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life’s dissonance. He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his five chapbooks Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety, andThere Is a Season.