Murder in a Gray Room.

(This is the first ever exercise I did in the first ever creative writing class I ever took in college. Something about how a setting can be a character, if I recall correctly, which I probably don't. Came across the file and thought I'd toss it up here. You know. For guffaws.)

Murder in a Gray Room

Truth is, one can only be the "giver" for so long anyway before feeling they are only being taken.

The room felt smaller by the second. It was as if each moment ticked and fell away from the flat little clock while the walls moved inward, forcing the focus of everything into the center of the room, where we now stood. Light trickled in through a single window, smoldering enough to illuminate our faces but shadowing everything else in shades of pale gray. We could still see each other. Sometime during five minutes of silence that felt like a few lifetimes, even the oxygen in the space began to weigh more. It took a struggle to breath it in, causing lungs to feel overworked and chests to get tight with force and effort.

There were enough chairs, but no one sat. The pressure of the room kept us upright.

So we stood there, air heavy and burning with stale breath and heated tension, like a thousand pounds of callous air hung around our necks from a short thick string. Troy said nothing, head bowed in a coagulated silence, staring intently at the carpet until his eyes must have hurt to be in his head. He was rubbing a groove into the floor, smooth and flat underneath his dark boot. A small sense of dark irony tapped me as I realized the carpet and my heart were both being crushed in much the same manner at the very same moment.

“Honestly, it’s not you, it’s me. I know that sounds so cliché but...” Troy trailed off, still refusing to look up at my face.

I had heard that sentence before, but only as the butt of a joke on some poorly written sitcom. These are not things real people say to one another in real life when one purposely breaks the other’s heart like so many other everyday detached actions.

I glared at him, into him, trying hard to find those sweet things about him that made me invite him into my life and my bed in the first place. I had snuggled into a warm fuzzy blanket of the words he said, covering myself up, wanting desperately to believe he meant all that was whispered softly into my ear so many lovely nights before this one. He worked a slight of hand, a magic trick of making the world sound so good, simply to snatch those dreams away before I had a chance to really grasp them in my shaky, wanting hands.

When I could find nothing there except a film of cold selfishness squirming and writhing in the face I once adored, my tears stopped falling. I knew he did not love me, could not protect me. I stopped wanting to be with him. I stopped needing him to stay.

Instead, in this microscopic lifeless room, I began thinking of all the ways I could kill Troy.

I closed my eyes and shut out the threatening darkness of the room to the welcoming darkness of my mind. Behind my fiercely clenched eyelids, I longed for a nuclear weapon, scaled down to size, a tiny piece of mass destruction complete with a little red button to turn him into a pile of ash and dust easily scattered to the wind and forgotten. I wished hard for a knife, a crossbow, a hammer, a large rock, a small petry dish with the tiniest drop of Bubonic plague, a rabid tiger who hadn’t eaten for several days, a virus-infected mosquito, a Satan-possessed twelve-year-old with a temper disorder, a noose, a gun, a really big high-powered automatic gun, a stick, a straw; even a KFC spork would’ve easily sufficed at that moment.

I thought of all the ways to make his heart ache as mine did, to wash him in pain and agony, to burn out his eyes with the misery of having happiness dangled just out of reach in front of one’s craving body like so many shining silver trinkets.

Troy lifted his eyes from the enthralling sight that was the floor and stared at me, still wanting something of me, not done with his special brand of torment yet. He clearly had no idea of the thoughts flashing in my mind; I was purely hoping he’d drop dead at that very moment. What else do I have that you have not taken? At once it hit me, slapping me hard – he wanted my permission to treat me like trash, to use me up, to keep me here in this little gray room and be his emotionless toy.

“Can I still come by some night? You might get lonely.” Even in the dark, the smirk forming at the corners of his mouth was unmistakably confident. Somehow the sound of his voice managed an echo, resonant even in this small vacuum of a room.

Troy and his smile oozed slime and pestilence equally. The air temperature continued to heat, seemingly causing slick sweat to form on the surface of everything. At any moment the grayness would start to wash off of the walls and furniture and mix with the dripping sweat, flooding at our feet in puddles, submerging us until we drowned in it.

It was then I realized the only way I could genuinely murder Troy, to slaughter and have any true sense of justice done.

I turned around, taking away from him the sight of my face, the place where my smile for him had been. I stole myself back. I left him in the dark place where the love in my eyes would no longer shine to light the world as I gazed upon him. I shut Troy out, left him behind and standing in that gloom-filled place, letting him drown in shades of sadness and the sickly sweat of death and decay that reside in the stifling heat of a little gray room.

I walked out. I left him there. And I shut the door hard behind me.