Typical

A short story by me.

He rolled over in an attempt to eradicate the flaming red glow of the midday sun that was penetrating his eyelids. Eventually the strong colors faded to black, but as he opened his eyes, that darkness was quickly replaced with the warm chestnuts and fuschias radiating from his half finished oil painting across the room. It wasn’t nearly as good as he’d thought it was late the night before.

His head span into a frenzy as he heaved himself up and off the ratty old mattress that he’d slept in undisturbed until this weekend. With a stained glass and two empty bottles of vodka in his hands, he pulled his socks on, successfully tiptoed around the contents of his bombshell of a bedroom, and crossed the hall.

There was a loud clunk as the bottles hit the bottom of the bin. It had been emptied. Confused, he looked around at the rest of his immaculate kitchen. And then it clicked. It was that weekend. The weekend Eva was due to bring her stuff from her parent’s house. Trust him to forget something as important that. Typical.

He’d been doing relatively ok since his mother kicked him out of home.  Luckily his boss at the café downtown was nice enough to keep him there for the past three years. Since his decision to study art, however, his life wasn’t going to be so balanced. So he reluctantly decided to find himself a housemate.

Walking out of the kitchen, he spied her in the previously empty lounge. She was settled on the floor, leaning against a sea of neatly stacked boxes. By her feet was the 200-piece jigsaw puzzle he’d left there. It was almost complete, with 3 pieces missing. But she wasn’t concentrating on that; her eyes were fixed on her notebook. He watched as her delicate hands moved the charcoal across the paper, creating a beautifully detailed sketch that he could only dream of creating.

She must’ve felt him staring at her, but she still didn’t look up from her notebook. “God, took your time getting up.”

“I was up late painting. You’ll get used to it. How long have you been here?”

“A couple of hours, dad drove me here at about nine.”

“Man, that’s ages. Guess I should’ve been more prepared.”

“It doesn’t matter, I entertained myself, see?”

She put her notebook down, and waved at the jigsaw. He was impressed.

“I can’t believe you did that. I worked on that jigsaw for months, and get nowhere, and then you do it in one morning. Typical.”

“It’s not complete though, technically. I mean you lost three pieces.”

He laughed, but it was true. Everything he had, there were pieces missing. There was never the full set. He thought about the things in his house, his mismatched crockery, and his jumbled bedroom. Eva was the opposite of him. Everything in her life fit into place. All the pieces were there. She had two loving, caring parents that would do anything for her. He, on the other hand, never even knew his father. He practically didn’t have a mother anymore, since their lack of communication after she made him leave. Wrongly or not, he blamed a lot of the problems in his life on his parents. He believed he was born with an alcohol problem, after he found out his mother didn’t stop drinking through her entire pregnancy. The support and guidance just hadn’t been there, life Eva’s had. He was never taught the importance of organization, or of getting things done. He couldn’t even finish a jigsaw, for god’s sake.

Eva noticed that his eyes had glazed over. She stood up and announced that she would start unpacking her stuff. As she walked out of the room, he watched her bleached socks glide across the old floorboards. He looked down at his own. One was green, and one blue. Typical.