Burden by Michael Marano

BURDEN
    With night, come the sounds.
    You hear them as you walk beneath halogen street-lamps that give light the color of brandy, as October air touched with frost becomes warm, heavy as breath. Your step is muffled, as if you walk on a wool blanket. The sounds come, as they have come before, while dusk deepens and stars spread across the dull suburban sky, while lamplight and the flickering blue of TV screens fill the windows of the houses you pass.
    Stiff leather creaks. Booted feet step. Chains hung from jackets clank. Keys dangling from out of pockets jangle.
    You are alone, surrounded by sound. Trying to walk away from it.
    The summer-heat falls on your back, your neck and your hands, which a moment before tingled with cold. You smell the scents of The City you left long ago. The humid, dirty air. The musk of leather and the skin of the men who wear it. Cigarettes and a blend of after-shaves sweetened by sweat. Under the brandy-light you feel, more than see, stars eclipsed by grey city sky.
    Darkness huddles the street. Night folds upon night before you. The suburban street fades as the stars have faded—the brandy-light is gone. The shadows breathe. They mill and they whisper. You walk among them. They have no form.
    Out of the ebony nothingness, from behind the curtain of night, Tony steps before you, as if he has stepped from around the corner of a building that is not there.
    You stop, held by Tony’s stare. You knew he would come. But not as he has.
    Tony is shrunken and ashen. No longer able to fill his leather jacket as he had in life. The weight of chains on the jacket make it hang slackly. Tight jeans that had once glorified his manhood sag loosely, as if worn by a boy who has yet to grow into them. Above his black T-shirt, his neck is thin as an old woman’s. Tendons show through the skin of his throat. His face is gaunt—skull-like as a death camp survivor.
    You see in Tony’s eyes an awful, lonely fear, a pleading that fixes your sight and settles in an icy pool near your heart.
    He steps toward you. You feel the shadows behind you become heavier, many eyes on your back. The sounds of chains and keys and boots and heavy belt buckles grow louder, closer . . . more distinct. The shadows breathe. They mill and they whisper.
    Tony reaches for you; his ill-fitting jacket falls from his shoulder. Part of you insists that this cannot be.
    His hand is on your shoulder, cold through your wool coat in the midst of this invading heat. The cold of his hand walks through your flesh to the cold in your heart. The air is warm in your lungs. Tony’s lips move as a child’s move while reading. No words come. There is only the chorus of metal and leather as the shadows behind you shuffle.
    You hear his distant voice as the lights of a passing car burn Tony out of the night.
    The crunch of tires smothers the sounds around you. The shadows at your back become wind. You feel living eyes upon you. Two children stare from the car’s backseat window. As they pass, you realize you are cowering, your body hunched.
    Stars fade into being. You feel them look down upon you, uncaring, as you straighten yourself.
    Autumn wind comes, driving away the scents you have been breathing, replacing them with those of dead leaves, bitter smoke from fireplaces, the salt smell of the harbour.
    Yet as you reach your apartment, you smell, just faintly, the scent of a leather jacket, of sweat tinged aftershave—as if you wear them yourself.
    In darkness that is your own, sitting in a domicile that has never been a home to you, you think of Tony’s eyes, how you would have longed for them to have held anger, accusation, the righteous fury of betrayal.
    Not the awful desperation they did hold.
    Dawn finds you awake, still sitting as birds begin to sing. You become aware, as you never have been before, of the beat of your heart and the flow of blood in your veins.
    * * *
    Veins bulge under the rubber tube around your arm.
    The woman wears