I walked in through the front door and felt the reassuring slam ripple through me as it closed behind me. The argument between Mr and Mrs Morris from flat five was silenced by the sealing of the portal.
I was home.
Realising my eyes were closed, I open them to the misty air inside my living room. First thought was that I’d left the cooker on from earlier in the day or, heaven forbid and thank God I still had a home, the previous night. However the cloying smell of tobacco assaulted my sense of smell and my eyes sought the source.
In the corner was a middle aged man, or rather, a middle aged man for his race. His blue spikey hair was resting against the headrest of my armchair as he billowed smoke towards the ceiling. He was wearing his usual green t-shirt and blue jeans. His maroon leather coat was flung across the arm of the nearby sofa.
My cat Asuka was rubbing herself up against his hand as he idly scratched the top of her head and his one red eye watched my every move with casual amusement. The other eye was white and pupil-less. The vertical scar going through it the testament to how he lost it.
“Hard day?” he asked as he raised a pipe to his mouth and took a toke. Red embers flared up in its bowl and a tendril of smoke snuck out of a nostril.
My mind finally registers the impossibility before me. “Seems like,” I mutter as I reach into my pocket for my phone. It seems oddly allusive but then my fingers clasp around the cold metal backing of it and lift it out by the corner with the cracked screen. In one fluid motion I scroll onto the camera, point it at the person in my armchair and take the picture, instantly sending it to Alex with the caption of “Can you see this too?”
Reassured by the creation of the photographic evidence that my mind was still sound, I sat in my office chair across from him. The computer on the nearby desk seemed to sense my arrival, or rather I must have inadvertently knocked it, and whirred to life.
“You don’t smoke,” I stated as he billowed more pipe-smoke into my living room.
“I thought I’d give it a try,” he replied, “besides, you have yet to write the chronicles of Gabriel, so I can do what I like…”
“Chronicles of Gabriel?”
Gabriel grinned at me, accentuating the chunk that was missing from his nose. “Yes,” he said, “Riddick got his own and so did that ridiculous place Narnia. Least you could do is give me my own.”
400 Words A Day 