Clementine And A Purple Box

Clementine Jordan woke up in a familiar room, on a familiar bed, with a familiar balcony, and familar cravings, needs, and sorrow. Slowly opening her dark brown eyes, and found herself gazing up at a plain white ceiling. She wasn't curious, and she knew what had happened. Her arms and legs trembling at the thought of looking at him again, she turned her head to reveal a dead body that she had been laying beside for the night. She noticed the smell of fresh bread from the bakery downstairs that her apartment laid over in France. Every Sunday a man she loved once would visit Lacroix Patisser to catch up at breakfast with a cheese bagel and tea. His hand would touch hers to catch her attention, and his eyes were warm honey, and often locked into hers from afar, a magnetic attraction, which somehow felt like a coincidence but at some moments, with his eyes on hers, she wondered if that was possible, she wondered if he had ever looked at anyone like this before. Was his hand friendly touch? His smile, and his laugh. The creases in his cheeks and the shape of his jaw. His neck and arms, hands and height, she admired and daydreamed forever into infinity about him. But, there he lay, cold and dead, and shot in the back.

Telling the police had never been Clem's first ideal of choice when it comes to cleaning up a murder, so she mentally threw that one out the window. She sat up, fast and quick as a snap, eyes trembling with fear. She laid a hand on the back of her bruised neck and squeezed in discomfort, then onto her forehead where a bloody dent had been taken out of her flesh, she used her intution and figured it was from the gun the man laid dead with. It was early morning, early enough for a cigarette. “No breakfast today,” she said to the dead corpse, “Ce la Vie”. She took another look at the corpse and already smelt the decay. In a slow walk, she approached the man from the side of the bed, a body from a man she once knew the name of, and would now force herself to forget. She touched his cold hand, whipped it into the center of his stomach. She stood there like a frozen shadow, lost in memories and old daydreams. He had followed her to her room the night before, and parked his car outside of her apartment for months. Her hands grabbed his cold ankles, and with a hard and fast force, she whipped him off the end of the bed so hard his head hit twice, once against the bed frame post and another on the wooden floor. Now distracted by her burnt cigarrette, she ashed it on the bottom of her crush's foot and lit another. envying, admiring, and dreading when the feeling of the smoke leaving her lungs. Clem observed the light morning rain through the open glass french doors, leading to a small, semi-circle of a bacony. She adored the black french railings that her father had picked when she first moved to France, including a perfect view of the street underneath from above Lacroix Patisser. She saw a man in a delivery truck crawl from the front seat of his van and open the back to grab a large cardboard box that would soon show up at her doorstep. He saw her smoking on the balcony and hollered at her, “Clementine!” He waved at her but she ignored him. She stood very still. He hollered again, “Come down here so I don’t have to bring this goddamn package all the way to your door!”

Clem looked back at the empty shell of what used to be a wonderful man, was now a dead man in the middle of her studio apartment with a cigarette burn on his foot. She would get almost nothing done today and she knew that. She had recieved another package, another velvet purple box. A new one. She knelt down and ran her delicate fingers over the seams of the lid, and finally opened it. The rubber band and needle made their familiar place on the murderer, only then she could find peace, and hear nothing. At 7 pm, she would finally close the purple box and change her attention to the very rotten man. Suddenly enraged at the memory of his hands around her neck, squeezing, and turning her neck purple, his thumbs pressing on the bone of her throat, the quick and hard hammer force from the metal of the gun to her head. He had come to kill her. She forcefully and angrily took hold of his ankles and yanked him over to the small french balcony overlooking a busy street. She took her current and fresh cigarette, lifted the covers from his face, and burnt the cigarette on his third eye. Then proceeded to lift half his body over the balcony railing, and with one small push, the top half of his body started to fall, and not long after came the second half. She watched his slow fall that ended with a brown splat. She knew this was not the most intelligent move and knew she was smarter than this, but she was simply too fucked up to care. Everyone in that city now knew how crazy she really was, and she was in high demand for questioning. The delivery driver no longer said her name, or even hello. He would simply drop the box at her door and scurry.

After a hot shower, Clementine lit another cigarette to feed her addiction, took comfort on her velvet red couch. Minutes later the needle and rubber band would have their place on her arm. Very soon after they would be no drugs left for her to consume.

Hours later, high and out of dope, Clem took a visit to the hospital, where she wandered looking for an answer. She didn’t care, she couldn’t care, she barely had enough brain cells to realize she wasn’t still sitting on her couch four blocks away because she was simply too incoherent. Her eyes had heavy bags of purple and grey, she looked ill enough to be admitted to that hospital as a patient. Only she wasn’t a patient, she stood, desperately, as a drug addict, which some may say is the same thing. Wandering the hallways, there was not much she could clearly see anymore. She stood in the middle of a long white hallway, with a man in her eyesight at the very end. She walked very slowly as the strong, white fluorescent hospital lights blinded her eyes and fried her mind. She knew she was walking, but it felt as though she couldn’t move, and her limbs had begun to drag and seem weak. She glanced into a private hospital room from the frame of the door at the end of the hallway, which revealed an old man, hooked to an IV, watching the television in a dark room. The TV light glaring and lighting the black space invited Clem. Desires began to rise more than they already were. Standing at the edge of the doorway, she approached the dying man laying sick and unconscious in his bed and observed. Then observed the clear IV bag full of sweetness. Lastly, her eyes wandered to the pit of his elbow on his right arm, impaled with the needle. She slowly, steadily, and quietly slipped the needle out of his vein and rested it on her arm instead. Only seconds of pure bliss and joy fell on Clementine like gentle rain or mist in the morning before she heard a female voice come from the doorway behind her, and a light touch on the shoulder. “What are you doing in here!?” the nurse stuttered. All Clementine could think was much of a stupid fucking rhetorical question that was. Clem grabbed the needle from her arm and yanked, far from softly, and gauged the needle into the nurse’s wide eyes. The nurse had been devoured in a pool of blood that swarmed the top of her head and blonde hair, the thin needle in her eye. She didn’t leave empty-handed although the circumstances, she had one full, clear IV bag as a treat for later.

She would stand out there and wave but never talk. She wasn’t completely aware if this was real life or another trip. She lit a cigarette and waved from her balcony. She took a deep breath and tilted her head to the sky to admire the clouds. To admire the blue she so badly craved to merge into. She stepped away to her velvet couch, opened and used her velvet purple box and needle for the last time, and walked to the balcony once again. She raised her current cigarette to her third eye and pressed hard, leaving a burn. Clementine whispered to herself in an ominous, observant tone, as she stood on her balcony looking down at her admirers. The burnt skin of the cigarette burn was dry and ashy, and the hole at which she burnt had begun to turn velvet purple. Clementine Jordan had flicked her cigarette to the street, connected one black heel to the black french railing, and then the other, emerging herself in free air, and leaving herself in the same splat as the man she onced loved.

"Aimer, ce n'est pas se regarder l'un l'autre, c'est regarder ensemble dans la meme direction." -Antione de Saint-Exupery

"Love doesn't mean gazing at each other, but looking, together, in the same direction."