Current quarters in morning’s light.

Before work in the still quiet of our house, as I busy myself for the coming day, solitude heightens sensory experience. Tranquility crystallizes sounds and smells and tactile sensations in the conspicuous absence of other human agency.

My alarm’s jarring tone wakes me with a start always louder and harsher than I care to anticipate. Rising I grope to part the gauzy net before flicking the wall switch. Dim light drips down creamy apricot walls to the cool, smooth, rich rust red floor chipped and peeling at the bedroom door. I stand and survey the bed whose faded ochre floral paisley bedding and fuzzy fleece throw sit disturbed and rumpled from a fitful night’s sleep. The mattress is a sunken, concave impression caving pitifully inwards at its middle.

Doors and stiff limbs creak and groan as I shuffle bleary-eyed about my early morning rituals. Together we are mechanical motion on tired hinges. I absentmindedly wonder if slumbering roommates wake to cracking toes and necks and backs.

In the bathroom I run a shower. The white plastic stall basin slowly begins to fill, its drain clogged by unseen foulness down pipe. Feet of all but the speediest bathers prune in the filmy lukewarm water. Sometimes in the mornings a fetid reek from a dark un(want-to)knowable void outside the window mysteriously suffuses the tight space with the putrid odor of sweaty troll feet stomping rotten eggs. While toweling off I shudder at the thought of seeping raw sewage.

After washing up, I iron an outfit for the day. The open living room sits forlornly half furnished and undecorated. Shadows thrown are few and indistinct. Against one wall a simple frame couch and twin arm chairs border a wide unoccupied gulf stretching between opposing desks. Outside, pale dawn light begins to give shape to trees and shrubs and brick walls bristling with bottle green broken glass barbs. A brushed aluminum hemisphere encasing a harsh fluorescent light bulb hangs suspended above the towel-draped ironing board. The UFO hovers silently over the day’s wrinkled shirt and pants, bathing the room in an unearthly milky glow. The fixture coolly observes as the iron’s dry heat erases even the worst creases with intense determination.

Breakfast is an afterthought this early in the mornings. Tongues and esophagi and stomachs balk at consumption, so cold stale corn flakes and carton milk is the mind’s modest negotiation with an obstinate digestive system. Then it’s brush, brush, rinse, floss, dress. Now I’m ready for the day. The front door issues shrieks of metal scraping metal as I engage the wobbly handle and throw the deadbolt, ensuring that if my roommates were not yet awake, they soon would soon be stirring. I close the gate’s Judas door, pausing again to double throw another deadbolt, and at five fifty-five march to the bus stop.