chaoscheebs

I needed to write a place for Intro to Creative Writing, so I wrote about Ryan and his apartment, because I had reference pictures to work from. ^^; (Link to CF)

The day started not with a bang or a whimper, but with Ricky Martin singing “Livin’ La Vida Loco” at max volume on a nearby alarm clock and the thinly-muffled temper tantrum of the neighbors’ child coming from the next apartment.

The thin, girlish-looking blond man in the bed next to the alarm clock groaned and blindly fumbled for the snooze button, finally succeeding after said song had firmly planted itself in his mind and would remain there the rest of the day. He opened one eye and read the glowing red digital display. It was 4:01 PM. In two hours he would have to report to his job, where he’d have to stay on his feet for hours on end in a series of white, sterile rooms, listening to people demanding to see the doctor or demands for a rerun of a rerun of a rerun of “The Simpsons” to be put on the waiting room TV. Than there would be the answering of inane questions like, “Why can’t we see a real doctor?” and the defending of his abilities to someone who could barely spell the word, let alone understand them, not to mention all the “Oh, Miss!” comments. Just thinking about any one of those items made him want to stay in bed and pretend it didn’t exist.

But alas, he liked having a place to live, however small it was, or how the most expensive things in the house were a six-year-old refrigerator and a little black wireless radio that only got FM frequencies. Story of my life, he thought, shambling from one side of the bed to the other, where his clothes hung from a cheap World-Of-Stuff do-it-yourself clothing rack.

He soon entered the main room of the apartment, fastening the last button on his shirt. It was hardly the even tinier and untidy living room he had spent the first 12 years of his life in, where he had been charged with taking care of his little brother while his mother went to “work”. On the other hand, it was hardly the large but inhospitable room where his aunt Meagan would yell at him or his brother if a doily or figurine of a child with freakishly large eyes was so much as a single millimeter out of place, or if either child made a sound above that of a golf clap. No, this room, while kept so tidy that even Mr. Clean would be impressed, was at least inoffensive and inviting enough for a regular person.

The man frowned as he noticed the wallpaper was peeling off the wall near the door. He never did like the wallpaper; it looked like a lazy artist just scribbled intersecting black lines all over the wall. Not that his opinion mattered much; he had neither the money nor the time to replace it. Such is life in the city, he thought, Rent’s high and if you don’t like it, tough, you either stick it out or move somewhere else. Which reminded him, the harpy he called the landlady would be calling to shriek at him if he didn’t get the money to her by Friday.

The neighbors’ child could be heard tearing down the hallway outside, screaming its head off with its mother yelling, “JUSTINE ELIZABETH TIMBERLANE! You get back here right NOW!” as she chased after the child. Ryan checked the small clock that was sitting on the coffee table before the beat-up brown couch. 4:17 PM. The day was shaping up to be an interesting one and he had barely been awake fifteen minutes. If this was how it was before he had to face the crowded bus ride to work and the throng of hypochondriacs, parents insisting little Timmy or Tanya’s head cold was a life or death situation, and the few genuine emergencies that awaited him in the hospital, he really dreaded how the rest of the day would go.

“I gotta get out of this place,” he muttered to himself, “I really, really do…”