‘This shouldn’t be.’ Charlie said when he woke up, he slammed his feet down so hard on the floor that the entire flat rattled from floors to walls. ‘If I had neighbors, they’d complain.’ He thought, then kicked at the garbage nearest to him.

His alarm was blaring, the constant ‘buzz...buzz...buzz’ a flash of white hot hatred and anger flared up for the noise by which he’d lived his life, and Charlie darted his hand out. He grabbed the cheap black plastic device, yanked it from the outlet and threw it at the wall with a shout. It flew from his hand, the power cord fluttering wildly in the air wild as the tail of a kite in the wind and long as the tail of a comet, the alarm shattered into pieces with heavy clatter like a child’s tower of blocks falling apart when it was stacked too high.

The pieces disappeared amidst the debris, and when he saw them fall and vanish amidst the garbage, his hatred turned inward. “God, what the hell have I…” He muttered but didn’t finish the sentence.

The ruin of his life around him burned like the bourbon he’d downed the other day. Then as he glanced around, Charlie frowned. ‘Where did these come from?’ And his stomach snarled at him while he wondered where those other liquor bottles came from.

The growling of his stomach proved more and more desperate, so Charlie ventured to the kitchen, his foot came out and he viciously kicked a bottle across the room where it struck a half upright box, tipped end over end, and shattered against the wall near the door, scattering glass around.

A moment later, Charlie shouted with alarm, “What the fuck?!” his lips parted with a dumbfounded expression. Down below his eyes, looking at the foot that had just kicked the bottle away, he saw that the bandage he’d placed on his foot with improvised paper towels and cotton balls was gone. In its place was a proper wrapping of white gauze.

More than that, his foot didn’t hurt nearly as much. Charlie picked up the pace, taking long strides the rest of the way into the kitchen, he went to a chair and shoved things out of the way to fall into the debris on the floor. Charlie reached down, grabbed his ankle, and pulled his foot up with a grunt to set it on his knee. He snatched the tucked in part of the bandage and yanked it loose, his hands ran around his foot, without even noticing, he began to mutter…

“Round and round the mulberry bush, around and round we go, where we stop, when we stop, nobody can know.” When he realized he’d spoken, he rolled his eyes at himself. “I can’t believe I still remember that old rhyme.” He tilted his foot back until the pain stung the extremity.

There, over the injury, was a medically taped antiseptic patch. “Josef… you sonofabitch…” Charlie sighed. But that still left the question of the bottles. “Have I been drinking that much? How long was I in that stupor…?”

No answer came to mind for Charlie Manning, and before he could ask again, his stomach reasserted itself with a growl like a starving lion.

Charlie rewrapped the bandage and tucked it back into place the same way, and thought of what to do next. ‘Have I not been eating… that doesn’t sound like me.’

His stomach growled again, arguing the contrary point.

A bag sat on the table by the chair in the kitchen, white cheap plastic, the sort from Josef’s store, Charlie reached in, there inside were a few clear plastic containers. One containing grapes that had become room temperature, still on the little clumping vines and stems, cut away from a larger whole.

Under that was a little clear plastic container holding lettuce, and another with a few croutons, and another holding some dressing packets, olives, and bacon bits… and a plastic fork still in its sealed plastic wrap.

Charlie Manning had never counted himself a religious man, but… at that moment, all he could think was, ‘Josef is a god- damn- angel.’

And that just intensified his desperation. With nothing else that he could think of, Charlie went to the bathroom, he pinched his nose and turned his face up, the path to the bathroom remained as clear as it was the last time Josef had gone into it.

However, the bathroom was not as Charlie remembered. The sink was clear, the mirror wiped down, the floor with its wet, foul overflow… mopped up. The toilet itself was even unclogged.

The shower had been rinsed clean… in short, it was… ‘Useable, I can ‘use’ this…’ Charlie thought with wonder, there was even a cheap toothbrush still in its plastic/cardboard combination container, and an unopened tube of toothpaste sitting in a clean disposable plastic cup beside the faucet.

On the inside of the shower on the cream colored soapdish was an unopened box with familiar green soap.

“Damn… how the hell does he know?!” Charlie asked the empty room with tears in his eyes, he peeled off the blue tracksuit and dropped it to the floor before reaching in, taking the green box and tearing the cardboard top open.

The strong spring like smell was a welcome one to his previously dead nose.

He turned the nozzle and after a few seconds of dreadful thudding from the showerhead as if the water were fighting internal blockage, a steady stream came down like spring rains over the great outdoors.

Charlie kept a hand in while the water went from ice cold, to luke warm, to warm, to hot and the steam began to rise. The gentle steady roar was a long missed comfort, and into it he stepped.

As soon as his feet splashed into the water around the drain a part of Charlie Manning began to return to life, to return to his humanity.

He gave long, deep sighs, breathing in the hot steam, his head bent forward, his filthy, disgusting hand caked with unwashed filth resting against the creamy wall, he could watch the caked on grime fall away from the places on his body that the water touched.

His body was a crusted mountain of foulness from the unwashed filth of just being a living person in a dirty world, to simply doing a shoddy job wiping his own ass when he shit into the trash can.

“There’s got to be some way out of this… there’s got to be.” Charlie told himself as the dirt and crusted grime ran down the drain. He began to rub the soap over his body, working a firm lather over his flesh when he’d dampened it, then stepping into the water to let it wash away.

He turned his face to the water like sunflowers followed the sun, various bits of crumbs that were hoarded by his thick and unwashed beard began to fall away to join the fate of the grime, grease, and whatever else even less pleasant than that, which had been clinging to his body.

As his hands ran over his body with the bar of soap, he noticed more clearly than before how out of shape he’d become. ‘Not much will fit anymore… and even if it did… do I want to wear that?!’ He let out a grim shudder. The prospect of wearing any of the clothes he now had was enough to make someone shiver in the midst of an inferno. ‘No, I doubt any amount of washing will take the filth out of that stuff.’

He continued to wash himself clean, spending the longest time with his head tilted directly beneath the shower head and washing the greasy mop clear, and when every square inch from the tip of his toes to the top of his head was clean, Charlie simply sat down on the shower floor and rocked back and forth.

‘I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to do anything… there has to be some way to stop the horror from happening. I don’t want to be the man who destroyed the world. Even if there’s nobody around to know… even if…’ Charlie stopped and bit his tongue.

He winced at the pain, and felt better for having done that much. He put his tongue between his teeth again, then slowly increased the pressure until it became a steady, dull pain, and then began to sharpen.

How many seconds it took before the pain was too much, that he couldn’t say. But to Charlie, it felt like hours in the shower. It might have been, because slowly, steadily, he felt the water begin to cool off.

Very slowly, his muscles aching like he’d been seated for too long, everything stiff and awkward, he uncrossed his legs, reached up with one hand to grab the metal grip bar on the shower wall, then hauled himself to his feet with a strangled grunt.

Charlie slapped the shower nozzle to the off position, it spun to a dead stop, and he opened the glass door to exit.

Then it hit him. ‘An angel, but not a perfect one.’ Charlie chuckled at the thought, “Looks like he forgot the towels. It was the closest thing to a real joke in a while, though the laughter was bitter, it was present. So, naked as the day he was born, Charlie went, walking on tiptoes to touch as little of himself to the floor as he could, back to where his laptop sat.

He waved his hands up and down several times before getting too close, air drying his hands and fingers before he opened up a shopping website and browsed for clothes.

He looked down at his body, his precious ‘medium’ was gone, and what remained was a large if he was being generous. ‘God… I really went to hell, didn’t I?’

He snagged a few articles of generic clothing, put in his address and apartment number, ordered it Fedex to ensure it arrived fast and was delivered to his door, then ordered a few more items. ‘New bed sheets, new blanket… some towels…’ He then checked out with his credit card and waited.

Seconds later he had a confirmation code and a few simple items were on the way.

His stomach growled again… ‘Right, food…’ The phone lay on the floor still attached to the charger.

He picked it up, the unread texts stopped the day prior, the missed calls also stopped the day prior. ‘So that’s it then. Josef is the only one left.’ Charlie realized, but felt none of the sorrow he thought he would. “I did it myself, what else could I expect?”

His stomach growled at him again, “I can’t very well order in, naked, that may work in porn, but I’m not attractive enough for that to not result in a call to the police and an indecent exposure charge anymore.”

With nothing else to do, he returned to the kitchen and prepared the meal Josef left for him. It was dry, it was simple, but it was filling. The sweet flavor of grapes burst over his tongue as he ate them one by one, then the tangy flavor of the dressing and the little noise of crunching bacon bits… as meals went, it was the healthiest, if plainest, meal he’d had in awhile.

The sort of thing he ate when he thought about tomorrow as if he had it.

When the last bite was swallowed and the plastic thrown back into the bag, Charlie thought about what to do next.

“Alright… I can’t very well go anywhere buck naked other than a nudist colony or a fraternity rush… and I’m about twenty years too late for the latter… and…” He looked down his front and could no longer see his penis. “I don’t have the body for that anymore, how long have I been-” He shook his head, casting off small droplets of water around the room.

“Don’t think about it.” Charlie told himself, “When your things arrive tomorrow,” he said, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes, “you can go ask god himself for help. For now… I have to do this on my own… even if just a little, to thank him for putting up with my worthless ass…” He then reached down, plucked up a bottle, and dropped it out the window to shatter into pieces in the dumpster down below.

‘The Lord helps those who help themselves…’ He recited the statement from memory despite it having not been uttered or thought in decades, then reached down, picked up another bottle, and dropped it after the first one until the space around his bed was empty.

“It isn’t much… but it’s a start.” He said with a grimace at the filth, and reached for an old greasy pizza box, he dropped it out the window and watched the way it caught the air with it’s wide open frame. It didn’t fall like a brick, but it made it in the bin. ‘Another step in the right direction, if I prove myself… maybe… maybe I can do something.’

Or so Charlie hoped, desperately… and fervently, with all that he had… he hoped.