Predating Autism by a Thousand Years

Nightly binging had swollen his proud Australian nose. He was horrified whenever a scent of sobriety was met with a mirrored glimpse of his face but in drink he found his antidote, robbing him of (self) consciousness and provoking the smashing up of any bits of reflective surface in the apartment. His newly fragmentized floor was immaterial when he could stay on his feet but when his hands sparkled with the flecked shards of mirror and glass, he would sit absent-minded in the corner and admire them, unaware until morning the long deep slashes in his blood-stained pants.

A neighbor had come in while he was sleeping and swept up much of the mess. The swaths of blood from wounds superficial and worse were left to stand; one didn't assume safety in those areas anymore, least of all with him, but his boots were taken to be repaired and his clothes had been thrown away, replaced with a few decent sets from the neighbor's closet. Paranoia gripped him when left his bedroom, the mysteriously clean living room leading to fleeting theories about accidental home invasion or urchin murder, but he rested in the doorway, drinking from an unfinished bottle and quieting the shouts of terror with drink. He decided that the truth could never be determined, not only in his apartment, but in the universal sense, and he would burn the new sets of clothing in the bathroom to celebrate.

A middle school bus stop had been unwisely placed outside his window and the new developments were fascinating to its denizens. The blood-stained ogre who occasionally made an appearance foaming at unseen enemies in his house was now nude, standing quite still in the middle of his living room. His gun holster, recently filled, hung fashionably loose around his glittering haunches and a straw cowboy hat, pocked with baseball sized holes, singed at their edges, hung over his eyes. The students were far from scandalized, grandchildren of the sexual revolution that they were. More entertaining uses for Mickey Mouse ping-pong paddles were in full circulation and that their parents could miss the bondage potential of braces would later come as a shock, but however worldly, this was something new. Their minds worked overtime to process this strange bare cowboy and their mouths popped like corn kernels as they each independently invented cos-play.