The Fireplace - Chapter 1

He lifted one foot after the other and carried himself back to his apartment. The dusk sky was harsh, the wind was dark, and the leaves fell from the trees in clumps.

And beyond the stretch of the dark trees and the fading grass was the city he had just walked away from – he didn’t want to set foot there again. It mocked him. It wasn’t somewhere people should live – it wasn’t natural! It made him feel…

It made him feel dirty and uncivilised.

He stopped at this revelation and looked behind him. Dammit, the neon boards were shining and blinking, showing advertisements from all around the globe where the wealthy technicians and managers paid millions for their companies to be seen. They were the ones who held the fate of the world. They were the ones who had chips implanted in their brains; they were the ones above; they were the ones corrupted – they were the new version of God.

He heard the door slam – he slammed the door.

He sunk down against it, his hands trembling so hard they could barely hold the dirty box of matches and the cigarette he fumbled out of his pocket.

He crawled, holding the cigarette between his lips, crawled to the cold hearth, not caring about the state of his trench coat because it was already marred enough, and stared at the mantlepiece with hollow eyes. He stared at it, lowered his eyes, and placed his hands on the ground, kneeling to the old Gods instead of the new.

“O my lady of genius and fortune… O my lord of goodwill and justice… O my muse of grace and splendour… wilt thee not lend me a hand? Wouldst thee see thy student suffering from the most poetic of diseases – starvation, inebriation and poverty?”

He internally cringed at himself, then he cringed at the cringe. He was a poet. He was free to say things like these – he was a poet…

The face of the manager of the press looked down at him sympathetically from his memories, her voice soft, “A poet, are you? We have no place for a meddler like you... but God, I wish we did.”

“Don’t you publish human writing? Your company’s name is Human Writers Luxury,” he had demanded stupidly, “I’m a human. I write.”

“We only publish refined human voices, not... this.” There was a kind smile on her face, but he couldn’t tell if it was good-natured or satirical. He raised his head and stared at his fickle Gods.

A bottle or two of alcohol and he was rolling around on the floor, punching stacks of handwritten poetry off their precarious piles and scattering them wildly. Part of his mind wondered if he would have to clean it all up, but the rest was crying out madly against his failures, against the Sisyphus’ stone that had been pushed up and then let down to crash on his heart, against the bloody world of bloody technology and everything that had ruined his life.

When he was knee-high to a grasshopper (oh, there we go, he thought, we’re entering the memory section), things weren’t like this. He and his friends, and all everybody else’s friends, had been meekly writing and thinking and imagining and striving to be writers. Back then, the world had felt vast, new and full of possibility. He remembered sitting in a dimly lit café, the air thick with the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke, reading his poems aloud to a rapt audience. Their faces had glowed with something he could only describe as joy —not just because of his words, but because of the shared struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

He had been so young then, so full of hope and ambition. He had believed in the power of words to change the world, to carve out a space for beauty in the mundane. He had written feverishly, filling notebooks with verses that spilt out of him like blood from a wound. He had dreamed of seeing his name in print – written by Fern Edelweiss – of holding a book in his hands and knowing that he had created something immortal.

But that was before technology began dominating the arts – yes, he had known that the Arts would go first. The artists. The writers. The designers. Ere long, algorithms started churning out poetry that was technically flawless – and scarily, very soulful. The presses stopped caring about raw, unfiltered human expression and started chasing whatever sold. The world decided that art was just another product to be optimised and monetised. The poets hid themselves and suffered.

After a bottle or two more, he was babbling nonsense that spewed like vomit from his mouth.

“Take me,” he sobbed, “Alleviate my soul from this suffering, my arms are filled with my own poetry and my fingers are red from my bloody work. Is there – is there no balm in Gilead? Take me! Take me from this world of madness and beauty – take me!”

He groaned and rolled onto his back, staring up at the cracked ceiling. The room spun around him, a blur of paper and dust and empty bottles. He reached out and grabbed a crumpled poem from the floor, clutching it to his chest like a talisman. It was one of his earliest works, written in a fit of passion and idealism. He tried to read it, but the words swam before his eyes, dissolving into meaningless shapes.

“What happened to us?” he whispered to no one in particular. “What happened to me?”

The room grew quieter, the chaos of his outburst settling into a heavy silence. His eyelids drooped, the weight of exhaustion, emotional drainage and alcohol pulling him down. He thought about getting up, about cleaning the mess he had made, but then again, he would really enjoy a rest...

Instead, he lay there on the floor, surrounded by the scattered remnants of his life’s work. The crumpled poem pressed against his heart – he didn’t even remember which one it was, when he had written it, and what it was about. As sleep finally claimed him, he dreamed of the Remona Café, of the faces glowing in the dim light, of the words that had once flowed so joyfully from his pen, writing about his youth, his life and the light.

And for a moment, just a moment, he was happy.