The Morning House

Inspired by a twenty-minute fic challenge on Facebook where the prompt was roaches and avocados.

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o ‘clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness.

-Ray Bradbury, ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’

Inside the apartment, the air was silent and still. The plants in their greenhouse had had more than their fill of sunlight, but lacking water, they had begun to wither and die in their plastic pots, while in the nearby kitchen, the water continued to run out of the faucet and into the sink, carried down and away by swirling pipes to eventually meet up with the reservoir two miles to the east.

Beside the sink on the counter sat a half-eaten avocado, its rounded well, devoid of its wooden pit, had turned a ghastly shade of dark brown along with the rest of its exposed flesh. An overturned carton of goat’s milk, now empty and forlorn, sat beside it, its contents having long since spilled onto the counter and floor, uncleaned up.

The alarm clock on the bedside table ticked off each second faithfully, but there was no one present to be annoyed by its incessant din.

Presently a large cockroach waded through the spilled milk on the floor, climbed upwards until it reached the counter, and scurried towards the neglected avocado, settling itself comfortably on the decaying flesh.

Across town, the apartment’s owner continued his tireless vigil as he sat beside a hospital bed, silently noting the days, hours, minutes and seconds that had passed since his still-unconscious partner had been found bloodied and beaten behind a dumpster in a nameless alley puddled with dirty rainwater and strewn with the mundane detritus of castoff papers, discarded cigarette butts, and abandoned trash.