Joseph awakens on his stone bed with an aching back, surrounded by startling faces with gaping eyes. He hastily reaches into his coat pocket for a quickly emptying bottle of sanity. He grasps around for a drink to down a capsule. As the pills take effect, the faces recede away and he stands up, every joint cracking in protest. Joseph looks at his scratched watch face and thinks to himself, It is almost time for my appointment. He wipes a sniffling nose and the glint of the metallic cap pinched between his arthritic fingers catches his eyes. Overturning the bottle cap he reads the bit of knowledge it contains. “Inveigle... Verb… To persuade someone to do something by means of deception or flattery,” he says to himself. …show more content…
“Dude, I don’t mean to inveigle you or anything, but serious, you make that place a good time.” Joseph falters in his even steps as the neighbor speaks that word but continues onward without word. He shivers at the coolness of the city streets. How odd, I have never heard inveigle before today and now I have heard it twice. Joseph keeps shivering and pulls his arms closer into his body, hands burrowed deep into his wrinkled pockets. His right hand tightly grasps his orange, plastic cylinder, each step rattling its dwindling contents. As he walks to his appointment his eyes absorb the mid afternoon city, a different atmosphere than the one he is familiar with. Joseph’s lunch always fell at precisely 20:00, long after the sun retired below the horizon and the glow of neon signs engulfed the fog. He watches the first shift workers rustle their way through the jungle, impossibly stretching out their thirty minutes. He examines the natural lit glow of his breath as it condensates and splits around his stubbled jaw. Joseph exhales a long breath and grey smog pollutes and breaks apart the pure white. Following the stream of ashy smog, his low gaze is led to the slathered red lips of a smog