The house was pitch-dark. Davis, in his awe, had stood outside for quite some time simply - observing. He stared raptly at every passing car, at every human face, at the trees, the grass, the pavement, the small bugs that flew in the air and the sound of the world settling into itself as the sun set. Soon the smell of home cooking has driven him inside to find food. But as he now came to realize, his house was no longer his own.
Aside from the fact that there was no food to be found, seeing that the fridge was completely missing, the inside of the house seemed to be stripped of all its wallpaper, paint and furnishings. Not even the smell of asbestos could be found. Davis was hesitant at first about believing that this was reality, but with this development he was certain. He knew he couldn't die from starvation while he wasn't in the real world, but the pain of hunger, from past experience he feared, can become unbearable after a while. But if there was nothing in his own home, what were the chances that the smell of cooking was real at all.
Already Davis could see that the world he now occupied wasn't structured like any book. This was certainly so,etching made to at least reflect real life, and the world had changed since he was eighteen. Unlike in his reading, Davis was rather unprepared for what he saw around him.
And so he left his house and took to the streets. Trash cans were empty, yet the occasional homeless man would produce food from the metal canisters. They were familiar creatures to Davis, the homeless. Most of them had skin darkened by the sun, harsh cracks running across the fault lines of their face. Grimy, knotted beards and hair seen from under torn vestiges of clothing, clear protrusions from the fabric where they held their meager belongings.
But all he did was observe. Every now and then they would look at him, but he did not look away. He knew most people did. People payed for their high walls and secure neighborhoods so that they didn't have to look, let alone acknowledge.
Hunger slowly rising, Davis resolved himself to stealing from one of the homeless should the need arise, but for now he could endure at least two more days of hunger. Although he really didn't look forward to the experience again. In one of the books he had read about a desert vagabond,hunger was a rather prominent issue. Davis hadn't felt hunger to that extent in reality. The dizziness. The weakness. Muscles faltering at every movement. The glaze that falls over your vision as thoughts become screams. These are things he had learned from that book, and things that no one else who had read it had picked up on. That review in particular had become a staple to any book club which used the piece as their topic. Children in schools invariably referenced it in their essays.
Davis had used his earnings from that to buy out an entire supermarket. Of course people had asked for some of that food. And of course he had complied. He remembered the day before he finalized the transactions with the supermarket chain's manager, back in the days when he still went out into the world. An older man was sitting in the concrete wall right outside a complex of fast food places. The smell of kitchens wafted into the streets and intermingled with each other to form a sickly sweet, uncontrollably enticing odour. And that man had tried to speak to Davis as he'd walked by. In a quiet and unsure voice, heavily laden with the local accent, which was foreign to Davis. And Davis turned around, asking what the man had said. He was used to begging. But he stopped anyway. The man merely uttered something along the lines of "never mind" and turned his head away. Davis persisted, until the man revealed his intentions to ask him for a small meal. And then Davis gave him the typical response.
"Not today, sorry," he said. It was a common one. Something he'd hear in passing in almost any street or on almost any roadside.
But after going into the supermarket, Davis came out with a small shopping bag, which wasn't unusual. Walking out of the shopping center into the cloudy outside, he found the man still sitting there. And so Davis took an apple out of his shopping bag, and put the packet itself into his pockets, and handed the man a can of pasta and an apple.
Davis hadn't stuck around for the reply. But he saw the man look him in the eyes. There wasn't a smile,mor much of a thank you. But that look had secured Davis' conscience.
The apple he ate on his way home that day was pretty sweet. There were a lot of marks on it, and it was slightly bruised, but it was sweet. Sure, the flesh was powdery and its consistency reeked of genetic modification, but juice dribbled down his hand nonetheless, and he'd licked it up.
Davis' reminiscing and drooling was brought to an ubrupt halt as he walked into something soft that gave way to his body. He snapped out of his dreaming and looked around him until his eyes locked onto the obstacle. A woman, trying to regain her balance, her brown her flailing around. Suddenly the shoes on his feet felt rather heavy.
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