ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01 JUNE 2025
Mr. and Mrs. Nebkitz lived on the seventh floor of the William Rand apartment building in Pittsburgh, a city once of bustling streets and bustling lives, now under the black veil of anarchy. A riff-raff of criminal gangs, haughty warlords, and bitter revolutionaries turned the city into a neurotic warzone, with the Police Bureau only another faction vying for territory and control. However, the horrors of the world were of no importance to Mrs. Sarah Nebkitz. She had a house (well, an apartment) to keep. She awoke promptly everyday to a digital alarm clock, screeching at 9 AM with a sickly croak. The thing sounded like it could break within the next month, but to afford (or even find) a new clock would be only luxury’s blessing. She started by cleansing herself of yesterday’s scent in the shower, then wiped the condensation from the mirror for her morning stare-downs with the bleak image of herself. Everyday she found a new wrinkle on her skin to cover with her cheap make-up. She blow-dried her dark hair until her curls bounced back into place, just above her shoulders. Then as a disjunctive violation of her Stepfordian commitments, she slid on plain denim jeans and a baggy homely shirt, which she thankfully remembered to clean the night before. This was all done before Mr. Nebkitz woke up around 10 AM. His freakishly heavy sleeping–he at most simply jostled a little when the clock screeched–was Sarah’s greatest relief in maintaining the apartment.
The clock read 9:46 AM. Mrs. Nebkitz zipped into the living area: an awkward combination of a kitchen, dining area, and living room. She grabbed a batch of beer cans, about five this time, from the coffee table that was slightly misaligned with the couch and the TV. She dumped them into a trash can then continued her hunt for more undesirable decorations.
The clock read 10:10 AM. Mrs. Nebkitz was unloading the dishwasher when her bedfellow waddled into the living area. He was a tubby man, being somewhere in between a rich pig’s tubbiness and a lazy fool’s tubbiness. It made sense if you knew his family. His father, though a bit leaner, wasn’t much different. Even had the same job, occupying those positions in banking you don’t see at the counter. His grandfather did the same thing and looked the same way. Although he was seldom spoken of, or remembered, it was imagined that his great-grandfather carried that Nebkitz gene as well. For the present Nebkitz, his eyes were sunken into their sockets, surrounded by grey skin and wrinkles. His hair clung to his head like grime. Without thought, his finger pushed up the glasses perching on his thick, unwieldly nose.
“Good morning,” said his wife.
“Mornin’,” he replied, then with barely any pause commanded her to, “Move,”
He used his body to pry his wife from the front of the refrigerator and swung the door open, automatically going for the beer and taking a sip of it as the cold crept out of the appliance.
Once Mrs. Nebkitz was finally allowed back to her morning duties, she said to him, “Shouldn’t you save it for later, Paul?”
He started a response, scrapped it quickly, then started a new one, “I don’t have work today.” Whether it was true or not was not Mrs. Nebkitz’s place to question. Her husband stumbled towards the couch and settled into it, then scrambled for the remote and prayed to himself that the TV would work today.
The clock read 1:21 PM. Paul was half-asleep on the couch after his cheese-and-beer-based lunch, with the news anchor’s droning voice feeling more and more distant to him. Then suddenly the voice hit him in the face, coupled with the creak of the front door. His son dashed into the living area, tossed a key ring onto the coffee table, and disappeared into his room at the end of the hall. Paul hurled his body upright and called for the boy. No response. He got up and lumbered across the apartment. Upon approaching the door to his son’s room, he thrusted the side of his fist against it, demanding the door to be opened. His face reddened with anger.
“Where the fuck were you?” Paul yelled at the door. The daze of slumber floated away and the memory that he even had a son fully reformed in his mind. He strangled the doorknob in the exact way where he could loosen the flimsy lock, and almost fell into the room. His son sat on his unkempt bed, the only greeting he could give was a practiced look of discontent, which was almost glued to his face permanently at this point.
Paul stepped forward and loomed over the boy. “You punk…” he muttered, his afternoon drunkenness slipping into his speech. Mrs. Nebkitz quit her vacation in her bedroom and appeared at the doorway, wiping her puffy wet eyes. She begged her husband to back off, but he ignored her. The boy’s lips were still sealed shut. Paul cursed him and grabbed at him. Before Sarah could react, the boy’s head was smashed against the bedframe and his body fell onto the floor in pain. She pried the beast from her son and held his body like a scared child. The tears renewed themselves and painted her face.
After a grueling few months of uncertainty, the Police Bureau was able to capture the neighborhood which housed the William Rand building. About a hundred jovial families were now well out of reach of any rowdy gangs. The streets were half-alive again, the silence of eternal night fading away, and neighbors in this part of the city could smile at each other and wish each other a good morning, without checking each corner right after. Paul could ease his anxieties of criminals and delinquents. If there was anything he hated more than the bottom of a can of beer, it was a thief. All was well under the watchful eye of the city’s protectors.
Paul, barely conscious at this time of night, found himself wandering the streets of his neighborhood. He couldn’t blame himself for how much he drank. The death that festered in the city was too much for an old man’s heart. How could he wander sober? How could anyone, he thought, make it without alcohol; make it without what alcohol made you: unthinking, unfeeling, and in a way, unbeing. Or as he called it: being happy for one goddamn moment.
Street lights guided his legs through the cool night air. His lungs were relieved at its plain un-smoky smell. Every now and then, he could lazily wave at a police officer keeping guard of the streets. He then found himself being stopped by one.
“Hey, there…” the officer said, stepping into the fat man’s way. “You seem a bit drunk.” The officer chuckled.
“What of it?” replied the drunkard.
“I’d prefer if you don’t go wanderin’ aran’ like that. Could I help you get home?”
Paul didn’t reply, instead just pushing past the nuisance trying to talk him out of an arrest. Then the police radio blared with some urgent encrypted signal; only static to the uninitiated. The officer anxiously looked between the drunkard and the radio, then finally made a decision, and jogged to his vehicle. He let Paul off with a warning.
Paul slouched against the wall of a building he didn’t recognize. The brick against his head and the pavement against his buttocks wasn’t comfortable, but his drunkenness dictated that walking was no longer viable. As the night grew colder, he could feel droplets of rain fall onto his face, and hear thunder ricochet off of the walls of the urban jungle. The storm settled over him and the moon peaked at him through the clouds like she was watching a mouse approach a trap. He couldn’t help but notice the rapid plucks of rain crashing against asphalt growing louder and harsh, as if they were footsteps. But they weren’t footsteps. They were a sound Mr. Nebkitz hadn’t heard in a very long time: horse hooves.
He swung his head towards the sound and in the flickering street lights saw the silhouette of a man upon a horse. The beast he rode was impatient, stomping in its place. The rider sat still and leered at Paul. To him, it was some sort of shadow creature, a centaur maybe, and he almost believed it as his reason subsided with exhaustion.
With a final flicker, the street lights gave out.
All was well under the watchful eye of the moon. She was suspended in the center of the sky, like a newly coronated queen. Her ocular form was guarded by only a few faint spots of light. The moonlight glistened off of windows and miscellaneous glass litter. The bottle slouching in Paul’s hand was no exception; the moon’s face implanted itself onto it; branded it.
Without warning, Paul felt the kicks of hooves against him, knocking him over. The hooves harassed him, beat him, bit into him, broke a bone he thought; put more and more debt to his name. It was the greatest pain he’d felt in years, maybe even in his entire life. His bruising skin radiated with pain, and then, it stopped.
Paul let out a few rash groans and tried curling up into himself. The weight of the horseman collided with the concrete behind him and Paul’s hair raised as to warn him of fate approaching his writhing body. The horseman gave him a final kick into his spine, then forced him to bare his stomach to the sky. Paul pleaded to the moon with his eyes, and the inaudible begging spilling out of his mouth. The attacker cut the prayer short with a burning across Paul’s stomach. The pain gnawed at him as his clothes were soaked in red. He wanted to roll back to his side but the horseman picked him up and awkwardly tossed him into the street. His head was smashed against the curb. Paul began to truly panic as his injuries now rattled his skull; he thought he was going to die. He thought that would have killed him right there. But yet again, a blade cut into his stomach, this time slower, deeper, gripping him and refusing to let go no matter how much he tried to pray. A scream attempted to escape the pool of blood in his mouth to no avail. And in that moment, Paul could barely even feel anything anymore. The metallic taste in his mouth grew distant, then his squealing skin, then the sound of the rain, then the blade in his body, then the moonlight. He retreated into himself and became as he was when he was conceived: unfeeling, unthinking, unbeing.
A rope grasped the neck of Mr. Nebkitz, and with some difficulty, finally suspended him upon a flickering streetlight. Some of his entrails–shriveled, polluted chunks of flesh–fell out of his gaping stomach and painted the asphalt below, but the sound of it echoed into no one’s ears.
The moon retreated behind the horizon, and the hunt was over. Death crawled from the cracks in the sidewalk and looked up at the corpse, swinging back and forth so gently. He smiled.