Horacio at My Door Again, by David Belcher

Salman Toor- Arrival II, 2019 Oil on panel 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm) © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Horacio at My Door Again

The Universe died. So says Horacio. He’s at my door, again. I keep one hand on the wall, and one on the door knob, blocking his entrance, casually.
 
I got evicted from my last apartment because of Horacio. And before that he got me into a fight with a man twice my size. And the time before that, he convinced my mother I had married a Russian girl who, he claimed, was only after my money. Still, I think of him as a friend.
 
Horacio’s foot is halfway across my threshold. I’m not worried about the demise of the Universe. I’m thinking about the book I’m reading, still open, pages face down on the worn highbacked armchair beside the door. But now, Horacio says, ‘What we think of as life is just an echo. We just keep living the same life over and over.’

And I lower my arm, invite him in to my new home, a four-room apartment, bare floorboards, simply furnished.
 
I don’t understand my relationship with Horacio. We met in a graveyard. It was the funeral of my only Aunt. Horacio had been her lodger. He had doleful eyes, and a long loose-limbed body that seemed about to collapse. I assumed it was grief. But once I got to know him, I understood, this is how Horacio usually appears.
 
At the wake afterwards, Horacio had whispered in my ear, ‘If God exists, He, or She, must be very bored.’ This was the moment I first heard Horacio’s theory that the Universe, from the Big Bang onward, was like an old TV show, repeating again and again, endlessly. Apparently, this answers many difficult questions, and the whole idea is supported by physical evidence and logical arguments that Horacio wasn’t inclined to share. I am fairly open-minded, and I added Horacio and his ideas to my collection of things that might be real, like other realities and UFOs.
 
I pad about my apartment in thick, woolly socks. The floorboards creak under the arch between the kitchen and the lounge. My pink pumps lie side by side under a tall side table I inherited from my aunt. Horacio picks up my book, and puts it down, glances about, like he has lived this moment a thousand times before.

David Belcher

David Belcher lives on the north coast of Wales in the UK, he is a member of several poetry forums and writes almost every day. His most recent work has appeared in Prole Magazine, Poetry Bus Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Ekphrastic Review and Right Hand Pointing. David writes and reads poetry because he enjoys it, and for no other reason. He is not a very complicated person.