CW: suicide

i’m tired and lonely and sad

Those words were scrawled on the wall in feces.

She looked at them for a second, then at the chimp, her chimp, swaying, limp.

It had been a clean break; probably relatively painless.

Strangely enough, she felt hungry.

That made her feel guilty.

She made a corned-beef sandwich, careful to close the blinds while she ate.

It was a decent corned-beef sandwich. 

He would have tried to smack it out of her hand.

She didn’t feel sad, so she put on some melancholy music.

That just made her bored.

She wondered how she was to dispose of him, whether the neighbors would notice her dragging a chimp-sized lump wrapped in bedsheets down the building’s stairs.

There’s fucking CCTV cameras everywhere as well.

Was this her fault?

Should a chimp live in a city?

Well, live and die?

How had he written his note?

He had awfully beautiful handwriting, considering a) the lack of opposable thumbs and b) the ink had come from his arse.

It began to smell awful in that now silent flat; her nose regained consciousness and started kicking off.

She went for a walk.

Outside it was hot and sunny and her glasses melted on her nose and her feet stood on every crack in the pavement and still she felt nothing when she thought of him swinging.

She felt something soft underneath her shoe and looked down; she had just stepped in dog shit.

She collapsed.

James Bone is a working class twenty-five-year-old bisexual writer from Liverpool who writes short stories and is currently working on a novel.