It had been six months since Gus sold a painting. “Was it the politically charged themes that caused my sales to drop?” he pondered. “Of course not. It’s the people. They just don’t get it!” To feed himself he relied on his credit card. Unable to pay the rent for the last three months, he had no choice but to take his art supplies and his albino ferret Carlos to a community shelter.
It looked like an old gymnasium where middle schoolers rocketed rubber balls at each other. The ceiling was all metal bars and sheets of aluminum. You could easily hear your voice echo across. The place reeked of armpit stench coupled with roach spray. Each dweller’s area was separated by tall white curtains that stood on giant rollers.
His father, a successful Pizza Hut owner, called Gus a few days after he was evicted and begged him to return home.
“It’s okay, just come back home and you can start delivering pizzas for me again, just like old times, eh?”
Gus cringed after hearing this, then answered, “I have to make it on my own. It’s part of the creative process. I’m determined to succeed. This is just a test. I must endure this before I find true success.”
Gus chose an area next to Gary, an overweight schizophrenic who demonstrated his authority by bludgeoning people with his fat fists. On his shelf, Gary had a massive display of vintage Marvel comic books wrapped in cellophane. Stickers that read “mint condition” were pasted on each one. Above the comics on the top shelf stood seven mason jars that Gary filled with his own urine.
Every morning Gary shouted, “Once Galactus is destroyed, the voices will stop. They’ll replace them with bright shiny lights and it’ll feel like Christmas again.”
After spending nine hours painting a portrait of an elephant decapitating members of the Kennedy family with an axe (John, Robert, Ted and Joe all together, their necks squirting blood), Gus took Carlos on his nightly stroll across the shelter. Lashed to a long red leash, Carlos, with his pink nose, probed everything: the stinky clothes, the sterilized bedsheets, beds on wheels, loose slippers on the floor. Already half asleep, Gus forgot to secure the latch on the ferret’s cage door. With curiosity coursing through his veins, Carlos made a break for it.
Upon finding Gary’s jars filled with his bodily fluids, Carlos sniffed them thoroughly before knocking them down one by one. The reek of urine and the crash of breaking glass reached Gary’s nostrils and ears. He lifted himself from his sleepy state and turned on his night light. All of his beloved comics — Spider-Mans, X-Mens, Fantastic Fours — were drenched in his own piss. He saw Carlos’s dark red eyes, grabbed the ferret and hurled him to the floor. Carlos emitted a high-pitched shriek. Gary ran to Gus’s bed and pummelled him with his sledgehammer hands. Carlos scampered to his cage.
The shelter’s manager flicked the lights on. Gus’s sheets were drenched in blood. He didn’t realize what was happening until shelter volunteers restrained Gary. After Gus cleaned up the blood, he found one of his incisors on the floor next to his bed. Thoughts of him in a Pizza Hut uniform came, followed by a sharp cringe. He then remembered another shelter nearby and began gathering his art supplies.
“I have to make it on my own,” he thought to himself. He turned to look at Carlos in his cage and saw that he was curled up into a whimpering ball.
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