Damn you, Detective!
by S.T. Fargo)
“Everything was a mess. It was a total fucking mess! I wearily opened my left eye and even more warily closed it. Then I tried to do the same with the right one but couldn’t, so I had to make my piece with the left again. My kitchen looked like a battlefield.
I heard a strange noise not far from me and made an enormous effort to focus my attention on the place where I thought it was coming from. It took me a while to find out. It turned out to be the sink tap. The water was wildly gushing out of there, raising a frantic cloud of water drops everywhere—like a damn waterfall. I assumed the hot water was running because of the steam, but the weirdest thing was the color of the splashes. They seemed rusty, and I had no idea why.
Eventually, I managed to open my right eye, which was probably bruised because it hurt terribly, and then I tried to get up. Some obscure suspicion buried deeply in my dizzy brain suggested I would fail to do so, and I did. It was only natural, given the circumstances: my right hand was raised above my shoulder, hanging on to something that restricted my movements. I slowly turned my head to look up, but the headache I felt hit me so hard that I had to give up immediately. Instead, I tried to feel the thing with my fingers. It was a pair of handcuffs, obviously. One of the rings was clicked around my wrist, and the other was around the radiator pipe. From there, hot water trickled down my forearm and dripped on my neck, moving further down my back.
I tried to think about the situation I was in, and not surprisingly, I failed again. I was totally unable to remember anything about the events that led me to all this. In fact, I had no recollection of the past two days at all, and my brain felt dead and sleazy, like a three-day-old mushroom left to rot in the woods. Every attempt to make it work ended in the awful swamp of persistent amnesia and my efforts just stopped there.
Right then, the telephone rang loudly across the hallway and startled me. Since I didn’t expect that, I jumped up, forgetting I was cuffed. The only result of my action was that I lost my balance, fell backward, and struck my head very hard into one of the radiator ribs. My brain exploded with pain, which made me curse as I sat on my butt again.
The phone kept ringing persistently. When, after a few minutes, my throbbing pain calmed down a bit, I made another attempt to look around and figure out what was going on. It was a tricky thing to do with no memories in my head. The new bits of information I managed to add to the picture were: an empty pack of ground coffee on the kitchen counter; the fact that the sink was obviously clogged with dishes and the brown water was now overflowing it, trickling down toward the kitchen tiles; and the presence of a blue plastic bucket, which seemed full of empty whiskey bottles. I fixed my eyes on the latter, puzzled, because I didn’t remember owning such a thing. Since I couldn’t rely on my brain to help me understand anything, I hoped the bucket itself would explain why it was here, but unfortunately, it wasn’t interested in doing so. In the meantime, the water from the sink finally reached the floor.”
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