City Of The Dead
an excerpt

I staggered to my feet and took a look around me. I had woken on the sidewalk in the flickering dim of a street lamp. Illegible posters peeled off the bricks behind me and thin, worn-through cardboard lay on the ground as though mashed into the paving. I wondered vaguely how long I’d been lying on the ground. I was cold, but it wasn’t unfamiliar. It was unpleasant, but it was familiar. Unaware of why I did so, I clenched my fingers in fear of losing what they clutched. My palms were warm, but my fingers were slowly getting colder.
I looked down at my hands, and released a bundle of newspaper whose rank smell made me pull away in disgust. I looked down at my hands, and noticed that I was wearing gloves that covered my palms but left my fingers exposed from the first knuckle.
Fingerless gloves. Just like…
Hobo gloves.
But I… wasn’t. Was I? The phrase flitted through my mind with somewhat scornful laughter. For a moment I was confronted with the sight of fingers combing their way through long hair; dark eyes shining through the hair that fell across them, eyes that seemed empty, and hair that smelt of…
No.
The thought was instinctive. The idea was appalling.
A woman?
I wondered, reaching through my mind. But my memories remained out of my reach. The possibilities that my fingertips reached were unreasonable.
Girlfriend?
Wife?
Sister?
I don’t have a sister.
“I don’t have a sister.” My own words sounded empty and hollow to my ears, echoing in the emptiness around me. It rang true.
Who?
The question made me shiver, and I felt my scalp prickle. This girl (the laughter had sounded girlish, hadn’t it?) had to hold some sort of answer. I needed answers.
No. Stop it.
I shook my head to clear the idea. This was madness. It was too vague, too dreamlike for the person to be real at all.