At the edge of his peripheral, Zāl sees the long expanse of a tunnel. There’s no end to it, only an ever-encroaching darkness—a mouth to a greater beast. An end of a voyage, a bridge that collapsed, a path to nowhere.

Zāl pushes himself to wakefulness—

—and is met with a bleak morning.

He’s overslept.

 Zāl can hear the cluttering of pans from the kitchen above, the restaurant in the throes of early lunch—three hours into opening. It’s unfortunate, as Zāl now has to slink up the stairs guiltily and pass by his landlord. She’ll remind him that he’s late, to which he’ll reply with something along the lines that he’s already paid in advance. To which she’ll kindly, albeit sternly, remind him again that the year advance had finished two months ago.

Zāl, eyes glued to his ceiling fan, mulls this over for another ten minutes. Inevitability is something he knows intimately and yet; he shrinks away when his bare feet touch the cold tiled floor.

The bathroom lights refuse to turn on and since the kitchen is running hot, the shower water runs cold.  It’s through the cracks of sunlight from halved windows that Zāl finds his reflection and manages to somewhat clean up and shave—even just by muscle memory alone. Slowly, as he’s toweling off his chin, Zāl’s fingers run along the underside of his jaw, just enough to feel the raised ink slither away from him.

By the time he’s neatly—somewhat neatly—dressed, it’s well into the afternoon. He plucks his sunglasses from the nightstand and slips them up the bridge of his nose as he creaks up the stairs. His landlord is waiting for him, her face twisted into disappointment.

“You’re late,” she says.

“I’ll have it soon,” Zāl provides with a casual smile. “From donations.”

“You’re always relying on donations,” the landlord says. “What happened to the boy from last year? Paying the whole year at once.”

“That boy had a really good job,” Zāl says. “Hope he’s doin’ well now, and all.

“Maybe if he wasn’t wasting his credits on silly tattoos,” she replies, gesturing to the exposed ink near his collar. “He’d still have that very good job.”

Zāl smiles. “These are just birthmarks, Tata.”

She looks like she doesn’t believe him but shoos him off nonetheless, deciding to focus on the customers flowing in to order their meals. Zāl exits through the front door of Haseem’s Shawarma, giving one last goodbye wave before the door closes behind him with a chime.

THE MECHANIC, Pt. 1