Free Hunger and Thirst by Richard Matheson Page A

that was worth the taking? Life must have been a hideous rack for the old man. He would be better off dead. Why should he be the instrument of release?
    The case is clear, he told himself. But, inside, wondered if he were rationalizing, backing away from it.
    No! It was
true
. There was no point in killing. As he had already calculated it was too great a risk.
    He rolled on his stomach and laughed; a short brutal laugh that tore from his throat and sprayed itself around and hung in dripping vindictiveness from the walls.
    He turned his head and, in the twilight dimness looked at the rose.
    It was still new and fresh.
    He had found it that afternoon. He had just come from the post office where he’d been buying some stamps. He saw the rose in the gutter, like a splash of blood it seemed at first. A crimson splash of blood.
    He picked it up. It was broken off and its sap was oozing from the green stump. He looked at it, instinctively, smelled it. He didn’t notice the people watching. He had come to the point where he always walked alone.
    The rose smelled sweet. The perfume of it went deep into his head. The petals were all curled around the center as though they concealed from sight some precious thing, embracing it in their soft, gentle folds.
    Underneath, like the thick strands of a hula skirt, were the green fronds. And glued by spit or sap or hope was a tiny piece of decorative leaf. He had touched it, the delicate green needles all like silken threads and green lace.
    “Beautiful,” he had whispered. And, somewhere in him, there was a tiny sense of resentment. For, through the months and years he had been building himself a picture of the world, painted in hues of dull unpleasant grey. And this sudden brightness, this sudden dash of beauty in the overall squalor seemed to destroy his picture, gave it falsity and showed the lie.
    He took it to his room. The beauty of it overcame the inner feeling of dislike. It was instinctive. It was natural to take a flower to your room for decoration. So he had taken it and put water in the glass on the window table and set the rose to standing there in the sunlight.
    Now he was looking at it.
    What
is
it? he mused, once again caught up in the search for meanings and connections. What is it beyond a rose and a bit of delicate lacework? Why did I find it? Does it mean anything? When there is no one to give it to? came the thought. For what is a flower if there is no one to give it to?
    He bit his lips and fought back the tears that, suddenly, wanted to fall.
    “No!” he said hoarsely. And almost jumped up to hurl the glass and flower on the rug and crush them with raging feet.
    Instead, he closed his eyes tightly, so tightly that it contorted his face, driving lines along the edges of his eyes and making ugly ridges and valleys on each side of his nose bridge.
    Forget those thoughts, he commanded himself. And, once more, felt a strong resentment toward the rose which had broken his pattern and hated himself for bringing it up as an evidence of the broken pattern.
    There is no love or beauty in the world! He demanded that it was the truth. The world is hard and cruel and mean. It is empty and fruitless. It is a neon sign glowing out its blatant insults to the night. It is a drunk lying dead in the gutter with the rain soaking into his white, flaccid face. It is hate and corruption and greed and hunger and thirst!
    He lay very still, trying vainly to empty his mind of sickening thoughts,
all
thoughts. God, if only there were Ex-Lax for the brain, his mind ran on, some cathartic that would purge the aching swollen mind of all its stored up dung of thought. If only you could think it out and pull the cord and watch a whirlpool suck it down and be free to fill your mind again with food, with better, cleaner food.
    But there was none of that, he thought.
    The mind was a sponge. It sucked in and in and in. And never out until the hand of death crushed it in an icy fist and squeezed it dry