Pigs Pearls' Update.

‘I had wondered what it would be like to die’ a voice snuck round a corner and seeped into my bones. Grimiver Gables followed his voice like a faithful dog and lurched towards me like a man about to relive himself of his last meal.
‘I never really wanted to die’ he lamented and approached ever closer. He was tall but the years has bent him almost double and his spine poked so violently out of his back you felt that with just another move it would burst through the paper thin skin stretched tightly over it and glint in the low lighting, joyous at its release as the old man collapsed beneath it. White hair jutted out in tufts from under his battered top hat as crippled and crocked as its bearer, it had faded with age and now was like his skin, a shadow of its former glory, a dirty grey.
The light was enough to see how dull his eyes were, but it could never have reached into the depths of the deep wrinkles that carved their way about his face in strongly defined lines of laughter and woe in equal measure.
‘Now I walk alone in the crowds’ he croaked trailing like I had, and the thousands before me, a single hand along the wallpaper.
‘oh how I loved these walls, it was fitting that I would end here and now look at me’ he opened his arms wide revealing filthy clothes that were more rags than anything, mere ghosts of expensive finery. A waistcoat inlayed with silver thread that would have been quiet magnificent had the silver not become unravelled and fallen into a threadbare mess, patches of a white shirt that was frayed at the cuffs and moulding a sick grey pocked through were the fine silk was no more than a hole.
‘Dust, that is what I am, as god had intended all humanity, the perfect state. Disregarded and unwanted, ignored. Nothing more than a film that protects the unused from false hope and gently lulls them into the acceptance of time. Time that will eventually welcome them into warm archaic arms and crush them in an embrace. I float, unnoticed from place to place a speck, a folly, a nuisance that is swept up and forgotten. That is what has become of me. All my years. My beautiful wife. And all I count for. I am dust.’ he came to a stop in front of me and continued with his sorrowful monologue.
‘If only I could just’ he trailed away and raised his hand. A hand so bent and knurled and wizened with arthritis that it was a claw that hooked in a threatening crescent articulated with swollen knuckles and hanging with loose powdery skin that was cracked with wear and relentless age. As he reached out I almost heard the bones creak in protest at this uninvited movement, joints screaming and squealing as each finger unfurled in a one slow painful action. Until it finally came to a stop when I breathed a sigh of relief for the man, the tips of his fingers brushed my cheek. It felt like leather, smooth but broken in wrinkles and hard with over use, but the flesh was warm and alive.
‘I wish I had not died, I had so much left to do, so much left to say. My part was cut before its time like a green shoot to the farmers indifferent scythe, draped in black. Oh the stage has been cruel again. Was my life not to be a comedy? It is a tragedy, though amusing to see that I linger here past my time, so it is a comedy , but a foul one and I have no taste for it. The stage it is my cobra and I like the foolish the charmed musician lent in for the kiss. Oh what a kiss, I felt the venom seep past my lips as real as I feel the clammy grip of death slowly tighten around my throat.’