Finished in September 2017

A Metaphor

*Writing Based On a Given Quote*

By Zac Langridge

Took this photo specially for this piece of writing, as I couldn't find any good images online.
Amazing what iPhone cameras can capture!

The acid was a nasty colour. A strange, almost stale-looking mixture of brown and orange. It was cloudy, chemicals creating a weather pattern of activity inside the liquid.
The skeleton of a man that stood over the bowl containing the acid, had an unreadable expression on his face. His eyes were blank and his mouth was slack, but his face conveyed something else, overall. His lank hair, dull clothes and sallow skin were almost a visual representation of his expression.
He reached into his stained pockets and drew out two coins. A copper 10 cent, and a silver 50 cent. He held the two objects in the palm of his hand, examining them with unforgivingly blank eyes. The glossy silver gleamed and shone brightly, a sharp contrast with the rustic matte finish on the copper one. He eyed them with some sort of curiosity.
And then he dropped the coins into the acid. They sunk slowly and the reaction was almost immediate. Once they’d nearly reached the base, bubbles began to form and rise to the top. The coins themselves seemed to be emitting jets of bubbles, similar to those underwater vents the man had seen in meaningless television programs. The reaction slowly grew more violent; the bubbles growing slowly, bursting at the surface and disrupting the initial calm. A sharp, acrid smell began to reach the man’s nostrils. He spat and watched as fumes rose from the bowl, the acid now seething.
As he watched, the water began to change colour. The bubbles were now coloured, a rusty reddish-brown. The man’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes were focused on the expanding colour. It was like red sand being stirred up in the shallows of a beach. Clouds of red filling up the parameter of the bowl. The coins were hidden from view, but he could imagine the edges being thinned down, eaten away and dissolved, like plaque rots tooth enamel.
Like his mind.
The fumes were red now. It swirled in the breeze around him, like a halo of acrid smoke. He stared for a moment at the seething, boiling acid - and then he tipped it out. Without hesitation, he just overturned the bowl, pouring out the acid and the coins. The steaming liquid flowed over the flagstones and into the cracks in the gridwork. Goodness knows what damage it would do, but it meant nothing to him. Nothing mattered anymore. As the acid drained away, he saw the remains of the coins on the ground. The overall shape of them had been seriously deformed; they were now flattened like rolled out steel, the edges as sharp as a razor. The patterns on them were almost incomprehensible, and the melted tarnish on the coins had turned them into various colours, obscuring their copper and silver hues. A complete mess, a twisted, deformed, mutated, broken mess.
Like his mind.

THE END