The Queen Of Warsaw

The Queen Of Warsaw
By Richard Krauss

The door crept open like a grin on the old woman.
She stood at the threshold of her apartment watching me with her sad, glassy vulture eyes through an uneasy fluorescent glow of the overhead pendant light affixed to the hallway ceiling. She didn't move though, just glared at me intently from her doorway, her clothing and head-dress blending in perfectly with the cobwebs and dark patterned wallpaper behind her.
The hallway smelled as it usually did: a diabolic mixture of fast food, coleslaw, stagnant water and shitty diapers. That shameful odor carried with me for so many months.
God Damn.
I placed my laundry basket on the floor in front of my apartment door so as to make room for the woman to go about her business, offering a nod of, ‘hello’ with a tenuous smile.
Still, she didn't move.
“Hi, how are you?" I asked, eagerly unlocking my door.
"I mees my husband." She responded in an unfamiliar Polish accent. I had lived next to her for almost a year but this was the first time I'd actually heard her voice. I turned my head towards the wrinkled old woman. A cold, vacant face pleading to be consoled greeted my gaze with eyes the color of volcanic ash.
"Oh...well what time does he get home? Is he at work?"
"Oh, no!" She yelled, sending an echo throughout the entire apartment building and out into the parking lot. My nerves rattled and I felt my jaw begin to lock in panic.
"He not come for me...O’no…
He no comes!
He is died...twulve yees ago."
She curled her tiny hands into fists, raised them to chest level and began to slowly convulse.
"I hate it...
I hate it!"
The woman screamed at me, sinking her head towards the floor, sobbing and babbling in an incoherent stream of misery. The hallway strip lighting cast its hideous yellow ray like a monsoon of piss up and down the narrow corridor.
When you've locked horns with such a debilitating force,
it can suck the marrow from your bones
if you don't
Run
Like
Hell.
I knew that there was nothing I could do or say to comfort her.
"Aw..."
I interrupted, suppressing my tears,
“I’m really sorry to hear.”

And I truly was.

I opened the door to my stifling apartment, walked in, and took a seat on the edge of my stained futon where I found a pen and piece of paper. Trough the wall that separated our living rooms I observed the woman's retreat back into her empty home; maneuvering with cautious footsteps around dusty furniture and countless stacks of yellowed newspaper and grocery receipts. The springs of her couch let out a rusty screech as she flopped down, exhaled loudly, turned the on the television, and waited.
My Polish Princess.
Slumped over in post-war agony.
Still honing the dull daggers of reality.
It won’t be long, lady. I said to myself in a nervous whisper.

He was coming, we both knew it.
On her heels like a stampede of brainsick rats from a sewer fire.
Finally, a solution.
Rest for a tired widow.
The crushing anger of 4,380 empty-handed twilights and lonely meals spent peering out of a second floor apartment window at the shadows of absolutely nothing at all.
The holidays in funeral parlor silence, the birthdays in bed.
All these god damned hells to be whisked away by his gangly arms.

The Queen Of Warsaw Vs. Death in Boots

I wrote on the paper with a shaky hand, still listening to this dying woman’s breath behind the wall. My heart pounded in my chest. He was just down the hall by now and would in a few hours kick down her door, shut out the lights, and go to work on an old soul one more time. Into oblivion.

Piss on all the wasted years.
Two decades of dried blood
and mystery scars.
A million heartbeats
for nothing.
A hundred thousand drinks
of cold sweat and bleach
to stiffen the insides.
That rat bandit motherfucker,
Death.
Humanity’s outlaw.
You’ll never take me.
I walked backwards,
covered in battery acid
through the mine fields.
I won’t do it anymore.
Do your worst.