Maria Clemm's Narrow: A Narrative Fiction

Waking up with the smell of booze still oozing from my breath I climb out of bed and every breath I take is like a sharp knife in my dry throat. With shaky hands so bad, I’m almost vibrating, my hand grips the dirty glass of what’s left of last night’s whiskey. Gulping down the lava-like liquid I start to choke, quickly trying to spit out what I haven’t already swallowed. After the whiskey comes back up I find an unwanted friend coming along. Below my bare, cracked feet I felt the grimy carpet thinning as the whiskey with drops of blood fall from the corners of my mouth. I wipe my mouth and pull on an old tight pair of pants, hopping into the gray-ish brown bathroom. Fixing the collar of my ink-black shirt I use my free, pale, shaky hand to wipe the scum off the mirror hanging onto the wall as if below were hungry sharks. After I seem to be decently presentable, I trudge my way to Maria Clemm, the mother of my recently deceased love. “Good morning Mrs. Clemm, how are you?” my croaky voice barely able to call out. “It’s the afternoon Edgar, but I am just fine. How are you?” Maria answers monotone without looking up from folding laundry.

Though there will always be something missing for the other side. Poe thought he was helping himself cope after the death of Virginia, his young wife, but others thought of him only as a drunk man with problems. Other’s assumptions on how Poe died relates to how much he drank and how he acted, the depressing and eerie poems and stories Poe wrote deeply reflected his own life. For many alcoholics, alcohol dependence is their coping mechanism and the drink itself is their friend. Isolation issues and depression are often linked to alcoholism and Poe had his reasons to drink, the dependence on it was Poe feeling as if he wasn’t fully alone especially after the deaths around him. Poe was blinded as to how much he was hurting himself and maybe the others around him by his