All in Fiction
“I haven’t seen the doctor in two years,” the voice says again, making me flinch. “I’m worried about what the doctor will find.” The spoon falls into the bowl. The heap of oatmeal looks bloated and sickly. The malignant cells in the raisins have undoubtedly metastasized.
The light thickened into blood that pooled at my feet in a methodical flood, and there were things in the blood, nameless shapes that bobbed just beneath the surface. I stumbled backwards, slipped, fell three steps, and grasped onto the banister. Then I turned and hobbled after my friends, my own panicked breath not loud enough to diminish the sound of blood dripping behind me.
I plunk my keys onto the entryway hook, noticing the stack of newspapers I have been collecting for the last few weeks have disappeared. “Me scare the hell outta you?” I ask, clicking the door closed behind me. “You’re in my apartment.”
It wasn’t long before Harold was predicating. Speaking in short sentences, Harold confirmed what his preliminary remarks had foreshadowed. “This kibble’s stale.” “My water’s warm.” “Lower taxes trickle down.”
The man met her gaze with rheumy eyes that welled with fresh tears. Justine felt her own throat tighten as she spoke in hurried, hushed tones. “My mother’s an invalid. We can’t travel. But you and your family could still book a flight, or just get in your car and drive. Get as far away as you can before it happens.”
Another. You’ll be just another in the crowd, fingertips pressed to the window pane and you’ll step inside our shop, buy cards and absinthe and oils, and I’ll keep twirling, pour fake tea from kettle, I’ll perform for you--blonde skulled and tiny. Quiet my throat. Pink lace gripped at my little wrists like teeth.
I start to walk away, but I pause, trying to convince myself that we haven’t just crossed a line. Alone time without Juno’s consent is forbidden. We are restricted from socializing outside the jurisdiction of our appointed duties.
I always get a little nervous when I’m asked to help somebody move. You learn things about people. Unless they box up every single little thing (and who does that?), you get little unguarded glimpses into their lives when you’re in amongst people’s stuff.
I feel the draft from the hallway. I hear the scrape and clap of her pumps. Then she’s turning on the lights. She looks at the bottle of Burrowing Owl breathing on the kitchen table and nods. Her hands slide across her stomach. She looks down at me with the same expression every week: one part surprise that I’m actually there, one part a strong desire to laugh out loud.
You glance around at the same place that held birthdays, barbeques, movie nights. The memories burst from their unmarked graves at the back of your mind. They form a pool behind your eyes, congealing into bitter teardrops that are on the verge of falling. You blink them away, making it all nothing but a few wet spots on your sleeve before slouching to your room and locking the door.
The blood rushes in and out of my cheeks, a turbulent tide. I’m afraid of tomorrow. And every day after. I don’t close the door right away when you leave. I watch you pick a dandelion from the sidewalk and study it curiously. As if you’ve never witnessed an identity crisis before. I think you’re going to make a wish—hope that you do—hope that it’s about me—but instead you stick it under the windshield wiper of a stranger’s car before calling a Lyft. I watch the sun rise behind the vacation homes and it’s so painfully ordinary in comparison.
He asks me why my hand is on his shoulder. Um, well I don’t know, I respond. He takes my hand from his shoulder and holds it. He examines my hand, as if he has never seen it before. I wonder if he’ll do the same to my eyes, just like he used to when we’d spend our time alone. If I could, I’d faint.
I have no control over my mouth as it yells and shouts. All I want him to do is hear. To wake up and listen.
My glass house is shattering and the little girl in a blue dress runs out chasing a rabbit.
I am the girl. She is the rabbit. But I run circles around her
and I cannot pause.
Every few rotations of the bicycle’s pedals, the front gear clicks and the chain jumps a link. Slow drums fill your head as you roll down the asphalt hill. Soon you’re rapping along. I just wanna race the Lambo’. Let’s roll the dice and gamble. Concentrate on the scarred concrete in front of you, be sure to dodge the cracks and potholes; to fall into one, you’ve decided, is to tumble into and beneath the earth’s crust, through the mantle, and melt into the core.
I was almost certain that the neighbor was a serial killer. The small doubt came from the fact that we both watched Game 6 of the 2011 World Series together – the same night the neighbor’s television broke – and got along famously. That doubt was erased, when, on that same night, I was bludgeoned to death with a remote right as David Freese hit that game-winning home run in the bottom of the 11th inning.
This is my chance. I place my blazer over her shoulders. At the end of the song, I let her wear it back to her seat. When all eyes have returned to me, no one notices her take eight metal rods, a roll of duct tape, and some wire cutters (all smuggled into the prison inside a specially made electric guitar) from the pockets and hide them in various parts of her tracksuit.
The heat drove people to unprecedented candor that year. This was around the same era that I pinched the skinny flesh around my humerus, the preoccupation with being infatuated acting as my food. The short-lived inspiration and admiration bloomed in my stomach where favorite snacks used to live. I ate starvation because I couldn’t digest anything but my many romantic fixations.
The effect of the owner’s possibly slightly sarcastic response was not lost on Retribution’s face. He spent a moment collecting himself and then said, “I’m here to tell you a little bit about myself. Now, I can either do so verbally or another option is I can provide you with a pamphlet detailing the relevant information.”
She feels as though she has been at this camp for a year instead of a month. Each day owns its unswerving, inevitable routine, like the sandy desert tides. She’s certain now that her schooling is a diversion, that less than a kilometer away, these boys are being prepared to shoot rifles, perhaps even missiles. Maybe she can save one or two lives.
This was different from his initial story to the cops. He told them he had heard someone shout “gun!” He’d turned to the woman behind him, who only a moment ago had asked where in the mall the women’s shoe store was, as if that were something a guy like him would know. “Gun,” he hissed to her, afraid his voice would alert the shooter. Then panic: “Gun!”
But in the later tellings of what he alone called the Galleria Mall Shooting he definitely heard the shot as he was shopping for new headphones. A blast that’d make you taste foil.