Mrs. Crowley threw down the bag of pills and balled her hands into fists. “You should just shut up and be happy. Stop fucking whining. Please. And where the hell is my goddamn car?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s been stolen, repo’d, sold to a chop shop. How the hell should I know?”
“Because you were the last one to have it!”
Bonnie peeked from underneath the bed and scampered through Mark’s open door into the living room.
“Samantha issued a restraining order on me.”
“What? Why? What did you do to her?”
“She’s a bitch, Mom. She wouldn’t leave me alone about having sex with her. I think it was just spiteful revenge because I wouldn’t sleep with her again. And I’m paying for it.”
“Are you crazy, Mark? You and Samantha have been like two peas in a pod since elementary school. A restraining order? A judge must have believed something was happening to issue that. And why didn’t you tell us? Do we need to adjust your meds?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mom. Me and Samantha are … complicated.”
“Well, you get points for being a cliché.”
“You know what? Go fuck yourself, Mom.”
Mrs. Crowley headed for the door. “Nice. Great language. I want my car back in the garage before you go to bed tonight.”
As she closed the door, Bonnie squeaked back into the room and jumped into his lap. He used the input function on the remote to switch his Xbox to cable. He flipped through the channels until he came to MTV2. He tilted his head as he watched a video from a band he had never heard of before. They reminded him of a more melodic Tool, and the vocalist sang about stripping someone’s soul. He pressed Input again, switching to the DVD signal. Without further manipulation, he heard the DVD player whirl to life, and images appeared on-screen.
He flexed his hip to knock Bonnie from his lap and then unzipped his pants. As the woman moaned in pleasure, he grabbed himself in an attempt to feel any sort of arousal. Nothing. Lifeless. When the actors were done with their melodramatic scenario, they returned to a fake dinner party, where it appeared other characters in this fabricated orgy were about to get their turn at some fun. Mark stopped touching his limp self and chuckled embarrassingly at the losers forced to recite this god-awful dialogue.
Bored with the calculated sex on his television, he stood and walked toward his desk. Mark’s foot kicked a shoebox sticking out from underneath his bed. The box skidded across his floor and stopped just shy of his stereo. Bonnie lifted her head, whimpered, and nuzzled down for a nap on his pillow.
Mark bent and picked up the shoebox. A layer of soot decorated the cover. He brushed away the ashes and rubbed the residue on his jeans before opening the box. He was forced to sit on his bed as he studied the first few layers of photographs.
Not yet. Just not ready yet. He reached for the Mogadon, the antidepressants, and the Ziploc bag of candy pills. He siphoned through each bottle and the bag, collecting a conglomerate of varieties before swallowing them in multiple gulps. Now I’m ready.
Mark pinched a photo of himself as a boy and brought it to eye level. He rode his first bicycle, his maiden voyage without training wheels. And he looked miserable. No smile. No excitement. No joy of accomplishment. Void of emotion, even then.
His hand covered his closed mouth in lightning speed as he picked the next photo to inspect. The image displayed him and Samantha as toddlers on the shoreline of the Jupiter Island lake, frozen in a sloppy kiss forever. Mark could see the Novaks in the foreground, laughing as their two-year-old daughter planted a big juicy one on the Crowleys’ son. How adorable. But that’s how they had met. That kiss, fifteen years ago, was the start of their friendship … and the trouble.
Mark sifted deeper into the offset pile of photographs until he found one that injected a little bit of life into his heart. The picture portrayed Samantha, the summer between eighth grade and high school, holding her hat as the wind tried to pry it from her hands. Mark had taken that photo, and it was the pinnacle moment of his love for her. He studied the bottom of the photo where the water lapped the shore and counted the waves. One. Two. Three. Three ripples broke on the shoreline at Samantha’s ankles as she tightly held her hat, and her hair was like a flag in the wind. Her mouth was captured in midspeech. She was saying something to Mark when he had snapped the photo, but he couldn’t hear her. Even in the picture it was obvious she was trying to convey something. Was it a mouthed I love you?
In the next photo he commandeered from the box, Samantha had turned away from him. He studied the top corner of the picture as Bonnie slithered into his lap, hoping for a petting. He ran his finger across the photographed sun. The picture seemed to depict noontime, but the sun was black in the photo.
He subconsciously petted Bonnie, and, when he leaned his face closer to study the black sun, the cat arched her back and hissed at the shoebox. The sound snapped him from his trance, and he placed the box in his lap.
Rummaging urgently through the rest of the photos, he noticed they all contained images of happier times, of more innocent times. The pictures of him and Samantha growing up together through the years showed a happy, smiling Mark. The other, strictly family photos showed otherwise.
He flipped the shoebox onto the floor, spilling the contents. He frantically separated the pictures into two piles: one having anything to do with Samantha and one being just family photographs of him and his parents.
Mark leaned over and opened his nightstand drawer. He located a pair of scissors and a lighter. Focusing on the Samantha pile, he cut out her face from every photo she was in. Picture by picture, he discarded photos with almost perfect circular holes where her face had been. Next to him was a rounded pile, like poker chips, of Samantha donning every emotion possible throughout the years.
Mark only stopped to chomp on a handful of mystery pills from the Ziploc before continuing to desecrate his childhood memories of the only girl he had ever loved.
“I will forget you eventually,” he said, maneuvering the scissors around her head in yet another happy photo. “I know that I will. It might take a thousand years. It might take one week. I’ll even forget the sound of your name …”
Mark wiped the first glimmer of a tear in a long, long while from the corner of his eye as he mutilated the last of the photos containing Samantha’s image.
“… or the way you look when you’re sleeping and dreaming of something more.”
Mark collected all the discarded yet intact photos, the desecrated photos, and the circular cutouts of Samantha’s face, and returned them to the shoebox. He reached for his lighter and lit the corner of the cardboard. Dropping the box onto the hardwood floor, he watched the shoebox and the memories inside burn; the heat from the flames stabbed his cheeks, as if begging and pleading to be saved.
He stomped out the last of the flickering flames, ash ballooning upward into his face and clinging to the curtains. After he was satisfied the fire was extinguished, he tossed the remnants of the shoebox into the trashcan next to his Xbox and crawled under his bedcovers to drown in his torpor.
Bonnie snuggled under the sheets as Mark wrapped an arm around the fuzzy cat. His last thought before he drifted to sleep was, I wish I was a little bit more sentimental.
Mark awoke to the sound of diminishing piano notes again. He glanced at the digital clock atop his television and pressed his palm against his temple to ease the throbbing inside his brain. He hadn’t been asleep long, but the sun had begun its descent on Golders Green. The piano notes reversed and climbed up the scale.
“Bonnie,” Mark whispered with aggravation.
He opened the door and grabbed the cat off the keys.
“Why must you insist on waking me up with your terrible Stevie Wonder impression, huh?”
Bonnie meowed and licked his cheek.
“Mom? Dad?” Mark listened for a reply. Nothing. The house was still. “Mom?” Still nothing.
He placed Bonnie on the floo
r and looked through the parlor windows. His dad’s car was not in the driveway.
“Looks like it’s just you and me,” he said to the cat.
Mark lifted his mattress and removed the bags of LSD and pre-rolled marijuana. He threw the bags on the bed and released the mattress; it whomped onto the box spring. He picked a joint and an LSD tab, and then retrieved the Ziploc of treats from his pocket. After studying the remaining pills in the baggie, he chose an orange and purple one he hadn’t tried yet. He swallowed the pill dry and sublingually ingested the LSD blotter. Lighting the joint, he sat on his bed and inhaled three quick puffs as Bonnie jumped into his lap. He exhaled in pleasure, as if he had just drunk a large glass of water during a heat wave.
“You wanna go to Alton Towers with me, girl? I can’t deal with all this boredom.”
The cat didn’t look at him.
“Nah, I guess not. I think the mall is pretty fucking lame too.” He took another hit of the joint. “But I wanna see if Samantha is working today.”
Bonnie slid off his lap as he stood. He entered his parents’ bedroom and opened their walk-in closet. Using a stepstool, he opened his dad’s shoe cabinet and pulled down the gun safe.
“Stupid fucker left the key in the lock.”
Mark turned the latch, and the cover popped open. He holstered his dad’s pistol under his belt at the small of his back and returned the safe to its spot in the cabinet.
“I’ll be back, Bonnie. Don’t wait up for me,” he yelled across the living room as he closed the front door behind him.
The LSD trip started the moment Mark grabbed the glass doors of Alton Towers’ main entrance. The people bustling around inside the mall swirled together, and the colors of the storefronts collided and merged with violence. He steadied himself and fought to control his equilibrium. Once the initial phase passed, he stepped inside Alton Towers Mall.
He patted the bulge of his shirt’s backside to make sure the weapon was still there. His shoulder bumped into another shopper.
“Uh, sorry,” he slurred.
The shopper continued walking, seemingly unfazed by the collision or returning any sort of apology.
“Fucker,” Mark whispered and lost his balance.
He entered Metanoia Books and absentmindedly shuffled through the aisles. He stopped and touched the front cover of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park. Scanning the aisle for any spying employee, he quickly stuffed the paperback into the front of his pants and headed out the door. What’s the point of money anyway? he thought as he adjusted his belt to maintain the weight of both the weapon and the stolen novel.
Mark shambled toward Samantha’s workplace and sat down on a bench directly in front of Baldock & Ashford. He removed Lunar Park from his waistband and surveyed the clothing shop’s interior through the large storefront windows. After flipping through the novel, he hiccupped and tossed the paperback into the trashcan next to the bench. Returning his attention to inventorying which employees were currently working, he unholstered the gun from the back of his pants.
The passersby didn’t seem to notice the black firearm in Mark’s lap. Or, if they did, they didn’t seem alarmed. He counted six female employees but no sign of Samantha. He fondled the trigger guard and noticed his palms had become sweaty. He thought about saving the paperback from the trashcan to have something to read while he killed time waiting.
Mark bent over and reached into the wastebasket just as black spots invaded his peripheral vision and the world shifted on its axis. He closed his eyes and prepared for the inevitable fainting spell.
When he regained consciousness, he realized he had slumped forward in a manner where the gun had been hidden, tucked between his stomach and thighs. He stiffened his body to help exterminate any residual dizziness from passing out.
Still no Samantha.
He sighed in defeat, secured the pistol into his pants again, and exited Alton Towers, leaving the shoplifted novel in the trash.
“Dawson!” Mark almost stumbled over the railroad ties again as he crossed the tracks toward his mother’s car. “Dawson!”
“Calm down. I’m right here,” Dawson answered, materializing.
Mark removed the firearm and tossed it to the ground.
“What the hell is that?”
“My dad’s gun. I just came from Alton Towers.”
“You went to see if Samantha was working, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re such a shithead. You were rejected by her, then she issued a restraining order—a lawful order to stay away from her— and you keep going back for more. Are you trying to ruin your future?”
“I never wanna be old, and I surely don’t want any kids.”
“Why? Because you think all your troubles are the result of bad parenting? You can’t blame your parents anymore, dude.”
“Well, that’s no fun. Who can I blame then? The pills?”
Another dizzy spell overcame Mark as the LSD took full effect; the sky seemed to move sideways, and he tried frantically to stop the moon from touching his shoulder.
“You can blame the fucking drugs you seem to be on right now.”
“Oh, don’t go all Goody-Two-Shoes on me, Dawson, now that you’re all dead and clean. When you were alive, you were a junkie, and you knew it.”
Mark pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and tapped the screen.
“What are you doing?”
“Deleting Samantha from my life—text messages, emails, unfriending her on all my social media accounts. Sucks that a friendship with the history we had ended this way.”
“You did it to yourself, bro.”
“Don’t I always?”
Dawson smirked and shrugged.
A twig snapped behind them.
“Was that meant for me?” Samantha asked, pointing at the discarded gun.
“Sam! What—what are you doing out here?” Mark asked, taking a step forward.
“I was waiting for you to come back so we could talk.”
“Come back? How did you know I was coming back? How long have you been waiting?”
“Dawson told me that you always visit him out here. It was just a matter of time. Again, was that meant for me?”
“Nah, babe. I was just gonna fire some rounds into the trees. Bored. Ya know.”
“Dawson explained everything to me.”
Mark glared at his friend. “Oh, yeah? What did Dawson explain exactly?”
“Follow me. I think you are suffering from short-term memory loss.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Fuck you, Sam.”
Mark didn’t move. When a few moments passed, and Samantha realized he wasn’t going to do what she had asked, she lunged for the gun.
“Okay, okay! I’ll follow you.”
She turned and headed toward the derailed train. When they reached the locomotive, she slid aside one of the entry doors.
“I know this is where you keep your stash.”
Mark remained silent.
She entered the train’s cabin. “And other things.”
“Sam, don’t. Don’t go in there,” he pleaded.
“I already have, Mark. I want to see your face when you see what they look like now.”
He swallowed hard and stepped into the train. The putrid smell was overpowering. He gasped and placed a hand over his mouth to prevent bile from rising in his throat.
“How can the smell not bother you?”
Samantha slid open the divider door between the two cabins and pointed into the darkness. “There. Look.”
“Sam, I know what’s in there. I put them in there myself.”
She shoved him into the darkened cabin, and he stumbled over his mother’s darkened and decomposing foot.
“Fucking look at them! Those are your parents! You did this— to your parents!”
Mark shook his head. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t mean it.”
> He rummaged through his sweatshirt pocket for the bag of pills. His fingers found the tranquilizers, and he removed the bottle. Samantha slapped the bottle from his hand; it rolled across the train’s floorboards and came to a stop against his dad’s burnt earlobe.
“How long have they been out here?” she asked.
“I don’t remember. Dawson could tell you. Time seems to move differently for me when I’m on the meds.”
“And Bonnie? You had to fucking kill your cat too? Mark, you are some monster.”
He allowed his gaze to move to the pile of lifeless fur by his mother’s torched right arm.
“When did you burn them? Before or after you killed them?”
“After. I killed them at the house and burnt them here. I did a good job covering my tracks. But they don’t seem to know they’re dead. I had a fight with my mother about her car this morning. And Bonnie and I have been snuggling all morning too.”
“Are you sure it’s not just the meds? Or all the drugs? Or your twisted little brain?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe. How do I know you’re really here? How do I know that any of this”—he fanned his arm across the space above his parents—“isn’t a hallucination?”
“Because I’m here, and I know I’m real.”
“Is that what you think? Are you completely sure about that?”
“Excuse me?” she asked with an attitude, cocking her head.
Mark grabbed Samantha by the forearm and dragged her from the train, closing the door of his parents’ train-tomb. Not releasing his grip, he stopped and grabbed the balled-up restraining order from a pile of leaves and opened it, smoothing the crinkles.
“In the end, this yellow piece of paper did you no good,” he spat.
Samantha tried to take a step backward and free herself from his vise grip. Mark clenched her arm tighter.
A Haunting of Words Page 2