Tail

by Julian Duenker

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The door of the car slashed open with bangs of metal. All Susan heard was the base of the tearing and struggling metal hinges of the door alongside the heavy and exhausted breathing from her father. She placed him in the back seat of the car, angling his body in the most comfortable position possible. His lengthy knees had to be bent against the door. Once in the car she looked back checking on his breathing. He had calmed himself down from his icy and lonely mountain.

  His gaze was hooked onto the ceiling of the car avoiding any eye contact with his daughter. He was awake and fine, reeling himself in from his lack of breath. She thought to herself that the best thing for him was to bring him home and suffocate his quiet elbows with a lovely woolly blanket.

  There was a quiet layer of air that filled the car as she drove back to his house. The day had grown tired and lathered itself with the promises of Grey and her underappreciated shade. Evening, leaving the sun to say goodbye. The dashboard of the car was void of colour, leaving Susan to forcefully concentrate on the road. As she drove she blocked all of her thoughts from galloping out of her mouth. Her boots were too convoluted and dirty with patches of mud for them to entertain what had just happened back in the field.

  She stared out onto the road n oticing the grooves of the road slowly disappear into more cared for tarmac. As she watched she tasted something between her teeth and her right cheek. Moving her tongue around she munched and fleshed her skin trying to figure out what the taste was. She felt nothing, but yet tasted bitter lemon exposing itself across the inner drum of her cheek. She didn’t care that she was biting on the essence of nothing, but was rather thankful in fact, delighted that she had something to divert her focus.

  Kevin shuffled in the back of the car making ruffled sounds from his light brown jacket. “You know my first ever car was sort of like this one... well less modern and a few more bumps.” She was glad he was talking again. Looking back at him briefly through the rear view mirror proved that his recovery only required that of a comforting hold and warm grasp. She couldn’t deny the overt sense of drama about his collapse back on the field, but not taking it seriously was too scary an option.

  “One day I found a huge... relatively big problem in the steering of my car. No bother I said to myself, thinking I would get it fixed within a day.....there was a bar, a girl, I got drunk. The problem was I took my parents car that night to the pub because I was too afraid to drive my own.” He said with his neck plastered against the door. He saw the running orange sky across half of his vision as he threw his look up into the ceiling of the vehicle. Both of them knew that only Kevin needed to talk, it wasn’t a duet. So she listened draining her singing voice through the bitter taste in her cheek.

  “My baby sister had some sort of a problem that night, only three years old. She had to be brought to the hospital. I’m always afraid to think of how they felt before their car crash, worrying about their youngest child like that.” That was the first time Susan had ever heard of his sister. All the hilled responses that she had waded through that day didn’t make it too much of a reveal. She knew he was hiding something from her, and it was more of a relief to hear than anything else. She felt it bouncing between the skins of her knees with every word of his that painted the old torn picture.

  “The only car that was available was my blue bastard. They were unaware of the problem... I didn’t hear about what had happened to them until I got back home the next day. I went through an entire… fucking… night while they lay bleeding and heaving on the road across from me. Home was never the same for me again.”

  She knew from movies and the odd soap opera that she would have to say something comforting to ease his worries and aged problem. Perhaps, a pat on his stomach, a comforting string of generic words would ease his shivering lungs. The further she thought about helping him the more she locked her gaze onto the road and the sides of the car. It was silence that she had chosen for there was nothing of worth to say. The nothingness and filled gaps in the car between them was more comforting than a hug. It wasn’t a callous touch that ran her, but rather a shocked silence. Nothing would have made that moment any more palatable, not even stabbed syllables from experienced beards in the sky would have cleared the air.

  So all he did was project his memories across the ceiling of the car, while she threw her rolling thoughts into the front of the road. Don’t even get started on where her boots were left at. Their laces were so tangled they would have made their mother cry.

  “What was her name” Susan asked as she tightened her grasp around the steering wheel. He hunched in his spot curling his limbs to protect his chest as if from unruly fingernails scratching his ribs.

  “Susan... her name was Susan.” He said as he placed his hand on his chest partially relieving himself from something that was locked up behind his fleshy red rib cage.

  They both chewed on the silence from then on in the car. With his words she no longer felt that bitter taste within her cheek, leaving the legs of her mind to run rampant and kick down the lining of her skull. Her boots were not prepared for that as they placed whatever concentration they had left on the pedals. The car drifted along with the city and people.

  The lights had come on in the streets casting bluntly shaded yellows and reds across the silhouettes of all the people that walked past. Kevin closed his eyes to relax for the rest of the floaty and cloudy ride, Susan couldn’t help but look at the people that swam above the pavements.

  She couldn’t see them walking, only saw their upper bodies drift from one warm patch of concrete to the next. Filling her view with their faces she allowed her passive hands to drive the rest of the quiet way. Not much traffic, allowing her to lather her mind with all the people that flew past her window.

  One face, long nose, dripped in hair held itself up high as it passed from one corner of the reflected glass over to the end. Another face pulled back by a rope full of blonde hair tying all her worried wrinkles behind her head. She seemed tense, with a consistent hand held up high to her neck as if protecting her voice from falling out and landing all soggy in her palm. Her eyes reflected the street lights as she turned a corner. One more face torn and worn by old work and aged experience. Susan saw the cliffs of wrinkles and grooves slide off of the man’s face. He held a small box dripped with pink paint, a bow, inflicted by sparkles and colourful hooks straight for a child’s joyous eye. He walked with a smile hidden beneath his sharp skin.

  The more Susan drove the less she acknowledged her father in the back of the car. At that point he had entirely passed out, suffocating himself with the slight brushed beard that lay above his relieved lip. His breathing was paced, short and troubled, but relaxed and better than he was at the wall in the field.

  She leaned her head gently up against the window of the car, with two hands on the wheel she stopped the car at the lights. Enthralled by the luring flashing colours of the street she merged her view into the flex of the window. More people, so many people, flashing their nude faces along the streets. They were bare, stripped from masks and clothed facial gear. They threw their voyeuristic expressions across the pavements to all the people that brushed past.

  No children covered the ground, but lots of childish faces presented themselves. One walked out of a nearby deli, wrapping a wet face of drunken joy across their soft skin. She balanced herself on her sea legs, dancing uncontrollably from one wall to the next. Drunk early Susan thought to herself. She was dressed with homely comfort, lacking the usual nightly attire of emphasised skin. Her red hair shouted constantly, springing from her scalp with curly jumps as if prepared to leave her bald on the street. Susan could tell from her constant head grabs that she wasn’t ready to let her hair slip away just yet. The woman’s youthful knees made it seem strange that this woman would be afraid of losing her hair. She clearly didn’t care what anyone thought about with food stains running down her sweatpants.

  As Susan began to drive off once again she zoned in
on the folds that surrounded the woman’s eyes. She saw small tears of self-pitied pink dig their way into her young skin around her eyelashes. It was a sore sight to see, with hints of pain from the woman reflecting back to Susan. She didn’t like pink, quickly wiping it away with a different view in favour of something that tasted a bit more baby blue.

  She drove into a more housed area, with TV lights burning through the curtains of all of their sitting rooms. The familiar roads drove them both home. With the house in sight it was the only building that didn’t have any lights on. It was quiet allowing the slow and sleepy brushing of the trees and plants to bring some noise to the table. But neither of them heard the tranquil murmurs of the plants.

  Susan parked her car. Carrying his half-awake self-inside she wrapped her hand around his waist, making sure that she saw her fingers on the other side of his coat. What happened next? Well the front door opened and they wouldn’t speak another word to each other for the next couple of days. She was surprised that she wasn’t angry with him. The most important emotion she took away from it was a sense of clarity, fucking draining though.

  The kitchen was dark, tiring its own eyes out trying to see the silhouetted people that entered its domain. With a quick flick of a warm yellow light, the kitchen’s worries of intruders dissipated, leaving it to relax with all the happy shadows that cast across the floor.

  She helped him up the stairs, dragging each of their bodies from a low centre of gravity. In front of her, in front of them, his room was left wide open.

  Turning a small side lamp on, she rested him along the bed, making sure that his head hit the pillow with a soft punch. He had drowned himself to sleep, too tired to acknowledge anyone or anything that resembled anyone.

  It was one of those strange moments whereby Susan forgot to think. She just stood there over him lost, not in thought, but in movement. Enveloped in her own reflection of what had just happened, her brain had rejected and ejected everything, overheated. In doing so, she looked like a shitty ghost hovering above their victim not knowing what to do.

  With a considerable amount of time having passed, Susan picked her loose gaze from the blanket and walked out of the door, closing it.