Midnight at the Bowling Alley

by Roman Theodore Brandt

  “I don't want to go back in right now,” I tell him. “I'm staying out here for a while.”

  He sighs against the back of my neck. “I'm sorry,” he says, this time almost to himself.

  I close my eyes and imagine myself anywhere else. It's probably still midnight at the bowling alley, and all I want to do is scream. I want to scream until my throat bleeds.

  “Just leave me alone for a while,” I tell him. That really sets him off, and he grabs my arm and spins me around to face him. His eyes are huge.

  “I've been leaving you alone the whole time!” he says, and he's almost yelling now. “You wandered off by yourself, and my mom thinks you're high!”

  “Your mom is a bitch,” I tell him.

  He looks like he wants to kill me, now. He yanks me toward him, and I feel an ominous crackling in my shoulder. My heart starts pounding in my ears, flooding the inside of my head with white noise and pulsing blood. I squeeze my eyes shut, my veins cold, but he just shoves me away and then turns to go back inside. Once I know he can’t see me, I’m on the ground, puking up my nachos. They don’t even have a taste coming back up.

  Eventually, I'm able to stand up again, weak and unsteady. My shoulder is throbbing. I see Jake standing just past the corner of the building with another rolling trash can, and he’s watching me. “Sorry about the mess,” I call to him, and he smiles and looks away, shoving the trash can the rest of the way to the dumpster. I can’t stop shaking, so I start walking away from the building to find the road, but there’s no road.

  I stare out at the parking lot and notice for the first time how big it is. Some of the more distant lights are burnt out, but it looks like the pavement never ends.

  I stop walking, and I can hear Jake dumping the trash can into the dumpster beside the building, and just as suddenly as I had a plan to get out of here, I realize that I’ll never leave. This parking lot doesn't end, I tell myself, looking out at it. As I'm looking, one of the lights goes out.

  Just then, I hear the door swing open behind me, and I turn to see Zeke coming out. He's calm now, and he says, “Let's get out of here.”

  “There’s no way out,” Jake says from the dumpster. He starts to roll the trash can back toward the entrance.

  I'm on my way over to the car, and Zeke turns the key in the ignition, illuminating the parking lot with headlights, the sounds of our car engine echoing into the night.

  “Everyone stays,” Jake calls to us before I close the car door behind me.

  “Fucking freak,” Zeke mumbles, and he slams the car into gear. “Fucking zombie,” he says. We're flying across the parking lot in the car, now, only the parking lot is still going. I look back and see the “Bowling Alley” sign flicker out behind us as the car bounces over potholes and cracks in the pavement, and then all the lights behind us start going out a row at a time. My heart pounding again, I turn to look ahead of us. Distant rows of parking lot lights are lighting up as we approach. My brain is working, sorting, setting aside memories, trying to figure out why this is familiar. Inside my head, I see the moments before we arrived at the bowling alley, like shimmering nightmares. I can hear a train, and my hand is wet from dandelion juice. Everything survives, I think to myself, and I open my eyes to see the parking lot flying past my window.

  The lights are like ghosts appearing on the horizon ahead. They light up in rows and rows and clusters and I look over at Zeke. He's watching them, too. Then, far in the distance, in the deep dark beyond the lights, we can see a sign flickering to life. “Bowling Alley,” it says.

  Zeke slams his foot down on the brake pedal to avoid hitting the brick wall of the building and the car skids, spinning and sliding toward the building. The tires scream and the radio crackles to life and dies again. All of our pens and napkins and fast food cups are thrown forward and sideways and against the windows. The car rolls to a stop and sits shuddering, the worn out wiper blades scratching the windshield. We sit for a minute or so with the wipers fighting against invisible rain, and then Zeke turns them off. “Fucking car,” he says.

  Outside the car, the world is silent as the rest of the lights come on row by row around the bowling alley. I can hear Jake's words in my head. There’s no way out of here.

  “What’s going on here?” Zeke wants to know, his voice high-pitched, but he's not asking me.

  *

  “It just went right back to the bowling alley, Mom,” Zeke is telling Elaine, and I close my eyes, wishing she would stop making him explain it.

  “Zeke, darling, you must have gotten turned around.” She puts a hand on his forehead, and he smacks it away. “Your forehead is hot,” she says.

  “I'm fine,” he tells her.

  “Your forehead is hot,” she says again, lowering her voice. She looks at me accusingly and then back at Zeke. “Have you been doing drugs?” she asks him.

  “Doing drugs? DOING DRUGS?” Zeke is yelling now, and she's trying to shush him.

  I look over at the snack bar, and I can see Jake wiping up some invisible mess again. He looks up and says, “You can’t get out once you’re here.”

  Everyone looks at him, and Elaine says, “Excuse me?” She picks up her purse and storms over to the counter. “Are you threatening us? I'll have you know that I carry mace in my purse.” She slams her purse down on the counter beside him and starts to fumble around inside it for something. “I will mace you,” she says calmly.

  “No one can leave,” he says. “I've been here a long time, just me.” His eyes are distant now. “Maybe longer than any of you've been alive.”

  Elaine stops moving and looks up at him. She almost laughs, and then she moves away from him. “I doubt that,” she says, but she doesn't actually want to talk to him anymore.

  Man, my head hurts. I see flashes of light, like the beginnings of a migraine. Then I see my hands in front of me, bloody and bent the wrong way against the airbag. I can hear the blaring train horn and the explosion of steel and glass and iron like they’re far away, like some mix tape of accident sounds played on low volume. The whole car is shaking around us, and in my head is a high-pitched ringing. Everything survives, I tell myself. Even when a train hits your car, you can survive.

  “Zeke,” I say, reaching out for him, and he's coughing beside me with the train pushing in on his side of the car, blood running out of his mouth like a waterfall and pooling on the way down his shirt. We've got glass in our skin, and the world muffled and quiet. Then, suddenly all the noise crashes in on me like a wave coming to shore, rushing over my ears. The train is screaming, the car alarm is blaring, and under it all is the sound of Zeke bleeding out. The car bounces over the railroad and plunges down the embankment to the ditch beside the tracks, with the sound of the train wheels click-clacking slower and slower, sending sparks into the night. The front of the car smashes into the ground, sending all of our fast food sacks and plastic cups forward to litter the dashboard and slamming my body into the seatbelt. I can see the first drops of blood on the windshield from Zeke’s mouth. I'm screaming, now.

  In my head are flashes of light and pounding arteries. The train is stopped now, and I can hear voices outside. Zeke is gargling blood and he's trying to push the seat belt release button, because there's fire in the back of the car. Then, I’m back at the bowling alley, staring at Zeke’s family, and the silence is painful.

  “We're dead,” I say aloud, and everyone looks at me.

  “You’re a drug addict!” Elaine yells, and she starts to freak out, gasping and searching in her purse until she finds a pill bottle. “You ruined my son,” she tells me. I watch her dump some pills into her mouth.

  Jake stops wiping the counter and sighs. “Sure wish I could leave this place,” he says quietly.

  “I have a life to live!” Elaine yells at him, the veins popping out in her neck, and her voice is muffled in my head. “This is my birthday!” She tells him.

  “Lady, if you had a life to live, you wouldn't be here,” Jake says.
<
br />   Elaine is really losing her shit. She's all over the place, tears and hysterics. “You're telling me,” she wants to know, her voice cracking. “You're telling me we all died at the same time. Some kind of coincidence.” She looks around at us with mascara running down her cheeks. Snaps her fingers in the air. “Just like that,” she says.

  Jack shrugs and says, “I don't know the specifics.”

  Her eyes are getting really big. “I am not dead, god damn it!” She's screaming with her face wet from tears, and she’s clutching her purse. “I am not dead! This is my birthday!”

  *

  Outside, our car is a mess of scorched sheet metal, distorted and hollow and dark, save for one lonely headlight beam.

  The door panels are hissing, and the last sizzling headlight bulb pops and goes out. I came out here to be alone, and I'm definitely alone. I've never been so alone in my life.

  Behind me, I can hear the door to the bowling alley opening.

  “Come inside,” Zeke says.

  “Go away,” I tell him, and the door shuts again, but not before I hear Elaine asking if I'm just going to stand out here like an idiot.

  I don't suppose it matters if I never leave this place. It doesn't matter what I feel or who I am or what I've done anymore. I close my eyes and the world fades away except for the humming of the parking lot lights overhead. Row by row, I can hear them going out, and when I open my eyes, the last row flickers and dies, turning the parking lot into a silent void. In the neon light from the Bowling Alley sign, the car looks normal again.

  There's no moon out here anymore, and the world is a deep, dark absence of matter. It's like being inside some huge, dark room, like a sound stage or something. It's like a field trip I went on as a kid, with my voice loud against the invisible walls. There’s no breeze or ambient noise, just empty space.

  Suddenly, the “Bowling Alley” sign starts to flicker, then it goes out completely, and I'm standing in total blackness except for the light from the doors to the inside of the bowling alley.

  I know I'm never leaving. I'm stuck here with these miserable people, now. I think of Elaine and her witty comments about me, Zane with his dick inside me, Zeke laughing at me, and I realize that I'm somehow still the villain because I ruined Elaine’s dream of Zeke being a normal person. The world disassembles without a sound. There's nothing now but the rumbling in my stomach and the pounding in my head.

  The door opens again, but this time it's Jake. “Come on inside,” he says. “Nothing out here anymore.”

  He holds the door open for me, and I push past him into the buzzing florescent glow of the vestibule and then I realize I’ve got my fist clenched. I open it up and see the smashed, wet remains of a dandelion.

  Table Of Contents

  ****

  About The Author

  Roman is not my legal name, but it's the name I've chosen to call myself because it sounds much more interesting than my real name. I was born nearly thirty years ago in the Midwestern frontier. I am an indie author, which makes me part of a very large group of authors who write independently of traditional publication. I have a lot of respect for authors who are able to publish traditionally, because it's a difficult business to break into that way. It takes a great deal of talent and determination.

  That being said, I believe that I am also among some of the most beautiful and innovative minds of my generation just by being an author, and especially by doing so independently. If you are an indie author, kudos to you. You are doing something most people assume is impossible.

  Midnight at the Bowling Alley is dedicated to my mother, Janet Sue Arnold.

  Also by Roman Theodore Brandt:

  Drive

  Ghosts

  Michael

  Country Roads are Why I Moved Away

  Table of Contents