The seductress’ hands lightly ran their way across Charlie’s back. She rubbed him and then held him and told him to go sit down.
Charlie walked back to the table and sat down.
“Charlie!” Hardy threw a smile Charlie’s way that he had never seen before. It was big and childlike, unsettling to see on the face of what he knew to be such a serious man. “I’d like you to meet my new friend, Charlene.”
“We’ve met,” Charlie said. He reached out and shook Charlene’s hand. She had a mug in front of her too and Charlie could smell what it was filled with. The aroma was so strong now it was like two hands wrapped around his neck, slowly but surely growing tighter and tighter with each passing second.
The seductress told him she loved him. She was desperate now. She’d say anything. He didn’t mind. No one else would say it, so he might as well let her.
“Who feels like dancing?” Hardy asked, his attention turning back to Charlene. She laughed and began talking to him. Her words were jumbled to Charlie, same with Hardy’s who began having a conversation with the woman as if his friend weren’t there.
Charlie was an island watching them. They were boats disappearing in the distance, soon to be sucked up by the blue of the ocean while Charlie remained stagnant.
Her hands were around his neck now. They were soft enough that he knew she loved him and always would and tight enough to remind him of the fact that he was still breathing.
Everything about her felt good now. Thoughts of the kids, of his wife, of sobriety, of The News had melted away and drained to some back corner of his mind.
He only thought about her now and the way her skin would feel against his, the way it would feel to taste her just one more time — it would feel like flying.
“Put a smile on that face, Charlie.” Hardy was grinning toward his friend now. The smile was cut off from the edge of the flask being pushed forward and dangling in the air.
Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days. Eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours. Just over half a million minutes. The math was easy because he had done it so many times before. The growing numbers were as easy to rattle off as the distances on the liquor store map burned into the back of his skull.
“I have to go.” Charlie lifted himself from the table, a chore thanks to the seductress’ hands pulling him down as hard as she could. Even through her strength, he managed to lift himself and head to the front door.
Hardy yelled out a couple things, but his voice was as far off as the aroma left at the table.
When Charlie passed by the television, a man was rambling about freedom and how now that we know when we will all die, we can finally all truly live.
Charlie left the diner and entered the bitter morning cold with only the seductress to keep him company. She was closed off to him now, angry. She got like that sometimes. She followed him as he pushed himself to his car.
While he repeated his numbers to himself, she rattled off her own figures.
The gas station just before the highway is only a two-minute drive down the road.
The grocery store was a three-minute drive.
Hardy’s beloved liquor store was only four minutes away.
Candace and the kids were an hour drive down the pike, depending on traffic.
New York City
It had been bought for the grand view. Why else did anyone with money buy an apartment in the city? As a child, he’d gaze up in wonder at the never-ending buildings and find himself in awe at what man was capable of. When the realtor showed him the apartment he walked straight to the window overlooking the world of the city.
He wanted the view of man’s wonders to be the first thing he saw every morning and the last thing he saw every night. It made him feel like a kid again, made him hungry to touch the clouds with the tips of his mortal fingers.
Now he looked at the skyline he once loved and felt his stomach twist. What fools men are. Touching the skies with our silly buildings.
What once was practical proof of men’s limitlessness, of their ability to one day reach and control the heavens was now a haunting and ghastly sight.
The city was not a challenge to mortality or a loving portrait of everything humans had created and conquered; it was just sad proof of man’s drunkenness with itself.
Sober now, they all abandoned it. The ideas, the power, the hunger — they walked away from it all, like children walking away from playthings they have grown bored with.
It was a nightmarish vision now that inspired in him a hollowness he had never known in all his life.
I walk across the decaying flesh of my city. It is a shell of what once was. The air scratches at my lungs now and takes some getting used to. The colors of the buildings are faded and the ground is littered with the sins of those still walking these streets.
I can hardly keep my eyes open or breathe without coughing for the first few minutes outside. Everything is cloaked in a layer of smoke. I stop by a car missing its roof and lean against it, hoping to compose myself in some way. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing out here or where I’m going.
“Daddy.”
The squeaky voice comes from below and nearly knocks me over. I take a few steps back when my eyes notice what’s talking to me.
“Daddy,” she says again. She isn’t more than five years old. Her hair is crusted and pasted to her scalp and her arms are covered in blacks and browns. The only thing covering the rest of her is an oversized t-shirt that announces in bold red letters: “I LOVE NY!”
She pushes a hand toward me and I step back again. Her other hand carries a shapeless stuffed animal. It’s missing a head or an arm and is as crusty as her hair. As she moves closer, I notice one of her eyes is having trouble opening.
“Daddy.”
I continue moving away.
“Daddy.”
I turn, nearly falling to the ground again, and run. I run as fast as I can, my throat burning and sizzling from the quick and large intakes of air. I run until my lungs tell me to stop, until they force me into an alley where I’m coughing, unable to catch any sort of useful breaths.
The air cuts and stabs at my insides. It feels like I’m breathing in my own death.
I fall to the ground and stay there until I can stomach everything without feeling like my insides are digging their way out of me. I push myself up and do my best to walk, the girl’s voice still echoing in some distant corner of my mind.
I’d loved this city once like a mother. I could walk anywhere in her warm embrace, close my eyes and take in all that she was and feel close to something. Her sounds are different now, quieter, harsher. Everything is wrong.
The physical details are there, the familiar buildings and streets. My city has not been destroyed; it has been infected.
My city’s soul is on fire. What once were the busy sounds of culture and commerce are now the screams and moans of something dying, something crying out for help it knows deep down will never come.
I’d loved this city once. I’d loved it harder and longer than any person in life. She had been the purest form of life. It was the most civilized place in the world because it was where great things happened, human accomplishment and exchange mixed to create the wonderful melting pot of the world. This was where the progress of humans was measured.
Now I feel as foolish as the men trying to touch the heavens with their skylines. This place seems today to be no more than a concrete jungle created by man once upon a time to give structure to the animals.
The soul of the city, the wicked underbelly controlled by a glass facade for far too long seeps through the sewers and steams its way onto the streets.
My mother’s breath, the very air I’d once treasured and thrived off, is now sharper and slower. I am the last of my city. I am the last remaining remnant of its beating heart.
My feet become too heavy to move. I stand for what feels like an eternity and listen to everything dying. A scream echoes its way to me from som
e distant place. Two people scurry on the sidewalk next to me, their eyes far gone, strangers to reality.
I turn around to shuffle my way back until piercing eyes stops me. There’s no feeling like the animalistic shock to your spine when you know someone is watching you.
Twenty or so feet away lie the small burning beads and they are going right through me. So strong is their hold that my legs cramp and I feel frozen in time.
The eyes are the only thing still about the man as the rest of his body thrusts aggressively back and forth.
I look to the rest of him and see his hips pushing against something lifeless slumped over a fence.
Something spews out of me I didn’t know I had inside and I start running again, faster this time, until every muscle in my body is aflame and pushing at my skin. When I begin to slow down, the dying moans of my city are louder, coming from all directions, each banging against my skull like a separate nail and hammer.
When my eyes finally catch home, I sprint into it and push myself up the stairs, two at a time, my body and mind begging and pleading with me to collapse. My heart is ready to burst when I finally throw myself through my doorway and close the door behind me.
It feels like I sleep for days.
Tommy Langville lived three houses down from him until Tommy’s mother skipped town one night and left a note saying she wasn’t coming back. Tommy was sent to live with grandparents in the country after that.
Tommy had a fancy fiberglass bow and arrow he’d nabbed off one of his mother’s ex-boyfriends.
“Cost like a thousand bucks,” he would say, holding the camouflage colored tool in the air for the two boys to admire.
He would fixate on Tommy’s bow, slung across the young boy’s fat shoulder. It made even a chubby, soft looking creature like Tommy look tall and strong. Following him into the woods one day, he especially couldn’t keep his eyes off the thing. He fantasized about how good it would look in his own hands.
For a while, he watched Tommy shoot meekly at trees until they both grew bored of it and began moving through the woods again. He didn’t have the courage to ask Tommy for a chance to hold the thing. He wanted so badly to pull the tight string back and then to feel the powerful release of the arrow.
Tommy had already stopped when his friend bumped into his backside, nearly toppling over. He looked to where Tommy’s eyes were glued and saw a pigeon, hobbling across the ground, flapping a twisted and broken wing, trying again and again to take flight.
He watched Tommy look at the bird with curiosity. He knew what Tommy was thinking, but pretended he was too innocent and good inside to fully realize it.
When he saw Tommy place the arrow and pull back, the bow string sending an echoing screech into the air, he told himself to say something. When Tommy walked over to the bird to pull his arrow out of the creature’s wing, he told himself to say something again.
Again, and again, he told himself he was a good enough person to stop what was happening, even as he silently watched the bird cry out deathly sounds each time Tommy released his arrow and then went over to pull the thing out of the animal.
After the arrow had made its journey five times, Tommy turned to his friend, his eyes small and face more in control than ever before.
“Kill him,” Tommy said, his voice not peppered with a stutter like it usually was — something other children would incessantly tease the boy for.
He didn’t move at Tommy’s request, even when his bow and arrow wielding friend ordered him again.
His eyes had wandered back to the bird, splattered in various spots with small bits of red, its feathers looking haphazardly pasted on with glue. Even with both wings crooked and nearly gone, it still tried hopping off the ground. It still tried to do one of the only things it was meant to do in the world — fly.
When he felt his arm scrape against a rock on the ground and looked up to see the now menacing Tommy, his eyes fell again to his friend’s bow. He still admired it, its precision, its non-changing mechanical nature. The arrow in his friend’s hand was dripping blood and pasted with bits of feather.
Tommy said something, but he couldn’t hear it. He looked back to the bird. After feeling his friend’s foot land harshly against his ribs, he moved to his feet. Tommy pushed him and he began walking forward toward the hobbling bird. It never stopped moving. It never stopped trying to fly.
He could feel a wetness on his face, but he didn’t remember crying.
He got to his knees, hearing Tommy nearly screaming behind him. He reached his hands down. The bird’s beady eyes moving every which way, its legs staying still for the first time since they’d seen him. He felt it —
Consciousness crashes against me like a tidal wave. I throw myself to my feet and pace my way through my waking moments, waiting for the electricity shooting its way through my body to dissipate.
Why does it always happen like this? Why does every morning need to remind me I’m still alive by nearly fucking killing me?
It festered in him for days. It was a hunger that couldn’t be fed. He’d try to sleep, but it would only burrow deeper into his brain.
He’d once needed the city. He’d needed it for breath, for life, for wealth, for whatever fraction of happiness he’d exploited once upon a time. Now, it was clear as spring water that it needed him. His mother needed him. He couldn’t let her die like this. If he did, it would eat him from the inside out and he would disappear before she did.
She needed him now. She needed him desperately and he could feel his bones quiver at the thought of leaving her in her time of need.
He threw on the hoodie and the mask and grabbed what he needed and left the apartment. He moved down the hallway feeling more determined and righteous with every step. The typical sensory assaults of the building latched onto him, but they didn’t control him. Not today.
There was the screaming, the crunching, the moaning, the flickering lights. And the stench. The stench was fouler than it had ever been.
No more waiting, he told himself as he reached the building’s front door. No more waiting.
I walk the streets until the pasty grime and filth spewing from the air become a new layer of skin.
The blade scratches deeper against my side with each step.
My hands shiver. My teeth chatter. An iciness sails its way through me when I pass a large roughly painted sign that reads, “FREE ZONE.” I don’t know what it means so I keep walking.
I nearly pass a couple on the sidewalk before my stomach tightens and shrinks and forces me to take another look at them.
He moans as his insides swallow her. She massages him like clay and he moans even harder as she digs deeper and deeper, his face getting paler, but his audible sounds as alive as ever.
Her naked ass and hips thrust back and forth with animal energy, fiercer the deeper her hands crawl and the higher the red spills.
She’s salivating over everything before her eyes catch me. Her hands continue to move about and he continues to die in ecstasy, but her eyes stay on me, piercing me, telling me to move on. I look away and keep walking.
I hike by a girl screaming at the sky after that and two other folks trading fists before I reach an alleyway that calls me.
I slither my way just enough into its shadow and my hand finds its way to the knife. I lean against a brick wall and close my eyes, pulling the blade out of my waist band and putting it behind my back.
Each twirl of the knife in my hand makes my heart jump and the memories stronger. It’s like a fuel feeding a fire in me, a fire that will burn this new world to the ground if I let it.
“How ya doin’?” The man is big with broad shoulders, but his voice is small. He’s shaky, as is the skeleton of a human hanging on his arm. Her eyes flutter all over me. “I say, ‘how ya doin’?’” He moves in closer so I can smell and feel his decrepit breath stroll its way across my skin.
My grip around the knife tightens and my blood begins to simmer. I look at him and can�
�t help but smirk.
The two of them move into the alleyway and the man moves closer to me.
“You a clown? You got a mask like one. You dressed like one. You a clown?” He doesn’t see the blade behind me so I keep twirling it as I imagine its edge breaking into his pulsing neck. I watch his throat move while he speaks and the heat from my breath floods the cotton of the mask and dampens my face.
“Here’s how it work,” he says, his black eyes darting all around me. “I have fun with you and then she has fun with you.” He reaches behind his back and then presents a dull, rusting blade of no more than four inches. Mine’s a good six.
The girl is off him now, more into the shadows of the brick wall across from me. She still can’t seem to keep her eyes or hands in one place. She’ll be easy.
When the man’s knife moves closer, I reach out with my free hand and push against his chest as hard as I can.
He doesn’t move far back, but the shock of what just happened has him frozen, if only for a moment. His eyes are wide and then focused with rage.
I can hear his teeth grind before he launches himself at me with the knife. He’s slow and I expect it so I move enough to avoid his knife being put into my kidney.
I grab the man’s wrist with one hand and his neck with the other and throw him to the ground. His blade drops onto the pavement and I push it away before moving back to him.
I look down and see a completely different man than the one threatening me before. His eyes are on the far away hope of his dull blade as he crawls backward. I climb onto the man, my hand still twirling the knife and my heart more boiling than ever before.
I straddle him with my legs and he can’t move. As hard as he squirms and screams, he’s too small and weak and frantic. I think about pushing my knife into him. He’s big but soft and probably cuts like butter. I look over the blade and think better of it and return it to the back of my pants.
I don’t expect the first punch to be so hard. I put more weight behind it than maybe I should. There’s already blood on his face and swelling in his cheek. I throw two more punches with all my weight behind them and I’m already winded, ready to take a break, but unwilling to give my prey the satisfaction.
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