Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “It’s not your fault, Cara. You don’t have to do this. I don’t need the money. Please, come home.”

  “I—,” I began, my voice hitching. My mouth flapped open and closed of its own accord, and my throat swelled enough to make sounds difficult. I think I squeaked. Don’t fucking cry, you shit. Don’t. “I can’t,” I said.

  The truth of it all was plain and simple—it was my fault.

  After my ‘cry for help’, after the antidepressants made me feel so good that I decided I didn’t need them anymore and went off my meds, I went straight into a downward spiral. An underage DUI bust, and pissing dirty with THC, was more than enough for the state police to seize my parents’ home and all their belongings, even though the charges of Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor filed against them didn’t stick. They were tossed out on the street and it was me who left them there.

  There were harsh words, to be sure, but Dad didn’t disown me. He didn’t need to. I’d invented enough arguments in my head and went through all the potential back-and-forths, and they all ended the same. I knew that reality wouldn’t be any different than the lousy movies I dreamed up in my head. So I left.

  He and Mom spent months searching for me. I stayed hidden, though, and I lied to the shelters and to the bums I decided to cohabit with. He touched me, I said. A year later, I learned through the hobo network that he’d left a message for me at one of the shelters.

  Mom was dead. Massive heart attack.

  That sealed the deal. I was poison. I didn’t even know where they’d been living, or where she was buried. I was too busy staying drunk and avoiding the police for the warrants I knew were out there from skipping out on my probation officer. At that point, the fewer people I was involved with the better. Fuck everyone, you know?

  “I can’t come home, Dad,” I repeated, stronger now. I sat up straighter, still holding the gun in my lap, index finger curled around the trigger.

  “There’s a better way, sweetheart. It’s not too late. Let me help you, please. I can get you help, and we can turn all of this around.”

  But in my head, his voice said what I knew to be the truth: You killed your mother. You’re beyond hope. You might be cleaned up right now, but we both know you’re nothing more than pure filth. You don’t deserve my help. Kill yourself. Get it over with.

  “Mr. Stone, did you know that your daughter has active warrants for her arrest? She has multiple misdemeanors: counts of drunk and disorderly, operating while intoxicated, resisting arrest. And, of course, soliciting. Mr. Stone, your daughter is a whore. How does that make you feel?”

  Dad’s face went red as the blood rushed to his ears. I knew he was seething. “What? What kind of question is that? She’s my daughter! How do you think that makes me feel?”

  A burning lump crawled up my throat and I stumbled off the stool before rushing headlong into the bathroom, a hand clapped tightly around my mouth. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t contain it. Vomit sprayed between my fingers, and I was running and gagging as my stomach emptied itself of everything. Booze, coffee and bile burned against my tongue. My foot hit the puddle and skidded against the sick-slick tile and I went down hard. My back crashed into the bathroom floor, the back of my head bouncing hard off the tiles. Muscles seized up instantly, a tight shock of pain all along the length of my spine and in my hips. I twisted, half-screaming, half-gagging, to finish throwing up. Hot, sticky liquid dripped down my neck from the side of my face. I could hear myself repeated through the room’s speakers—an unpleasant, discordant echo.

  I lay there for too long, in my nasty waste and humiliation, reeking of bourbon and spent coffee, utterly dazed. I could hear Brillo Pad and his ammosexual co-host laughing at me. Their words were lost amongst the whirling ringing in my ears and flashes of silver that lingered in my vision with every blink. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their mocking tone was unmistakable.

  Slowly, I got to my knees, using the bathroom sink to haul myself to my feet, my back screaming all the way. The pain kept me from standing up straight. My whole body was shaking, and a thick caul of mucus covered my chin, darkening the neckline of my stained blouse. I washed in the sink, ignoring the condescension of the Revolver crew and the concerned pleading in my father’s voice.

  If I needed another reason to kill myself, I guess I had it.

  My eyes lit upon the social media stream. More men laughing at me.

  Sick whore, one said.

  That was funny, another said. Now suck off that gun.

  Lost amongst it all was a lone voice of reason. A single person that wrote:

  #Revolver is disgusting and irresonpsible.

  Don’t let these people win! Turn it off!

  It didn’t take long for the message to get buried in the noise, or for other users to attack that one voice of dissent and threaten them with arson and rape and death.

  “Honey, please,” Dad said, openly crying now. Begging me. I saw #Revolver #FAG out of the corner of my eye and my ears burned. Another trait I shared with him. “There’s other ways. We can fix this. I promise you, we can fix this. We can start over. We can change things. Don’t do this.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t do enough for you. I wanted to help.”

  “There’s better ways for you to help than this. C’mon, sweetie. Cara. Please. I’m begging you, sweetie, please. Not like this. You have to listen to me. I—”

  “Turn it off,” I said, turning toward Brillo Pad.

  He nodded and Dad disappeared in a dark wink.

  “Your dad obviously loves you very much,” Sean said. “You can walk away from the money, the money you earned for your father, and leave with nothing. Or you can continue to participate.”

  “We’re up to sixty-five hundred,” Brillo Pad said, a shine in his eyes. He licked his lips, slowly, as if anticipating the blood spill. My life nothing more than a cheap game to him.

  “What’s your choice?” Sean asked.

  I can do this.

  My lips were dry and my back ached scornfully. I brushed aside Dad’s televised lip service and said, “Let’s go for seven thousand.”

  Both hosts smiled, revealing toothy fangs, their leering eyes brimming with hatred. I was in the devil’s sandbox, digging my hole deeper. That was my choice.

  Bitch. Slut. Whore. Hussy. I’d heard it all before. Been called all of it and worse. Still, I was surprised at the amount of repetition in the media feed, and the frequency with which these words arose, as if cultivated from some collective, self-loathing hive mind of insecurity. There wasn’t even an attempt to muster something approaching creativity in the insults. The whole display was pathetic vitriol.

  Brillo Pad and his boy-toy eventually got around to my medical history. The Kay brothers owned seventy percent of the nation’s healthcare providers, and obtaining a complete record of my past was an easy feat for them. The social feed filled with hashtag poison.

  Mine: Hashtag Go Fuck Yourself.

  “What do you have to be depressed about?” Brillo Pad asked, apparently in all sincerity. But it was a loaded question. I’d been down this road too many times, too.

  My probation officer: “You’re sixteen. You skip school, no job, you drink all day. What do you have to be depressed about? You want to be depressed, get a job.”

  Dad: “Why did you do this to yourself? Are people at school making fun of you? What’s wrong? Talk to us. Tell us why you’re so moody lately.”

  Ravencroft therapist and post-Ravencroft shrink, Dr. Tilbury: “How do you feel?”

  It was all chemical shit, and I went through rounds of cocktail drugs to find something to even out the dopamine receptors and uptake my way to normalcy. Depressed was just what I was. I didn’t need a particular reason, and anything could set me off, and oftentimes did. Why the fuck did I stop taking the pills?

  Because you’re an idiot, something dark and slithery told me, an all-too-familiar voice perched on my shoulder.

  Nobody
understood. Everyone thought they were miserable, that they had shitty lives, that their minor inconveniences were epic disasters. My raise wasn’t big enough. I stood in line for over two hours for a loaf of two-day-old bread. Well boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river.

  My brain chemistry is fucked up, and that’s the bottom line. There’s no cure, only prescribed placations for the demons inside me. If I took the drugs, I was weak. If I tried to solve matters on my own, say with a Remington New Model Army 1858 revolver for instance, I was weak. And if I let nature run its course, my disease was illegitimate and unearned. I was another homeless fruitcake, my depression somehow less than real.

  But, people have their own problems. Nowadays especially. That’s a hard hump to get over.

  I shrugged and said, “Life sucks. That’s all.”

  I saw the glare in Brillo Pad’s eyes. The one that said my answer was a cop out. Maybe it was.

  “How many sexual partners have you had?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, struck off-guard. I took a second to recompose. “How is that at all relevant?”

  “Well, I’m reading over your medical chart,” he wiggled a microtablet at the camera, “and it says you’ve had two abortions. That seems like an awful lot. And both before you were twenty.”

  “I was raped,” I said, my tone hollow. I had to shut myself down inside. It was the one way I could go on. “I was…I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

  “But you are promiscuous, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, I know you and your pals think rape is great and rape babies are God’s gift to women, but—”

  “But,” Sean interrupted me, “you’re a murderer! You’re a sinner! You’re a maniac and a serial killer and a whore.” His was a toothy strike, and he craved his pound of flesh with theatrical zeal.

  “Whatever.” Defending myself was useless. I made a point of not glancing at the social feed. I needed a cigarette.

  “So after you’ve killed two innocent babies, you think you can simply take other people’s hard-earned money and kill yourself? Take the easy way out?”

  I laughed. “You think this is easy?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Honestly?” I said. “Listening to your hypocritical bullshit and not pulling the trigger on this here gun is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

  “Why do this? You know you’re going to Hell, right?” Brillo Pad jumped in, probably worried that Sean was hogging too much of his camera time.

  “I guess we’ll see.” Not that I believed in Hell, or Heaven for that matter.

  That little diatribe brought in another hundred bucks. I yawned.

  “I hope we’re not boring you,” Brillo Pad said, smug as ever.

  “I want to know about the riot outside,” I said.

  “There is no riot outside,” Sean said.

  “What’s with the gunshots, the explosions? I can smell shit burning. Why don’t you report on that? This city is falling apart.”

  “Those are a bunch of hoodlums getting what they deserve. What do you think you deserve, Ms. Stone?”

  “You’re deflecting,” I said, sipping coffee, trying to be cool.

  “You learn that word during your time in Ravencroft?”

  I shrugged. “I heard tanks earlier. There’s real life happening right outside this studio, and you’re willfully oblivious.”

  “There’s nothing happening outside.” Brillo Pad was turning red and inching toward the edge of his seat, ready to fly off. If I were in the studio with him, he probably would have throttled me.

  “Except people getting what they deserve, right?”

  Another hundred bucks came in. “Maybe people actually want to hear the truth for once,” I said. “Seems there’s some real money in the news.”

  “That isn’t your money,” Sean said. “You didn’t earn that.”

  A huge concussive blast hit too close, shaking the building. The lights dimmed and, this time, took too long to self-correct. The Revolver hosts did a fair job of keeping their cool, still holding on to the pretense that nothing was happening.

  “An explosion just rocked the building, Sean,” I said, putting on my best reporter’s hat and mimicking some old-school journalists I’d seen on TV before the Kay brothers bought up the entire nation, one politician, one lawsuit, one television studio, and one piece of legislation at a time. “We are at the epicenter of something very serious, and very dangerous.”

  The green light winked out. The mic was dead. Brillo Pad cut to commercial, but I still had the camera studio feed on the left-most display while the adverts played out on the center console. I watched the hosts talk animatedly—yell, in fact—at one another, at their producers, at everyone in the room with them. There was no audio, but their wide mouths and violently red faces told me everything I needed to know.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. For once, I actually felt OK. Somehow, an inner reserve of strength had helped prop me up in a way all the bottles of booze in the world never could.

  The door blew open as another explosion erupted outside, even closer. The walls shook, but I didn’t know if it was from the blast or from Stevens’s furious stampede into the room. He took long, quick strides toward me and backhanded me across the face. The inside of my cheek cut open against my teeth and filled my mouth with a coppery tang. The blow toppled me off the stool and sent me to the ground. Hot coffee scalded the underside of my forearm and the back of my hand. Somehow, I still held onto the gun; even more miraculously, it didn’t go off.

  He flung the stool aside, sent it crashing into the wall, and delivered a swift kick to my stomach.

  “You stupid whore,” he screamed, kicking me again. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  I raised my head, tried to sit up, but he grabbed my face in one large hand. His fingers pushed my cheeks into my teeth, making my lips pucker in pain. He smashed my head into the floor, screaming in my face, an incoherent rage.

  “You trying to ruin the whole fucking show?” he yelled.

  Saliva peppered my eyes and forehead. His fingers loosened and I took in a massive, painful breath. My ribs burned with the inhalation. He punched me square in the face and I felt my nose depress inward with a sickening crunch, snot flooding the back of my throat in a bloody glob.

  I tried to blink, but saw nothing except swirling stars.

  “I’m going to teach you a good goddamn lesson,” he said, one fat hand going to his belt and unbuckling the leather. I tried to scoot backward as he unbuttoned his pants and pulled the tail of his shirt away from his waist.

  “You ain’t ever gonna forget this lesson,” he said. “I can promise you that much, you mouthy little shit.”

  “Get away from me!” I dug my heels into the carpet and pushed myself away. My shoulders banged into the wall, and his hands were groping at my pants, fumbling with the button.

  I raised the revolver and pulled the trigger. Time slowed and I watched the immaculate details of horror, as the flash of superheated gases puffed against his hair and bubbled the scalp to bursting. A gout of red exploded from the opposite side of his skull, messy chunks of grey and white mixed in with the blood, making a noisy, wet splash against the carpet.

  His eyes went soft as he collapsed against me. I spent too long trying to get out from under him. I spent a long time sitting against the wall, my breath ragged, pointing a relic of a revolver at him, waiting for him to move. He never did.

  My heart was racing, and I couldn’t quite believe what I’d just done. I wanted to cry, wanted to run, but I was stuck here in the ‘off’ position, exhausted, reeling and unable to catch up with reality.

  I can do this, I thought. And then I wondered what this was supposed to be.

  What did you say earlier, Daddy? That we could fix this? We could change things? Maybe we can.

  I had five bullets left.

  Another explosion, this one right outside. Close. Very, very close. The noisy, heavy treads of tanks rollin
g into the city square.

  Blood seeped from Stevens’s skull, a standing pool too thick for the carpet to absorb.

  Five bullets and a promise. We can change things. Maybe.

  For the first time in a long time, I felt good. For the first time in forever, I smiled a real smile. Not like I had anything else to lose, anyway, right?

  The riots, the explosions, the gunshots—it kept people on edge, nervous. I heard the shuffling of bodies behind closed doors, but nobody came out as I strode down the hallway and into the broadcast studio. Or maybe, since it was a Saturday night, the building was short staffed, operating on a skeleton crew. What kind of accountant wants to die a hero while pulling some weekend overtime?