“I wonder if it was the same man as the one I talked to in the office. He didn’t have a Bible, though. Or a hat.”
Holly got out of the car and left it running at the curb. (If it had ever been running at all.) She shouldn’t have found a parking space so quickly, but things were different in this version of this city. She understood that now. Or she understood it better than she had at first.
There was a light on, burning in one of the windows where the boys shared a bedroom. The light flickered. A television? It shouldn’t be a computer. They weren’t supposed to have computers anymore; it was part of the plea deal.
Rage welled up, harder and hotter than any tears she’d ever cried. The anger burned so white she could hardly breathe, until she remembered that she didn’t need to breathe. That made it easier, to keep walking without running or screaming—to open the door like she lived there, and let herself inside past Aunt Patty, who was fat like Aunt Jean, and she would’ve been just as bitter if she hadn’t been so goddamn self-righteous. Aunt Patty wasn’t supposed to have a computer, either. Not while the boys were under her roof. She was sitting at the dining room table and checking the Internet on a smartphone, reading some conspiracy website. It assured her that she was persecuted, and that she was afraid of all the right things, all the right people.
Holly swept down on her, and struck her aunt’s hand as hard as she could. The blow was fast, and it came unseen. It came hard. It threw the phone across the room, where it lodged in the wall’s chipping plaster like a butter knife in a loaf of bread.
Aunt Patty didn’t speak. She didn’t move. She stared at the phone, and she breathed as fast as a rabbit.
“I’m dead,” Holly told her. “I’m dead, and I hate you.” She didn’t know if Aunt Patty heard her, but she wanted to be heard, so she shouted it: “I’m dead, and I hate you!”
Aunt Patty flinched. Her face went tight with goosebumps.
Holly leaned in closer, until her mouth was near enough to bite her aunt’s ear. “Everything is your fault, too.” She backed away, went to the kitchen—it was on the other side of the dingy, cluttered room. She opened a cabinet, found some glasses, and began throwing them. They shattered on the floor, and against Aunt Patty’s chair.
Patty still didn’t move. Holly didn’t care if she did. She didn’t care if she couldn’t. She kicked the back of the woman’s chair with all the force she could rally; she dug her foot in, like she could shove it all the way up Aunt Patty’s miserable ass. The chair rattled and toppled, taking her aunt with it.
She didn’t watch it fall. “I’m not here for you. Maybe I should be, but.”
Down the short hall with only three doors—a bathroom, two bedrooms—Holly stormed, gathering up the city’s weird, smoke-like fog alongside her. It poured through the cracks in the foundation, the missing insulation between the windows and their casings… she called it all inside, and pulled it into her hands. She squeezed it, crushed it, and pushed it forward to blast open the bedroom door that belonged to the two PKs whose names she couldn’t remember. Only their faces. Only their crimes. Only the fallout.
They were in there, because where else would they be? If they’d ever had anything better to do, then none of this would’ve ever happened, now would it? The other voice, the one she talked to, in case it was her grandfather—it was too soft, too far in the back of her head. Did it want her to stop? Or was it just along for the ride?
The two prison kings blinked at her, two pale and eyeless cave fish confronted with the dawn. They saw something, but it might not have been Holly. She hoped it was something more fitting, something like a naked child with fear in its eyes and blood dripping down its legs. She hoped it was a little boy with his hair yanked back and his mouth hanging open while the camera flash went snap snap snap.
The brothers were separated by enough years that they should’ve been more different in appearance. There should’ve been more to distinguish them than their height, but there wasn’t. They both looked like their father, long out of the picture, not that it would’ve mattered.
No. Not quite.
The taller of the two had jumped a crooked retreat, and he stood with his back to the window, flat against it. Everyone had always said how much he looked like Grandpa. Everyone had always said it, because it was always true. A spitting image, though she’d never seen it before. He wasn’t a spitting image of the grandfather who’d been old for as long as Holly had ever known him, but a carbon copy of the younger man—thick from years of manual labor before he’d taken to the seminary. A bespectacled man, bald before thirty. The taller brother was the younger of the two, and he was twenty-seven. What was left of his hair was yellow and vanishing.
Holly balked.
She waited for the quiet voice to tell her what to do, but it didn’t.
There was nowhere for any of her surprise or pain to go, so she used it to fuel the anger that burned her up, feeding it into that furnace. “You did this!” she screamed at them, not knowing if they could hear her. She screamed it again, at the screen they shared between them. They had a computer, yes. Their parole officer must’ve missed it, but they were only playing some first-person shooter with Nazis in it. This time. Last time it’d been worse, and the investigation had gone on for two years. That’s how long it’d taken to go all the way down that rabbit hole of karmic sludge and anguish.
She’d never been clear on the particulars. There were plea deals, and problems with the evidence, and outright incompetence with the forensic IT department. But here the prison kings were, having dodged any real time behind bars. They got away with it—like they’d gotten away with everything, relatively consequence free, for their entire goddamn lives.
But Jesus, she’d forgotten how much the tall one looked like Grandpa in the old pictures. The ones where he was grinning in black and white, smiling under the weight of feed sacks, tied up in bundles.
She hated the tall one for his face.
She reached for the beds and upended them, one and then the other. She threw them across the room and broke the iron rods off the frames while the boys yelled and hollered, begging for help that wasn’t going to come from anyone except their mother, and she was useless. The only power she’d ever had was raising sociopaths. She couldn’t bring them up, and save them, too.
The computer screen was flat and cold and it shattered when she touched it—so she picked up the pieces and threw them like she’d thrown the phone, like knives at a target. Most of the shards landed in the mattresses, and the curtains. Some of them hit the floor.
The boys pulled up their twin-sized mattresses and hid behind them. They were building a stupid kid’s fort, like they were stupid kids, so Holly broke something else: a mason jar that one of them was using for a water glass. She crushed it, and used the largest piece to assault the fabric fortress. She cut through the sheets, through all the cheap material until it bled stuffing and springs, and she pulled those out, too.
“Did you do it together?” she demanded. “We all wondered if you sat around and jacked in tandem, you fucking creeps!” She’d hacked most of the way through one mattress. The shorter, older prison king kicked it aside and joined his brother behind the cover that remained.
Holly grabbed the other mattress. She wedged her fingers like spikes into the sides, and she pried it away. They were rats, cowering in a corner. The short one covered his eyes, burying his head against his brother. The taller one, the one who looked so much like a dead man, wasn’t looking right at her. He was looking over her shoulder—but when she looked, she saw nothing, not even their mother, who must’ve heard the commotion by now.
She swung the chunk of glass like a sword, and slashed until she hit an artery. The short one’s neck blossomed as red as funeral roses, as wet as the gutter snow. It was a marvel of color in this city, where everything churned in grayscale. He slumped, and she loomed triumphantly.
One down. Halfway there.
But. She buried the gore-sticky
weapon in the wall. “It shouldn’t have been you!” She roared it in the tall one’s face. She retrieved the shard and swiped it at his cheek, leaving a thin line of red across his skin. The line was a slim, razor-fine italic. Then it was bold. “Your brother was always a lost cause, but we thought you were better. We thought you would be better!”
She wished she could cry, but that didn’t happen in the city—so she swung the glass instead, again and again striking the wall and not the cousin because he was wearing Grandpa’s face. Or he wasn’t, and she knew that, but.
Her cousin sobbed and swore in equal measure. Someone could cry here, after all. She smashed her hand through the bureau mirror, and took a bigger piece of glass, one the size of a plate. It should’ve cut her hand to hold it. But nothing cut her here. She couldn’t bleed and she couldn’t cry, and she’d have to come to peace with it.
She held this new, foiled dagger to the tall boy’s neck, and let it dig. (It was okay. It wasn’t Grandpa’s neck.) She let it split the skin in a tender spot that was better suited to a kiss, if you were the kind of mother who did that sort of thing. She let the bead of blood form, and well, and swell, and drip while she wailed the tears she couldn’t cry. His frail remaining hairs billowed, and his eyes went dry and pink but he couldn’t close them. Could he see her? No, he was still looking behind her. There still was nothing there.
“Accident…” he gasped.
She didn’t know if it was a reply, or merely an expression of confusion. “All this time, you should’ve been in jail. Your mother shouldn’t have been stealing Grandpa’s life insurance, like there was anything else keeping the lights on except for me, and that shit job at the courthouse.”
“Lawyer…” He was digging his own grave, and too stupid to stop.
She remembered it now—pieces of the disbelief, the murderous fury she’d felt when Aunt Jean had shown her the statements, where the lump sum pittance was bleeding away, signed over check by check from Grandma to Aunt Patty. In Aunt Patty’s handwriting.
“You came to me, at the courthouse. You wanted me to throw it away, to look away. To make it go away.”
“Accident,” he said again, but that didn’t make it true.
She didn’t care. She realized it as her hands were going slick, because another half an inch and he’d be right there with her in the city, where no one can see the sky, but no one gets in your way.
Out to her car, he’d followed her that night—trying to stop her. Trying to keep her from filing the complaint that would send his mother to jail. The sky had been so white, and so had the snow on the ground; but on the piles of garbage, it’d all gone brown around the edges. You don’t accidentally push someone. You don’t accidentally take the paperwork and run while the snow goes red and the sky drops lower and lower by the minute.
But he wasn’t looking at her, he was looking behind her. She couldn’t hear the voice that was talking so softly, so firmly, so hopelessly in the distance. She could only see this terrible thing that wore someone else’s skin, and she pressed the broken glass under that face, against that neck. She could peel that face right off. He didn’t deserve to wear it.
Nobody knew what Grandpa would’ve done.
She fell back. She stood in the wreckage of the room, all broken glass, clotting blood, and tooth-stain yellow foam. The light overhead sputtered, but kept the room a gruesome shade of wet fluorescent lime. All the shadows were too damn hard. She couldn’t see anything except the resemblance, and that wasn’t fair at all. The city was supposed to be fair. Wasn’t that how it worked?
Wasn’t that how it worked.
“I still have time,” she told him, as he bled and cringed. She held out her hand, and called the fog to bring her something useful. It brought her the envelope with the complaint, signed by herself and Aunt Jean in their own goddamn handwriting. Either Aunt Patty hadn’t destroyed it, or the city had seen fit to return it. She clasped it so hard that her knuckles would’ve turned white, if.
In the other room, her aunt moaned.
To hell with her.
“Good night, preacher’s kids. Good night, prison kings.” Holly turned her back.
She hated the city, for all its second chances—because she could only scream and she could not cry as she left them behind: one dead, and one who would probably live. She should’ve reversed the two, if you’d asked anyone. Take the killer, and punish the other to even the score. But the killer wore a dead man’s face, a prison king with the preacher’s profile.
She left them there, and she left the shitty old building standing in one piece.
She deserved to cry. Both brothers deserved to bleed out slow, all the way, remembering why everything had come to this. Everyone deserved to mourn, on their way out of town.
Didn’t they?
DEAR DIARY
by
SCOTT SIGLER
Dear Diary,
Today my foot went through the floor. But nothing broke. It blended in. Or shifted in. I’m not sure how to explain it. It felt warm, and nice. My foot wasn’t all there. I saw it and I got scared and I pulled it out and it was fine. Makes no sense. I had about a bottle of wine, so maybe just drunk. But the weird thing is when it happened I felt loved. I don’t know why. I wish I could feel love again.
I am so very lonely.
—Carmen
* * *
John stands on the stained WELCOME! mat in the hallway in front of Apartment 214. The mat was there when he helped his friend Robert move in three years earlier. John takes a breath, remembers the things he has promised himself he will not say.
Two things: Is your back any better?
And the big one: Are you still reading that goddamned diary?
John is tired from the long flight. He wants dinner and a beer. But first, he has to do this. He has to try one last time.
He rings the doorbell. He waits. He rings it again. He waits. He rings it a third time. Finally, he hears the slow shuffle of approaching footsteps. Robert opens the door just enough for his body to block the narrow space. He stares out, sunken eyes narrow with… not hate, exactly, but more disdain.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I flew in to see you,” John says.
Robert looks so different now. Gone is the can’t-stand-still excitement for anything and everything. Gone is the blonde hair. Gone is the frantic energy that made Robert’s eyes dance and dart. Gone is Robert—the person who answered the door is just not the same one John went to college with. Robert stands there, in a bathrobe and slippers… the clothes of the old man he has become, not the thirty-year-old he is.
“You shaved your head,” John says. He doesn’t know what else to say.
“Hair is a pain in the ass. Have to wash it all the time, and it hurts when I shower.”
John nods, catches himself doing it. He wasn’t nodding because he agrees, he was nodding because he thought what he always thinks when Robert complains about pain, he was thinking of course it hurts, just like everything else—hurts when you stand, when you sit, when you walk, when you lie down… all part of the mental gymnastics you use to keep you trapped here.
“That sucks,” John says. “Is your back any better?”
The question came out automatically, the way one might say bless you when someone sneezes. John cringes inside—he promised himself he wouldn’t ask that, but it came out anyway, like a worm forcing its way from a pasty apple.
“No,” Robert says. “It’s not. I’ll ask again—why the fuck are you here?”
John knows how this will end. He has to try anyway. One last time, he has to try.
“You stopped answering my calls,” he says. “And my emails.”
Robert shrugs. “There’s nothing left for us to say, so what’s the point?”
John glances past him, into the dark apartment. He can feel the heat pouring out—Robert keeps the temperature ungodly high. John spent enough time there, in the early days after the back injury, to know R
obert mostly walks around naked, because the elastic waistband of underwear or boxers—like everything else, it seems—hurts his back.
The apartment… everything was great until Robert moved in here.
“There’s plenty to say, Robert. You have to get out of this place.”
Robert stares. A look of annoyance, fatigue, and even betrayal.
“And go where? I can’t afford anything else in this city, and you know I can’t drive.”
Or fly. Or take a train or a bus. Because Robert can’t sit down without excruciating pain in his back. Half the time John feels so sorry for him—imagine not being able to sit, at all— and half the time he thinks Robert is fucking crazy and has set up this crazy construct to keep himself trapped here.
Trapped in this hot, dark apartment.
“I talked to Christine,” John says. “You can move in with us.”
Finally, Robert smiles. “I wonder what you had to promise her to make that happen.”
John doesn’t answer. He didn’t have to promise anything, he had to threaten. Threaten to walk out on her if she was so selfish she wouldn’t help his best friend. Oh, that argument. Christine has been telling John for years to wash his hands of Robert, that Robert is the walking dead, that it is Robert’s choice to write off humanity and live alone, die alone. John has defended his friend to his wife for years. Trouble is, it’s taken John those same years to realize Christine has been right all along. That’s what she does: she gives the hard truth, whether you like it or not.
“John, this is bullshit,” Robert says. “You know I can’t make a fifteen-hour drive to Wisconsin.”
John doesn’t want to say the next thing, because he’s said it before—he already knows what Robert will say in response. Still, John has to say it.
“It’s a five-hour flight, man. Five fucking hours to get out of here, to be with friends.”
Robert shakes his head. John has asked Robert to bite the bullet and fly, to live with the pain of the flight and the aftermath, and Robert has his reasons why he won’t do that: the pain is too great for five hours of sitting; the landing might jar him and the last two times Robert was “jarred” it resulted in weeks of nine-out-of-ten pain instead of the normal seven-out-of-ten; the airplane seats might cause more damage, making Robert’s miserable life even worse. Et cetera, et cetera—no matter what the solution, Robert always has a reason that solution won’t work.
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