My Lurid Escape

“My Lurid Escape”

a short story

Gary Baker, August 2014

I remember the sun as it drew across the room, and how I wanted it to stop for one goddamn moment and how I needed the light. I remember the sweetly wafting tendrils of the whiskey beneath my nose, and the way it stung while it enticed. Then came the taste as I lifted the glass and brought some in for further inspection, and the way it was so wonderfully opposite to the scent. In this case, I needed the numbness.

Holding my arm tight, I brought the knife from the jar of rubbing alcohol and set down the tip on an incongruous point of my arm.  I put it where I would have no fear of arteries or the like, no fear of tendons that could be sawn in half, just muscle and a bit of fat with skin in the way. I had to hold a small tasting bottle of scotch with my arm just so it wouldn't twitch on me like a mad soldier under the knife back in the twenties, doing so also kept me focused on my task. I wasn't leaving this be until I'd seen blood.

One drop, I told myself. One drop and I'm done. No more.

So it began.

I pushed in and felt the electric sting, which prevented me from pushing further when it became strong enough to bring stars to my eyes. So I swashed the knife in the clear liquid again and brought it to the pinprick once more. This time I would do it. This time for sure.

Again I felt the sting, the jolt of helpless denial that my body seemed intent on screaming, as though it thought I were some killer from the movies all but unstoppably drawn by the busty blonde with the dagger in hand as he came for her. It seemed to think I could be stopped, though, just like how in those movies the killer can always be talked out of it, perhaps even delayed until some force of nature or police or something could intervene. But not me. Not this time.

I was only here for a drop, after all. No more.

What was the worst that could happen, I asked myself.

I pushed harder and was immobilized by pain, so instead chose to draw rather than push. I laid the blade down lengthwise along the point I'd made, and pulled ever so slightly. While this didn't bring the pain, it also didn't bring the desired gleam of crimson. So I did it again, pushing harder, drawing more forcefully, watching as hairs atop the skin were sliced and the skin broke free layer after layer.

For a moment there I became frustrated enough to saw at my arm. The drawing wasn't doing anything, and this was the sharpest blade I had in the house, sharper than any of the steak knives or such like that, and although they weren't exactly sharpened by a professional they could more than handle the tasks they were made for. Unlike me. Unlike this knife at that moment.

I cleaned the knife again in the alcohol and took a serious swig of the eighty-proof off to the side, downing it like floor cleaner. Delicious cinnamon burned from all angles, evaporating even as I swallowed, or so it felt like. What liquid made it down my throat was dry and searingly wonderful, and my soonest exhale brought gasps of intake as though I'd just swallowed a real fireball. My lips stung with the sweet burn and I allowed my arm the moment to relax as I enjoyed the taste once more, licking it off like a psychotic cannibal tasting flesh after years without.

Then, determined as the numbness moved across my cheeks and into my scalp, I retook the knife and shook the alcohol from it. I brought it to my arm again where that last drop splished on the skin. It was like a magnifying glass. Suddenly I could see into the wound I had made. And I could see quite easily how I still had yet to break the skin. My arm wasn't numb enough yet, I learned then. Haltingly, I retried the piercing method. This time it went in further, but felt no more like cutting a steak than it did like cutting sailcloth. I saw the tip pushed down into my arm, but there was no blood.

This angered me more than I can say. I became overwhelmed by this urge to push it in all the way, all three inches of steel, just to find out if I were even human. Already I had pushed it it more than a millimeter and I could see just where the skin ended, or so I thought, but still nothing so pink as the pastel blossom of a 'naked lady' could be seen. Instead all I was given was an ugly white-ish tone and the jawbreaker-like layers of my skin.

Another swig of whiskey, then.

This next time I knew I had already broken skin, so I chose not to redo the annoyingly tedious task, and instead began sawing at the end of the fissure already made. It worked for a moment, and then I hit something, something threadlike and tight which wouldn't let me cut further no matter how much I sawed at it. So, decidedly believing it to be a small capillary of sorts, I turned the knife around and pulled at the string from the other end. It took a moment to get down that far again, but when I did I knew I had something.

So I slid the blade along behind the thread from the more shallow of wounds and pushed away from myself with hardly enough force to cut into a fly. I wanted the blade to do the work for me, not the other way around. If I had to use brute tactics for this I may as well have tried doing so with a pencil or a pen, perhaps.

For some time the two objects just wouldn't part ways. I had the thread peeking close to the skin layer, stretched from it's depths in my fattier layers one millimeter deeper, with the alarmingly not-as-sharp-as-Id-thought blade tip. Then, as I pondered taking another swig big enough to fill my mouth, I felt a release, and my knife flew free with only enough momentum to jolt my hand.

At first nothing else happened. I grew angry for a moment, knowing I had snapped some thread within me, yet seeing not a hint of blood. After all the minor pain I had endured, I still hadn't gone deep enough. So I retook the blade after swashing it about again and settled myself to no more drinking until I'd seen a drop. This time it only took a second or two of dragging the tip through the opened crevice before I got something.

Deep, dark and nearly brown, I watched particles stream down from the alcohol filled wound opening. Odd, I thought, and cleared the fissure to allow more. When I did so, I pulled from it a mat of congealed brownness that looked more like mud residue than a scab. So I redipped the blade in the alcohol and once again slid along the bottom of the opening until I got what I was looking for.

Barely a single drop came bubbling out, then nothing, then one more and nothing shortly after. I just stared as it did this little routine until finally it clocked in me that this was from the pulsation of some vein inside my arm, near the surface, that was releasing blood with every beat of my heart.

By then the sun had moved across the table and no longer had me in its sights. I moved things on the table and shifted places then, so I could see, and watched as half-congealed blood was pushed through the cut into the real world little by little despite how deep it was I had dug. The fascination grew. I placed my arm atop a paper towel and rest it there while the blood barely dripped down. Every second or so I had to re-clear the wound so it could drip once more, but each time I did the numbness came and allowed me the act before coming again with the pulsation. By this time my arm had an ugly line moving to the towel, pocked with particulates and dried blood in the path of more coming down little by little.

I cleared the line again and felt the rocky roughness of the bottom, so I dug deeper, seeking more to this flow, and yet each time I pulled the knife away it seemed the wound had pressed itself into closure again and that the only way I could see more blood was by pulling one side from the other. So I did. I placed two fingers upon my arm, one to either side of the line, and pushed the lips of the wound away from the other. Blood would come for a moment, and then I had to clear the drying debris once more.

Finally I sat back, relieved somehow, feeling lighter, more real. Somehow the druggy sluggishness of my life had seeped just slightly further away, enough that I could see what the sluggishness was. I looked upon my act and smiled. This was all for that smile, I knew, for that sense of satisfaction for once and, knowing that it was small enough not to be questioned, I sighed with contentment.

No one would notice. No one would know.

Not even my girlfriend would ask me where I got it from, nor the more problematic questions of why I had done it. For once I had a dark secret to hide, and for some reason this made me giddy. I felt the queer throes of withheld laughter inside, threatening to come forth, and knew that this secret, while dangerous in the eyes of those in my life, may have just given me the escape that I needed. I knew then that this would be a return act, an addiction of my very own, could I only get over the nervous pain.

Perhaps, I thought musingly, next time I might try harder alcohol before digging in.

* * *

[NOTE FROM THE WRITER]

[August 31, 2014; 2:30 AM]

--> So I wanted to put this out there in the realm of the real, that this work is a piece of nonfiction, and that it was written in what I had thought my lowest point in mind.

Turns out that was anything but true.

I'd sworn it was a one-off deal, that that lone drop (or in all truth, that lone dripping run of quickly-dried crimson) would be the last. Yet such isn't so. I have drawn again. I have drawn my skin open again, to the point of several drops, each more red than the last.

They started out as a brownish hue, like dirt had been globbed in my veins and this was somehow releasing mud from within me. While it felt as if this were absolute truth, I know it was all psychological, and altogether with such knowledge I still cannot figure out what this is all for. I cannot say why I do this, nor what has brought me to it.

Sure I can point to the increasing mental stress lately, about the point at work where I simply broke and resigned despite numerous bills to pay and loans to make installments on. I can also point to those very bills for this. I can show many moments of doubt as deep as the neurons carrying these words to the fingers as they type away here for you all. I can convey so many moral wrongdoings in my world done unto others as well as myself, all focused upon this one lone life and how many it meets along the way to the final end. I can tell anyone who asks of the struggles I face each and every day and how anxiety meets stress so thick it drowns, and how when I actually open my fearful eyes I can see nothing to truly be afraid of, and how this then makes me feel so insignificant and small-minded that I just want to die to be over it all.

Yes, I am a horrible human being. Yes, I take things out on myself that should never have blame set upon anyone and, yes, I know these things to be fallacies in all truth, but that notion doesn't make them any less strong, any less wondrously vivid when push comes to shove. When I see these minuscule things emerge from behind the magnifying glass, like a cartoon bug walking on a scientists desk, instead of acting out against them to rid them of my life I take it out on myself in turn for ever having thought them large in the first place.

So for any out there who understand this... this piece is for you.

I have begun in earnest lately. I started with what turns out to have been a dull knife, that or just way too broad for the task. Now I yearn to distance myself from the razor removed from a box-cutter, cleaned and sanitized with high-grade rubbing alcohol. I found myself doing this even in plain view of Meaghan as she watched a show online earlier. When asked about it, I blame a cat, after having added so many others around the larger ones so as to appear so. Each burns, yes, but each also relieves some tension as I remember how the razor bypassed my sensory objection to pain and alleviated some in its place.

I still am not quite sure why I do this, however, even as I wonder where I should place the next one so its not obvious come daylight. I should admit now, though, that none of these go very deep other than that first time. With the razor in poised delicate-gripped fingertips I fear of going too far and not realizing it until its much too late. Thus I only go, so to speak, skin-deep. I go until I see a neat, crisp line of red, and then stop cutting deeper and focus on letting no scab appear. I scrape it away with the flat of the blade to allow the line to stay longer, to allow it that final course down my forearm and onto the paper towel lain beneath.

Now what was once a dream of mine, a worry without cause but a worry nonetheless, has now become much more tangible and real. I can now truly fear going too deep and doing something I can never do. It really isn't my intention, mind you, to end my life. Instead my intent is to focus on pain in place of mental worries, in place of things I can never truly change. Instead of absolute panic over not having an income just now, I am able to focus on my arm and how much I can take before adding the cleaning liquids and neaten it all up. Instead of fretting over a lack of fuel for a car I currently cannot make payments on, I can focus on how hard I press the blade and when I should begin drawing it along and how long to do this one and which direction and where to make the next one when the time comes and how to make them all look like cat scratches or the like to the untrained eye.

I know it's wrong, but then again this same pain would come from tattoos and a tattoo would last me my entire life... not just a week or so. I guess what I mean to say is that this is real. It doesn't get any more real than this. Yet truth be told too many people dismiss those in my state as small-minded and depressed and mentally unstable and fraught with a disease of the brain and so on, while not many tend to stand aside for a moment and ponder the implications. By cutting I am therefore an outcast among many, and yet by keeping it in and never doing anything physical to release it I slowly become a mass murderer or a depraved psychopath or a true suicidal being. No matter what malcontent it keeps from reaching me, if this act seems horrifying whilst keeping me alive, then I say let the blood come. I say keep this drawing act going...

and let the alcohol clean what ails me one drop at a time, from the internal in the form of drunken charades and from the external in the form of sanitation and fast-healing.

Derelicticus

"Derelicticus"

a prologue

Gary Baker, August 2014

(part of a lingering rage-based satire inspired by works of junkie-fiction)

Enter once, twice, three times, hit 'ctrl' and the letter 'A' as one, font select: scroll to Rosarivo, then hit twelve point size, justify margins, and finally one point five spacing. Done. Now the good stuff.

I see the needle coming and my muscles steel themselves from the stimulus. They know what’s coming; I know what’s coming. Hell, you’d think I’d have just gotten over it by now. But no. I won’t. I can’t. Each time is new and, as they say, improved. The bolt is rearing, the liquid viciously awaiting. Like the fluids in a viper’s maw, gunning for that bite, pining to draw blood, needing that orgasmic release of finality as fluids are shot deep into the flesh of another being.

But this isn't at all what my own body thinks of. As the impending prey all my molecules seem unable to justify it all. They think this the end. They think that death comes next. Does it? I ask myself, with none but an echo of thoughtlessness in response. I’m too fear-stricken to believe what lurks, to believe what comes, to understand in a comprehensive manner that which would soon pierce skin raw and delve into the sacredness of unbroken veins.

Alright thare, Mista Gunna, a voice from beyond my cerebral focus echoes in like the shimmering light seen through meters of ocean water. I feel like I’m drowning, like a songbird captured by an all-too-tall wave that should never have been, my feathers soaked and my scrawny pin-prick toes doing nothing to propel me to the surface. Thas ain’t goanna work, you bein so overwrought an all. Wae need to calm you daown.

Suddenly the dark humid room is gone, all the green walls vaporized by a quick burst of light from my peripherals and I feel weightless in a new sensory darkness. All I can think of is how they must have expelled me from my body somehow. Perhaps they yanked my cords a bit too fast, or maybe they just said ‘to hell with it’ in that godawful accent and slit my throat. But that wouldn't be right; they need me alive for the injection to work, for me to work.

Then a light snaps on ahead and I feel myself moved somehow until my eyes are able to focus through the haze of smoke and steam. What I see, then, stops my heart.

In the light, standing in such a way that it seems I view from a ceiling support beam, is this woman of unseemly features. Her hair is both light straw yellow and yet deep murky black, shifting from one to the other with unrealistic fluidity. Her skin transcending in both sandy pale ales and burnt ocher mahogany. I find myself lost for a moment in just that, in the way her tones ebb and flow and how this hair of hers curls about like waves locked in time as it all cascades upon her shoulders, where the collar of a long coat hides everything beneath her chin, all angled at a three-quarter tilt from above and behind.

Thas goode, naw, aint’t? The voice echoes again, suddenly reprimanded by another just at the cusp of audible range. Naw don’ yoo worry, Mista Gunna, yoo jus’ watch an fo’get about us. Jes relax them bones and we’ll all be best’a buds. I hear the bass of the other again and feel the first move away, though from where I cannot say. Then a muffled echo of a disk being dropped, and the first comes back again with a tap of what would be my own ankle if I had one anymore. Enjoy the show, naw, hear? ‘Specially cause yur in fer’a treat.

Suddenly there is movement ahead and my attention resets, brought back to the girl as she slowly lifts away the coat as though home for the evening. She lets it drop into the darkness by her unseen feet, instantly standing alone in the darkness in nothing but glossy obsidian small clothes over creamy light-latte skin. Her shoulders, now unheeded by the jacket, show a bit of sun damage from some foray outside, her freckles almost invisible through the healing tan, and her covered breasts seem curious as they peek just into visibility with the angle I view from. I try not to, but my eyes then move down, across the pocks in her back where her shoulder blades make shadows and across the indent where her spine recedes inward with it’s curve, and roam across her hips. It’s impossible not to admire whomever brought her into being, in that proportions had been painstakingly thought out, whether by genetics or DNA grafters putting her basest structures together molecule by electron-sized molecule. Her cheeks shift this way and that as she moves her upper body, doing something beyond my attention, and slowly the slight amount of clothing stretched out upon them shimmies into the verge between each side. It isn’t much fabric, to be honest, that moves into that line, that highway roaming deep across places that can only be dreamed of, but the elastic that runs the trail renounces complete coverage and leaves her cheeks all-too-nicely unveiled. In that moment her features stop shifting, her latte skin sinfully silky-smooth and her hair a glimmer of strawberry within a light caramel.  

A sudden gut-wrenching sensation hits my left arm and I try to move, try to shift my awareness, the woman fuzzing like static as I finally grasp my own arm from within and attempt to move it. More numbed slicing ensues into searing pain and I feel tendons snapping like cataclysmic rubber bands.

Well sun’offa gun, he mocks again, am I to baelieve yoo felt that? He chuckles an eerily cheerful laugh and I feel movement from my side again followed by what could only be a hand patting my lower thigh. ‘Is time I thaink we turn up the heat, eh, Mista Gunna? Give yoo summa that good ol’ fashion haspitalitay. On tha house, naw.

In an instant the pain was righteously gone, and my attention came to again with the woman turning my way with an unhooked bra held over her poised breasts by crossed wrists. Her verdant emerald eyes shone with something intangible to me until she dropped her hands to her hips and the bra slipped into the depths with her ankles.

Like before, I try not to look, but it’s just uncanny the way her breasts hang just enough with a youthful pugnacity, how they draw in the eye like the physical embodiment of a black hole in space instead placed mystically on the female form. Freckles span these, too, originating near the collar to dip down near the upper contours of her ribcage through a low valley of temptatious flesh. They seem to hang toward me, her form suddenly gravitating in my direction, and I find myself upon a sofa of sorts, this lioness stalking toward me with all but her vulva left visible. The tantalizing draw, the suppressed desire within then loosens and I feel her stepping closer, the by golly, I thaink’e likes this’n almost drowned out entirely as her lips part and reach to my own.

For a long moment I am lost again. I float in space, drifting, falling. The ground is gone entirely, replaced instead by the weightless awe of the woman’s mysterious purr. She then draws away with my upper lip caught between softly poised teeth leaving an urge I’d not felt for a long time in this society of repressed desires. In that moment I need her. Something within tells me not to, but I reach out and bring her close, cupping a shoulder blade with one hand and a handful of buttocks in the other.

She gasps and an accented chuckle reaches me from somewhere else. The wind of the open window playing tricks with the echoes. I feel her pulse quicken, then, and she pulls away just enough to stare longingly into my eyes, the need in her just as clear as my own. Passion moves into play and replaces the fear I can no longer understand as she traces my chest with faint trails of her fingers, ebbing slowly, tauntingly downward. Straddled, I can do nothing about the smallclothes of hers that remain between us, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

She bites her lower lip on one side and again I see that need. I see her desire reflecting my own, driving me crazy, acting out the energies bottled up for far too long, now. Then her fingers reach my belt and before I can attempt to help it’s gone, tossed to the side. Lost forever.

Out in space something slices and I feel a release of pressure. A weight shifts in an impossible location. My eyes begin to wander, trailing away as though in extreme exhaustion.

At that moment she chooses to pull me out and press her palm, caressing fingers and all, into a sensation that brings me back.

“Don’t you go leaving me dry, boy,” she mocks while drawing the highway of obsidian elastic to the side. Eyes wide, I wonder what I was thinking. Why would I fall asleep now?

But then the slicing returns, like the vibration of a badly strung bow upon a tightly-wound violin.

Abruptly a hot anger burns in her eyes, those emeralds turn fierce with rage and she slams down over me. For a slight moment she holds there, eyes locked with mine as though demanding my complete arousal for the amount of time she requires. Again I wonder what could possibly distract me from this.

Then slowly, tantalizingly, she lifts away and sends shivers coursing up my spine. My heart kick-starts, gears within switch into drive, and I clench my fingers across her hips to pull her back down. The quivering then moves from me to her and I know it has begun in earnest this time.

The sofa shushes beneath us, drowned out by her pace-less, ragged breathing. Hair paints my nose when she drops her forehead down, her arms like pillars to either side of my neck as I drive onward with repetitive increased pounding. The ribbed sensation in my arm keeps on, but I ignore it now, too drawn into her rippling muscles to care about the curious phantom. When it increases in intensity I know she spots the distraction coming even as I do, and without loosing me from her hips she spins to lay with her back against my chest on the plush cushion. Her cheeks press emphatically over me, and she pulls me close once more to restart our routine.

“There,” she whispers after a few thrusts, and her eyes fight to stay open. When the slicing ensues again I pantingly open my eyes to find her laying over the tingling arm, shifting to the rhythm of my assault. It’s just the sofa. Why would I think it anything else? Then she turns her head to watch me from over her sunburned shoulder with an energetic gleam in her eyes and I wonder if the burn still hurts her or if perhaps the endorphins have numbed it. Again she bites her lip and releases a ragged breath.

This goes on for some time, though I would be lying if I said it went on forever. Ultimately, after some changes in position and pacing, I find myself being hugged between her skyward thighs as I push forth one last time, her hands grasped dangerously upon the contours of my hip bones. She releases a lasting shudder of withheld breath before collapsing into the cushion beneath me.

With my heart still racing I lay down half atop her, still poised between her knees, and bring my eyes to hers. The grin she dons, then, brings an ache to my heart, like warm steel suddenly coursing through my veins. She doesn’t even need to speak it, as I already understand, but she winces and seems saddened as she does so anyway. “You know we can never do this again.” Those emeralds turn bleak by comparison and she looks away, toward the sky. Opposite the direction of my now missing phantom slicing. “Try not to lose this, ‘kay?”

She sounds like a young girl trying to plea to her first love never to leave her, but why would I ever? Even had we not just consummated our passion together, I see no reason why I would ever forget her. Then her eyes turn upon me again and seem to scold, as though having just heard my thoughts.

“They will destroy you, Gunner,” she lectured. For some reason I feel fear building up again and my groin responds by shrinking away in cowardice. The intensity in her voice increases and she rolls her glorious body onto me and bores holes into me with that glare. “Do not let them do this, Gunner. You’re better than that.” She shakes her head angrily and shudders as the living room shifts with sudden static. “What we are, in this moment, should not exist. They think they have you, Gunner, that you have been completely taken over, but they’re wrong.”

She places a palm onto my chest and heaves herself into a seated position, and again the room buzzes with static snapping. Her eyes dart in every direction at once, fear building in her as well. Without warning her glare is back upon me and I am caught entranced by her severity. “What we are doing is against everything they plan. Yes, they uploaded me into your brain, but Gunner you have to understand that you subconsciously took control.”

The room cracks wildly, then, and she disappears for a brief moment into darkness. The room stutters like a corrupted data file and sounds about the same. Her voice lowers dramatically, awkwardly. Her eyes burst with light and her skin seems abuzz with hues of motion despite my feeling nothing of the sort. “I-” she attempts, “-built a-” again the room shutters viciously, threatening to break down into bleak oblivion, “-pocket-”

Then my world is void of everything.

All I can sense is the quickly-fading echo claiming “-to save you….”

The year back then was Twenty-seven thousand plus change. I haven’t aged a day since. Not really.

Einfach Leben

“Einfach Leben”

a short story

Gary Baker, June 2014

Eleven o’clock and I pop the cap on my first bottle as Charlie plays on the flat screen, cigar still smoldering in the livingroom ashtray. He’s up to no good again, always off on some caper or other doing god knows what or why. I watch as the ginger rebel dons a dress and masquerades as a vegas dancer for the Prime Minister.

I wonder why they call him that; was there some other series of ministers before him? Suddenly it dawns on me that Optimus must have been the same way, otherwise he would just be Optimus, which doesn’t nearly sound as all-powerful. I mean, who in their right mind would allow some mega robot intelligence seven stories tall to roam the earth with the name of “Optimus One” or “Optimus Prototype”? No one, that’s who. The prime must mean by any indication that he is the best, by default. So the Prime Minister must be some sort of dictator for the Europeans. A man who came after a bunch of phonies who couldn’t handle cold, hard leadership.

I smile and start to refer to him as “Optimus Minister” while Charlie pretends to give him a lap dance. But it isn’t a real lap dance; no, Charlie is too good for that. He actually pockets the phone of Mr Optimus and passes it off to a rebel crony of his acting as a bouncer, then scampers off to rejoin the stage. I actually enjoy his little routine, grinning as the hairy dancer fools everyone else. Stupid sexy rebel man.

A knock at the door, frantic and bothersome. My head pounds just as hard, indicative of the hangover in full force. I free up another soot-black sea of greatness and drop it back. Another knock and I grumble without moving. The couch and I have become best friends, there’s no way I’m going to give that up, not now that the cushions have started to form around me. I feel like a rope tied to a tree for decades, the trunk slowly overtaking me until I am simply a piece of the whole.

“Trumer?” A female voice, somewhat sexy, but incredibly irritating once it dawns on me who it is. Rachel knocks again. “Trumer I know you’re in there. Open up.” In hasty annoyance to end her spiel I connect my headphones to the wireless VidBase on my coffee table, ending the audibility of the show. “Are you serious?” She berates. “I just heard you…” she sighs with an angry overtone and I knock another back trying to pry into my own mind for details.

Again with the knocking! Insatiable grumbling as I flip open the laptop and hit the power key. It comes out of sleep and straight to ComeOnMe, my latest tab. I forgo the memory-prying of the night before, now entirely sure that it was a bust after all. So much for the glory of delayed adventures remembered in glimpses over the next few days….

“Dammit, Trumer, that’s it!” I hear a jingling of keys and panic. I almost smash the computer screen when I close it so hard, just in time too as the front door opens with wicked speed and slams against the wall just inside. My first thought is that the neighbors must be vying to kill me right now, or at least those who aren’t at work. My second thought is how the hell she got a key to my apartment. Who did she play to get a key to my place without me knowing?!

Rachel glares at me with wet cheeks, eyes red and makeup dribbling down across her chin. Her hands are on her hips and her painted fingernails dig into her jeans like rounded cactus spines. Then it seems to finally hit her and her eyes go wide in shock. “Seriously?!” She rebukes -- or maybe she refutes, the throbbing pain is too much for me to think clearly and the light of day that enters in behind her from the courtyard attacks me like a million illuminated wasps, seeking the sweet spots of my retinas. She gives me a thrice-over, “where the hell are your clothes?!”

I look down over my furry flab that hoists a plate of dried-out lunchmeat like a butler, and discover that I am half-laying with nothing but boxers on. “In the wash,” I lie. “I’m waiting for them to finish so I can shower and put them on.” I purposely ignore the fact that they are still lying haphazardly across the white carpet throughout the room, and similarly I avoid all eye-contact with them as though doing so makes them not even exist.

Her cheeks soften and she perks her lips to one side, relaxing with sympathy. “Look, Trumer, I came by…” she shoots a glance at the window and tosses me a blanket from the cubby system beneath it, then sits down on an ottoman. “I came by to apologize. For last night.” Eyes wide I move the plate to the table and lean forward, covering my sorry self with a thin layer of dyed wool. “Let me guess,” she winces, noting the bottles with an overall eye wander, “you don’t remember?”

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“Ha!” Rachel throws herself back against the cushioned chair next to her, “you’re sorry! Dammit, Trumer, I’m the one who’s sorry!” Her eyes bead up and she feigns a smile. “I shouldn’t have rejected you like that. I was scared. I was pissed. I was-....” She brings her keys into her hands and watches them with what looks like reverence. “When you gave me a key to your place I thought you were asking me to marry you, and there’s no way I was ready for that!” She sighs loudly and wipes away tears with the back of her hand. “And -- wait, is that a stripper with a Hitler mustache?!”

It catches me completely three-sixty and for several moments I just stare in bewilderment. “What?” Then I see where she’s looking and realize she’s referring to Charlie. “Oh. No it’s a Charlie Chaplin mustache.”

She scowls disbelievingly. “On a stripper?”

“No,” I correct, “on an Irish rebel spy acting like a vegas feather-dancer to take down the Optimus Minister.”

“What kind of show is this?”

With a finger held high in lecture, I set down my latest bottle. “It’s the perfect mix of Charlie Chaplin, James Bond and the I - R - A. Though if you think about it, there’s quite a bit of the Stooges laced in as well.”

She shakes her head. “Whatever. Anyways I’ve been thinking about your offer and wanted to tell you that I accept...” her eyes once again take in the whole room, “although only on the condition that this never happens again.”

I sit straighter suddenly. “Are you serious?” Is she serious? What if this turns out to be a joke? A prank set up by my neighbors, or colleagues? I mean, it’s not as if I didn’t want her to say this, but I don’t even remember asking her in the first place.

Rachel’s smile is soft, caring, and totally obviously intentionally ignoring the mess nested around me. “Yes, Trumer, I am one-hundred percent serious.” She shrugs, “truth is I kinda, sorta wanted it all along anyways. I just wasn’t prepared to be asked like that, in front of all of our friends, at the exact same sitting as when Karl proposed to Jenna.” Another nervous shrug. “It sorta felt like you were only doing it because you felt the need to, that you were only asking because we’d been dating for so long.”

Maybe it’s the booze, but I scowl, “we’ve only been dating for six months….”

“Exactly!” Rachel runs her hands through her hair wildly. “And to think I almost told Jenna I hated you for asking me like that!” Then I notice the green and blue smears across her elbows. She’s been painting again. Standing, she pockets her keys and makes her way to the fridge where she concocts some sort of mixture with the rice milk, coconut water, and... was that a lime? Then she turns to me with her solution in hand, a milk mustache set upon her upper lip. “You told me something last night, while pleading your case. You said I needed to…” she glances off to the side, trying to remember, “I needed to ‘einfach leben’. I think I said that right.” She connects with my gaze again with a look of hope as I muse on how she pronounced it wrong. “Was that German?”

“It means to live simply, more or less,” I sit back and rest my hands on my lap. “That or to simply live, whichever, though to be honest I’m not entirely sure I have the grammar correct.”

“Well either way, I choose to ‘leben’ in the moment.” She comes to the couch and sweeps aside the empty bottles and detritus, then hoists her insane white, sweet-smelling mixture. “Starting with a cure for the hangover you gave yourself due to me rejecting you.” As I reach for it she lifts it to her own lips and chugs the damned glass. Grinning, she sets the empty thing down and laughs devilishly while unplugging the headphones from the jack and hits play. Instantly the sound of the rebel ginger slams into my ears as he sneakily chicken-walks off stage to the not-so-mellow jazz music.

I suddenly hate the show, but Rachel sits back and turns up the volume grinning like the Cheshire the whole damned time. Maybe it was a bad idea to give her a key after all.

Impasse

“Impasse”

a short story

Gary Baker, March 2014

Two years back I was ready to jump ship. I was standing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, looking at my feet, ready to take the plunge, and then I found God. I’d never bothered to call myself an atheist until that precise moment and, ever since then, I’ve never seen any reason to change that.

I remember the wind, the incessant tugging of air at my jacket like an unseen monstrous entity trying to throw me around. It was enough to boil the blood in my veins before I even looked down to see the bustling streets so very, incredibly far below. I inhaled deeply through my nose and held it for a second, awaiting the calming effect that it often gave, then slowly, so very slowly released it through pursed lips.

My breath quivered as it went, anxiety meshing with raw fear and a wish that it didn’t have to be this way. I opened my eyes, unaware that I had ever closed them in the first place, and looked once more upon the setting sun falling between skyscrapers. The world was coming to an end. Everything was crumbling and there was nothing I nor anyone else could do about it.

They say the ring of fire was on the verge of breaking itself, that the icecaps were gone completely and that the most recent hurricane in the Caribbean wasted it’s way all the way through to Moscow before finally petering itself out. Claims had been made that the moon was shifting in it’s orbit and that one more nudge in either direction and there would be two possible outcomes: A- it would fall toward us and be the last thing anyone ever saw, or B- it would drift away into space and would kill the cycle of weather and tides and so on. From there it was only a matter of time before the whole of human existence simply shut out like a dimming LED.

I wasn’t ready to face those consequences. My life had been perfect up until then. I had a wife, three loving children, and a career as a high market supervisor for a publishing firm at the dawn of an age when books -- real books -- had come back into style. These days everyone carried some literary document made of pulped wood and ink with them at all times. Some chose the age-old classics from the early twenty-one hundreds, with topics that bordered on the heretical dislike of technology, while others chose more modern titles spanning anything from the sciences to the dead religions that technology had slowly pushed out of society.

Yet it would all be gone in a mere echo of the dials upon a clock. Entropy had reached it’s end, and I wasn’t one to face things like that head on. What if the world burst into flames? How could my pale complexion face such a feat without hordes of pain lasting all-too long? Besides that, I hated pain. I still do.

So there I was, facing the sun for the last time with my buttoned jacket beating a quick rhythm against my throat as though drums beating out my lonesome dirge. A tear dripped down my cheek and fell from my chin. I watched it fall, eyeing the glint of refracted light as it pre-enacted what I was just about to do.

And, in the uncaring crowds below, I made eye-contact with God.

My heart skipped a beat. Maybe more than that. I just know it felt like forever that I was transfixed in those eyes. They seemed to hold everything, like miniature doorways to the whole universe with infinite stars and everything just a few cellular molecules apart. I couldn’t tell the gender from that height, but there was no mistaking who it was: all the dead religions boiled down to that one moment when what appeared to be a pitiful homeless vagrant caught the sight of a man about to end it with a half step into empty air.

Suddenly I slammed against the stone wall, my heels arching as I tried to get back to something stable. I was inside my office before I knew it and was racing lopsided to the elevator terminal even as I suddenly realized I’d lost a shoe. It didn’t matter, though, as I just had to get there. I had to meet him -- her -- it -- or whatever God claimed to be.

“Got a hot date?” Jennison Valdery mocked me as she calmly sipped her protein-infused mocha beside me. Her suit had been pressed and refitted just that morning, smoothing the edges of her elegant hips with swatches of silk-like carbon micromesh and an underlying leather-tan fabric. She eyed me with an arched painted eyebrow and eyelashes that extended all the way to her forehead as the latest fashions dictated.

“No,” I mumbled, loosening my tie awkwardly as we descended floor by floor.

She laughed that fake laugh of hers, a chuckle that was supposed to catch men off-guard. It didn’t work on me, not these days, not now that I had a purpose. We’d had an affair once or twice before, I will admit, having hit the red panel on the way down to indicate a corporate need to stop the elevator as would be done in a private meeting. It happened more than either of us wanted to admit, but I never had the heart to tell my wife.

“So then what’s the hurry?” She crossed her arms curiously and leaned against the polished steel panelling. “It’s not like the world is going to end any time soon is it?” She smirked with a wide grin of pearly teeth and deep green lips that also followed the latest styles. “Oh, wait -- I forgot: it is!” The doors opened and I began toward them. “Well, whatever,” she cooed as I passed, “the way I see it? Doesn’t mean a thing. It’ll all be dust in a few days anyways, eh?” She kept talking, but the doors had already started closing and I was well on my way through the foyer to the corner door that led outside to the unfabricated breezes and scents.

It took a second of looking anew from this alternate angle, but I found him again with another stroke of lightning in my chest. He was still there on the sidewalk, smoking the last cigarette from a now-empty pack, watching the skies and occasionally shaking his mug with a few macro M-chips inside.

Again I had a hard time telling if God was a man or woman, or even one of those who’d been born into the middle sex given by a feat of nature and technology. For a split second I wondered what he would prefer I call him. Should I address this person as ‘Sir’? ‘Ma’am’? Perhaps even ‘thei’ as had been the overall middle term for the last century?

Instead, I lost my chance -- God looked my way, dirty pudgy face and all, broken teeth jutting to the side here and there, and grime colonies seeming to decay the very flesh upon which growth was enabled. This was a person on the verge of death as well and I wondered for a split second if that was ironic. “Well don’t just stand there,” thei called, “come closer, share a smoke with me, eh?”

I wanted to move, but found myself frozen in place. What did one say to the living patron saint of the longest-lived, though still dead, religion of Earth?

We stared through billows of smoke for ages before God shook the cup again and received a few chips from a passing soul while, in the distance, someone succeeded where I had faltered. I heard the horrendous smack and winced, though no one else seemed to even notice. These days it was far too common a sight in the cities.

“Sad, that one,” God mumbled, taking another draw of the tobacco. Those eyes still held me, keeping me staring, no matter how hard I tried to get away. “Single theilen, obviously no offspring, with a fanatic tendency to paint like no other.” God pursed it’s lips to the side, “I always wondered when those chemicals would start to affect thei and convince thei to end it.”

God lifted a grubby finger with more oily dirt on it than I had ever seen this deep in the city. “Almost like you, I might add.” A welcoming, warm smile appeared and I found myself sitting cross-legged on the ionic-edge street side with someone so low comparatively that most must have thought I’d lost it. “See? No harm done, my little lamb. None at all.”

Dumbfounded I just leaned on my knees and shrugged. “Where’ve you been?” I finally breathed.

“Here,” she handed me the tobacco and I took it gingerly, since I didn’t really think I had the choice of saying ‘no’ to a smoke from God. “Now what’s this about my whereabouts?”

I drew the first breath of smoke that I’d ever done in my life and coughed instantly, much to God’s cackling humor. When I finally caught myself again, I shot him a look of annoyed wonder. “Where have you been all my life?”

God raised thei’s bushy, unshaven eyebrows as though over the wires of a pair of spectacles. “You mean to say you, or anyone living in your religiousless times for that matter, need the likes of me?”

“Well, yeah.”

“As in I, the famed-” she scowled, “well, at one time I was -- creator of all things in this universe?”

I glanced to people casually passing by as the world counted down it’s last moments. They all seemed so calm, so eerily unaware. I wanted to grab one of them by the shoulders and shake them, asking frantically “don’t you care? Are you not afraid? Am I the only one who sees this?!” Instead I returned my gaze to God’s eyes, those magnificent eyes that held eons of everything imaginable. It was ironic that suddenly I had the inspiration to write books upon books on anything that came to mind, and all when I had perhaps a day or so to live. “Well I sort of had a bad week last week.”

“Meaning?”

“I stubbed my toe when getting out of my sleeping capsule, then forgot to put on my autodetection ring and was locked out of the vehicle pod for hours while I searched through messes of everything in my home for it, and things just kept getting worse for me.”

“And you just assumed I had nothing better to do.”

I shrugged, “if there was ever a time where I wished a god existed to control my fate then that was it!”

She nodded with lips pursed around the cigarette, “hmm, you wanted someone to blame it all on.” Her face became a flurry of wrinkles as she drew again and frowned at me, then handed the tobacco back for me to do the same. “Alright, lamb,” God mumbled while streaming thick smoke from her nostrils, “look at me. What do you see?”

I finally inhaled smoke without choking and let it sit in my lungs for a bit, as I’d seen God do, before releasing it into the wild air again. But I did look him over as commanded, noting the scraps of sullied trash bags used as a makeshift belt, the stains of God-knew-what, and gave myself a moment to chuckle at that thought, coating his every last garment. He wore sneakers three sizes too small, his toes peeking out of mouth-like holes in the forefronts, and laces so frayed it looked like God had assembled them from body hair over the years. He was overweight, yet anorexically thin in the same glance, where the rags neglected to cover his pasty diseased skin, and each breath both expanded his visible ribcage as well as tightened the cellulite beneath that.

“Are you looking?” Thei asked. “I mean really, truly looking at me?”

“Yeah, and?”

“Krishna, lamb!” She cursed. “Why do you think I look like this? Why would an all-powerful being choose to be poorer than dirt, or eat scraps of food leftover after the rats are done, eh?”

I was silent, trying to figure out a good response.

“Or how about this one,” he shot again, “if I were so benevolent and all-powerful, why would I allow the universe to be about to collapse for your kind?”

I frowned at my one remaining glossy neosuede shoe, letting the tobacco ease my anxiety. “Because… you’re just an asshole?” As soon as I’d said it, I hated myself.

God smirked joyously and I watched as thei made the cigarette grow back to full length and reignite itself, then took a dramatically long pull. As thei released the smoke with a sigh, God rolled thei’s eyes toward me awkwardly. “Exactly.”

Suddenly I felt wronged. The world was about to end and all because the last living god had simply decided he was annoyed with humanity? What gave him -- her -- thei the right? “Are you serious?” I jabbed and snatched the tobacco away from the bastard.

“Completely,” she sniffed angrily. She crossed her arms and fell backwards onto her pile of things that looked more like trash blown in on the wind. “Think of it this way, lamb: I am the last god out there. All the others faded away as science inevitably snipped us out of the human mind. We once reigned over everything, you know, our power limited only by the vast numbers of those who worshipped us, and now only I exist due to scholars unwillingly acknowledging me because of a book I, more or less, wrote eons before their time.” She rolled onto her side to face me as she took the tobacco back for another pull. “Obviously I was pissed. Science had, in fact, won out on us all and there wasn’t even a god at it’s center for us to complain to. So I made an ultimatum: starting on this coming Tuesday I will only allow your universe to exist for one day for each soul that believes in me. Just one, each.”

I gaped and smoke dribbled from my lips. “No shit,” I breathed exasperatedly.

“Trust me, there’s shit,” he huffed angrily, “and it’s all your lousy asses that walk this earth, too. Nothin’ shittier than a bunch of worshipers ignoring you and your miracles for the plain-old screen of the latest phone.”

Then it struck me: there was a loophole. “So, wait, you mean to say that if, say, three people were to start worshipping you right now you would let the earth live for another three days beyond Tuesday?”

Thei grinned. “That’s exactly what I mean, little lamb.”

“So,” I hesitated; how to word this in a way that God would tell me completely? “How do I get atheists to start believing in a disproven god?” Then I startled with a shock of realization. “Wait -- how do I prove you to me? I can’t go out there spreading the word of your sorry ass if I don’t even believe in you.”

Crossing his nasty-smelling arms under his head as a pillow, God laughed lightly. “Well you can always wait until December twenty-fifth to find out for yourself if I’m legitimate or not.”

“But that’s this Tuesday!”

“As I said: I’m giving you humans until my son’s birthday to start worshipping me, and from then on I will only give you shits one day per believer to continue existing.” The grin on her lips was frighteningly dark.

The Day I Played with Fire

"The Day I Played with Fire"

a short story

Gary Baker, February 2014

The rain was soft, much softer than I expected it to be as I lay there, blood dribbling down across my gaping eyelids, wondering if this was success that I was finally feeling.

It started days ago. Too many, if you ask me, but for relevancy I'll keep it to a minimum. I want to say it began all suddenly and out of the blue, but in all reality it didn't. I had seen this coming for weeks, months -- hell, I'd seen this coming years ago, not that I had ever admitted it right out. I did cry out for help, though, don't get me wrong. I didn't let fate take me lightly. My shoulders had been increasingly white over the last few weeks, and neither the hype nor the meds did anything to alleviate as much.

Three days back I was at work, sitting in on a meeting with my boss as I geared up for a promotion of sorts.

"Craig," she said, with that all-too-familiar scowl of approval set upon her cheeks, "don't forget that you represent us, this store, when you go there." She sat back in her black leather office chair, waving her gilded pen like a baton between her dexterous right-hand fingers, and crossed her leg like a stereotypical cubicle boss. She was the kind of boss people would search for years to work under, not sexy and thus not someone people rumored about as having slept around to get to where she was. She was competent, and that showed through her every demeanor, whether it was her loose-fitting pin-stripe slacks, or her semi-mustache that appeared every time she'd been up late trying to reconfigure something that would increase sales.

She was talking about my transfer. It was purported to be something to help me ease into the higher-ups, almost like a stepping stone that no one else was willing to bat an eye at me with. I was lucky to have her as my superior, much more so to have her be willing to take this big of a risk on my development. If I failed, she would forever be marred by her mistake in vouching for me, and she made that clear from the get-go. Almost a 'no pressure, but if you don't succeed you won't be ruining just your own life' kind of moment.

But really: no pressure.

Things changed from there. As I worked the next day at the store I was transferring to, I met the new bosses that I would be under for the next segment of my career, and found out I wasn't as perfect as I had been talked about.

"Look, kid," the new superior pointedly stood when there where seats to be sat in, "we don't just need someone to fill the shoes of someone for a while, we need a good. Hard. Worker." He turned to the door, then and led the way to my new abode, a place where the hardware and the good old nuts and bolts of the store could be found. With a wave of his hands, he indicated the spread of my new domain, "this isn't just some department of yours," he wavered on obedience training as though I were some mutt out of the pound. "This isn't even your new home. It's our backbone, and if it doesn't move right, neither does the rest of our little contraption. You got me?" Suddenly he smiled, all eager-to-please and beaming with delight, "but I trust you'll do the right thing, don't you worry."

It took me an hour to learn the new way of things, even though I was doing anything but the job I was transferred to do, and by the time my lunch hit I was ready to call it a day. I eagerly pushed into the oddly-circular room where I had placed my bag and tore into my lunch: a mere toasted bagel with Skippy and strawberry Weston jam, as I ate the words of my latest book as well. It was then that my phone buzzed. At first I ignored it, thinking it anything but important, and dove back into the other world just pages beneath my nose.

The hero was valiantly staggering through a dark, murky hallway, where the bestial juggernaut golemn had laid it's final trap. My heart was racing as I followed him, seeking answers in the authors tone, knowing something bad was about to happen and yet not able to tell Lord Graedel what I thought it might be. The hallway was obliviously dark, the sewer water fogging the scene as he tread deeper and deeper. He gripped the hilt of his sword when he heard a noise -- and my phone buzzed again, shattering the illusion.

It buzzed a second time, and then a third, and finally a fourth, before settling into peaceful calmness again as I reached for my second bite of an awkward bagel PB&J. Something was up, and it set me on edge, though I hadn't the slightest as to why. So I flipped open my phone, saw the six missed messages, and felt that electric jolt of anxiety that normally accompanied the fear that someone had died, or was dying and needed to talk to me of all people to say their last words via text or some shit like that.

What I got, instead, was something way out of left field: "Craig, the bank called", "wtf is wrong with you? can't you pay one godam bill?!", "this is ruining our credit you dumbfk!!!!"

I didn't even have the capacity to read the rest, nor to acknowledge the bad spelling like the English major that I was deep inside. It felt like I was having a heart attack. My veins had turned to ice, my heart into a rave-like beat sped up via Garage Band or Music Pro or some software like that, and my breathing reflected that of a dead mouse. Finally I un-clenched my throat and inhaled as if I'd been under water for ten minutes, and clatteringly dropped my escape to the table. My world was over. I was going to die.

It took deep breaths, controlled as if I'd had an asthma attack like when I was a kid, and took serious forces to bring myself back to reality. I told myself that everything was going to be okay, that my life wasn't over, and that I was surely the butt of some douche-bag joke played by... no, wait, they wouldn't joke with me, they never had and probably never would.

The panic then returned and took another series of moments to bring back under control. No amount of alcohol could solve this for me, and besides that I was midway through the toughest day I had had at work in ages. I wasn't just there to work, I was there to make an impression. But fuck whomever expected me to be calm in a time like this: my life was ending and I had to get away.

I tried the book again, but couldn't concentrate. I tried force-feeding the remainder of my breakfast, lunch and dinner, all one meal of a bagel with peanut butter and etc, but found my appetite gone and my diseased stomach a turbulent organ of chaos at that point. So I threw the rest away and clocked back in.

The next few hours went by as though slowed down by the hand of some sick deity trying to mess with my head more than had already been messed with. Minutes felt like hours and hours like days, until, finally, I found the seat of my hatchback and sighed so loud I may as well have moaned with ecstasy. In seconds I had thumbed the radio onto full and had the engine turning over, when I overheard the news of impending rain.

Normally this would have been a bad thing for me, not being one to enjoy it full-on like the rest of those I worked with, but this time I relished the idea for some sick reason that I had yet to decipher. So I drove home with the odd music of a lonesome oldies station playing as my backdrop to a dreary, dark night, which only further brought my mood into the shitstorm of what was to come. I felt the sorrow of a blues singer who'd lost his lover to a doctor in Manhattan, I felt the regret of a country singer who'd left home to see the world only to find out he left his best girl behind, and actually felt the pain of a man playing the harmonica to the beat of jazz flutes and percussion as he sang melodious tunes of a girl who'd died on her way to meet up with him where he'd planned on proposing.

By the time I got home to my apartment I was practically bawling but, choosing to 'be a man', instead held it in and grit my teeth against what should have been otherwise expressed right then and there.

I made my way to the door, just then, and entered into a dark living room where I quickly found a note from my best friend, roommate and lover of over ten years, claiming: "hun, please stop avoiding my parents, they are just trying to help you. They didn't mean to type it the way that they did, and are sorry for that. Please talk to me tomorrow when you get home." She had then penned in with another color of ink at what seemed last minute due to her handwriting "PS: please be quiet coming in, I work at four a.m. and I know how you stumble around at night when you aren't thinking. Love ya!"

Yeah, right. So I bedded down on the couch, heart racing once again, and eased into sleep as fluidly as green branches might catch on fire.

The next day came like the last in that I learned more about where it was I would be staying for the next segment and also more ridicule by those with whom I would be working. Lunch came without the everlasting throes of fear induced by malicious texts, which were so sarcastically missed, and I found refuge in knowing that my hero somehow survived his plight by expecting the beast to be in the shadows instead of the murky, glowy sewage, and had thrown himself into harms way to avoid the worst of it all. He was wounded to hell and back, though, and walked away dripping neon waste with more than just a few scrapes as he limped back into the light of day again, valiant and heroic as ever before, knowing he had vanquished the worst of his problems while down in the deep.

The rain then started at just about the same time that a customer was telling me how bad I was at my job, all because I refused to take a clearly fraudulent return. She didn't rest there, either: no, she claimed I was a 'hell-hole of a human being' and that I have been should be ashamed of even existing.

So I smiled and told her with a straight face that I was; and I meant it. She was right. I had no reason to argue with her about returning a brand our company had never carried, nor about how our company would not allow returns into cash without the receipt nor tag being present. I was a pitiful human being. I failed on bills, I avoided stressing situations, I was heavily taxed when thinking about any sort of finance, and fuck it all I was a man, treating a woman with anything other than complete reverie.

"You're right: I should be hanged," I told her in my own mind, and walked off without saying a single real word edgewise, much to my dismay. The day then passed by as quickly as ever, until the closing supervisor came in and relieved me of duty so I could thankfully head home in pouring down rain.

I bit my lip as I phased into my car, not even aware of the water that had already drenched me in the fifty feet I had walked to get there, and felt the metallic blood well up onto my tongue. Then my phone buzzed again.

I didn't even have to read it, as the next two came in one after the other from the same "You Know Who" name. Apparently I had changed both her parents names to the same nuance as each other, though I knew not when. What then threw me was when the phone began to ring that incessant "carry on my way-yward so-ooon, there'll be peace whe-n you are go-oone" and I was not in the mood for Styx at all just then.

"Yeah?" I answered.

"Craig," came the voice of her father, the husband of my co-signer, "just the man I was wanting to talk to." I wanted to say 'no shit, that's why you called me' and thus felt like a complete ass for even thinking that. The rain on my rooftop drowned out the sounds of birds that would have lightened my mood just then, and so I felt myself dropping even further as the man went on. "Look," he said, suddenly all serious, "we need to figure out what's going on with that loan of yours." Of course it was my loan when it came down to me needing to start paying it off, despite my financial inability right then, whereas it was always our loan when they told others about how they had helped me go abroad all those years ago.

"Yeah, I know, I've been trying to contact the bank," I lied, "but unfortunately I keep working hours where I start before the bank opens and I get out after they close." I gave a pause to let that sink in. Realistically I had worked those hours, but only for the last couple of days. In all reality I had no excuse for leaving it unpaid, despite the heart-race that it gave me whenever I so much as thought of it. "I can call their regional hotline, if you'd like?"

He sighed audibly, making it obvious that I was the male organ out of the two of us. It wasn't as if I didn't already feel that way, but hearing the aura of someone who absolutely despises you kind of puts an extrasensory damper on things that becomes hellishly hard to describe. "No -- just," he sighed again, angry with me as had become the usual, "go in when you have a chance. You remember how long it took to sort this all out when you had to call them after the college lost your records. We don't want that again." He grumbled to someone in the background, and came back with the sound of his fingers coming off the microphone. "I trust you'll get this sorted out, Craig. Talk to you later," and abruptly hung up.

I wanted to die right then, and it felt like I was -- with how heavy my heartbeat had become, still sitting in the parking lot of my new workplace, with more water heaving onto my car than a typical car wash could have done for twice the usual pay. I hated everything. I was avoiding bills that affected more than just myself, I was too wet-behind-the-ears for the job I hadn't even fully transferred into, I had been called out on being the worst of human beings in all of existence, was avoiding the dentist where I could get my two root canals taken care of all because I had a fear of the sounds their tools make, and had found myself locked in a steel box on wheels...

...while rain slicked the roads.

In an instant, I knew what had to be done.

It was a good fifteen mile ride before I chose the place I would do it at, all with the ruse of making it appear like a normal accident. So I hit eighty, my usual 'I'm in a hurry' speed, as I came upon my exit, and gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, my breath coming in nonexistent inhales and my heart making one long hum in my chest.

Then the guardrail hit the front bumper.