OPEN TO AN OCEAN by Tommy Dean

He circles the fountain like an animal pushed out of his habitat. The heat smothers his body. It’s the tenth day above ninety, and still they—the powerful men he imagines sitting in a tall building chewing on ice and swiveling in office chairs whose leather seats cool these men’s backs as they laugh at the little boys like him—won’t open up the water tower reserves. He flaps his hands at the sun, but it trains its unforgiving eye on his narrow shoulders. He’s heard about invisible rays, but today they punch and slap, making his skin as tight as the tops of conga drums.

His mother calls to him from their lofty apartment until her voice breaks. It’s even hotter in the room he shares with his Uncle and older brother. They pass a cigarette back and forth, argue about politics that they are too poor to change, their words pouting in the rising smoke.

“Go play,” they say. “Be a kid, Damian.”

He wants to ask them why he can’t be a kid in his room, one who colors or reads books, who gets to lay in the bed for once and not the pile of blankets on the floor. Why must he have to run and jump, and be the plaything of gnats and wasps?

But they bully him with their bodies, their sloping shoulders, and cantaloupe necks, their voices chasing him out the door and into the street, where though he mingles with trash and dust, there is space to twirl, to hoot, and cry behind the grocer’s dumpster’s because he can’t reach the lids.

The alleys offer shadows, the closest he can come to sunblock, but there are noises of machines and of ghouls, legends of harm that take him back to the fountain. He scuffs his feet along the brick, wishing they were wedges of cheese or sliced watermelon. He bends his head over his knees and sniffs. He waits for the birds, but they no longer linger or scuttle across the stone path, no longer squawk for a piece of bread. They hide somewhere not so far away, but still, they remain unreachable. Like the river of his mother's eyes where the happiness has receded away from the banks, making everything dull with cracked dirt.

And still, she calls for him, because even without water, even with the searing heat, her instinct is to love him, and so he begins to dance. Soft humming from the well of his lungs gives him rhythm, round and round the spigot buried beneath the brick. Faster his body lurches, arms raised toward the sky in a toddler's desperation, until the people gather around him, air springing from their lips. The ground shakes beneath his feet, soles of his shoes clopping, echoing, calling for his mother to join him. Two, three days, he keeps watch for his mother, the people babbling her name, though he’s never spoken it out loud. They are connected like a string between tin cans, vibrations from his dance catching on the wind, sound so pungent, his mother almost falls from her window as she leans toward him ready to receive the pieces of him he’s willing to sacrifice for these first drops of rain, her tears running rustily down her cheek. The people shouting, “Now, boy, you’ve done it,” and “Don’t stop!” and “They won’t ignore us now.”

But they do, these men in their towers, lazing in their pools, watching with frozen grins until the boy collapses. Only then do they relent, a swipe of a hand, and their machines come alive sending a streaking signal toward the ground, quick as lightning, but soundless, as the pipes gurgle and then gush, the fountain erupting. The mother wades through the crowd, women parting, children hiccuping as they are held back until this mother touches her child near his neck, water seething around his nose and mouth. His eyes open to an ocean.

Continue Reading...

THE DEATH OF JANNICK MEISNER by Avee Chaudhuri

David Tilker is a brewer located in San Antonio, Texas, and he hired me last spring to write his biography. During his vetting process he read some of my work, including two stories here at X-R-A-Y about a character named Jannick Meisner. In the second of these stories, “I Was Married By A German Expressionist,” Jannick officiates a wedding for two close friends and orchestrates a violent and spectacular confrontation with a guest during the ceremony. This guest is actually Jannick’s secret lover. Jannick’s antics intrigued David Tilker and he asked, in a hopeful tone, if the events of that purported work of fiction were based in truth and whether Jannick Meisner might actually be a real life individual.

Jannick Meisner is real, I admit. His audacity is real. The danger he once posed is real. I met him first in Lake Charles.  We were drinking buddies. And we had many mutual friends and I too was a guest at that infamous wedding, on the bride’s side. I witnessed the whole fight. For his own amusement, Jannick had fisticuffs at a wedding he was presiding over. Tilker’s immediate reaction was: you have got to find this bastard, this iconoclast, and bring him to San Antonio. David Tilker was getting married and he wanted the Jannick Meisner treatment.

The finder’s fee was considerable, enough to keep me in single malt scotch for a year, so I agreed to the preposterous task of drawing Meisner out. I first traveled to Lake Charles to search for Meisner at his usual haunt, Pappy’s Bar and Grill. According to the regulars, he had gone to New Orleans to join the Merchant Marine. So I then went to New Orleans and endured the hipsters and tourists and confederate flag wavers and the lousy goddamn smell of the place. I found Meisner’s ship, just back from Kolkata, and his captain complained that Jannick had abandoned the crew in Ho Chi Minh City, to trade in exotic birds.

That night I phoned Tilker to give him an update. He became excitable, “Yes! Follow the goddamn Bavarian to the ends of the earth, if you must.” David Tilker had become infatuated with Meisner and had even started taking German lessons at Texas State University.

So I went to Vietnam. It is a vibrant country. The people are remarkable. Meisner had gotten into trouble with the local authorities and had fled across the border into Laos. And from there he had gone to Myanmar, all the while traveling with a contingent of small, colorful, rare birds he had captured and trained to circle above him and terrorize any who might reproach him, or show any unkindness to children or defenseless women. In point of fact, he became a sort of myth on the Indochinese peninsula, protector of the innocent, that sort of mawkish thing. But like all lawgivers he had flaws, in his case an obsession with orgasm control. His partner would have to bring him to the threshold and stop, and repeat and stop, all day. The criteria for loving Jannick physically was simply burdensome. According to the people I interviewed, ranging from simple villagers to high powered businessmen in Bangkok, he never reciprocated.

In Singapore, exhausted, I confirmed Meisner had chartered a flight to Brussels, and in Brussels I tracked down an apartment he had rented. I went there armed with whiskey and diazepam, only to find that the apartment had been recently abandoned and that it contained the corpses of six murdered Interpol agents. Jannick was the target of an expansive investigation into the smuggling of endangered species.

“Jesus fucking Christ” I said volubly at a cafe afterwards, and they scoffed at me as if I were yet another Ugly American.

“I’m coming home,” I told Tilker in an email. He was not amused but he understood. Meisner had gone completely unhinged.

I flew back to the States in August of 2018, after months away. In early September, I was reading all the local Texas newspapers for the sports pages. I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m a bit of a gambler and I like to bet primarily on high school women’s bowling. And yes, there is a sexual element to it, if we are being frank. Out of Marathon, I happened to glance at the Life & Culture section. There was a photograph of Jannick Meisner, though the caption read Jeff Coolbody, standing next to the sculpture of what appeared to be a deformed giraffe.

After Brussels, Jannick had come back to the States and settled in West Texas. Every day huge shipments of animal feces were carted to him on the Missouri Pacific or some other rail line and he would take the feces and shape them into the animals which produced them. This was an artistic medium that began in Russia, Jannick told me. He’d sold the birds and in turn had received enough money to afford the logistics of his art, the cooperation of the railroads and zookeepers, et cetera. I went to visit him and he welcomed me with a five course meal.

“This is my dream. I dreamt of this since I was a boy in Munich,” he said.

“And what of Tilker’s wedding? He’ll pay you handsomely,” I said.

“But I’m happy. I am at peace,” Meisner said to me and I believed him. He bid me Gute Nacht, reminding me of the spare room and the full liquor cabinet and the Wi-Fi password before shuffling off to bed.

Perhaps this will surprise no one, but the death I speak of is not literal. It is the death of an idea: the insane, cornered, malevolent, discerning German. He is no longer that person, and he can no longer be properly embellished, at least by a serial abuser like me. His artistic conceit is odd, very odd,  but he is earnest about it, like a young child coloring. Nothing to disparage there, though certainly nothing to lionize. And there is no twist, by the way. I promise you. Were this one of my usual accounts, Jannick would have died while working on an elephant. Its torso would collapse on top of him.

All I can say is that Jannick was alive and happy and real when I left him. He works under aliases obviously. He cannot stay in Marathon forever, since he is still a wanted man. He’ll be moving soon, I imagine, but follow the smell and look on his works.

Continue Reading...

A CATALOGUE OF TEMPORARY OBJECTS by Clio Velentza

One by one they sat for their portraits. Littlest ones first. They stopped at the door and undid their braids. They rubbed their hair with vinegar and pinched their cheeks. The oldest ones were fearsome, they didn’t know how to listen anymore. One pricked her finger and spread the blood on her lips. They rolled up their ribbons and stuck them in their shoes. They spat and brushed their eyebrows. One by one. Littlest ones first, these ones still had hope.

The photographer had one grey eye and one black. He would close an eye to look at them, and then the other. The grey eye was polite and dim. The black one was the one they liked best, because it seemed to tell the truth. Then he hid underneath the cape of the machine. The headmistress thought it looked too much like he was putting his head under a skirt.

The stool was perilously high and had a cushion embroidered in Latin. The littlest ones sat squarely. The oldest ones parted their knees a finger’s width. The headmistress slapped those shut.

“We’re looking for parents, not husbands.”

The photographer took his time. Every now and then he emerged and observed them for a while with both his mismatched eyes. The littlest ones laughed at that. The oldest ones sometimes teared up, sometimes clutched at their chests as if recalling something urgent.

flash

“What are you making?”

“A catalogue of temporary objects.”

flash

“What is an object?”

“What my black eye can see.”

flash

“What is temporary?”

“What my grey eye can’t see.”

flash

“Am I an object?”

flash

“Am I temporary?”

One by one they sat. One by one they stepped off the stool, blinded by the light.

Continue Reading...

KENTUCKY SHITS by Giovanni DeJaneiro

Steven lived alone in a small house on a cattle ranch at the bottom of a hidden valley.  He didn’t have city water, air conditioning, or internet. The kitchen stank. Empty beers crowded the table and counters and stovetop.  A flyswatter hung on the wall—flies hummed through the air. Dishes towered in the sink. Bright orange slime curdled in a dirty saucer, seemingly the source of the hideous reek.

He inflated a mattress in the family room, where a floral couch faced a huge wood stove.  Grains of rice, toenail clippings, bottle caps, and dirty tissues overspread the coffee table.  Envelopes and invoices carpeted the carpet alongside coins and coasters and crumpled socks and another flyswatter.

The mattress deflated while I slept.  I woke up on the floor. Steven wasn’t awake.  I took a shit and washed my hands. Stripping down, I tiptoed into the tub.  I let the water warm and danced under the stream.

Fifteen minutes later, the water choked and ceased.  

The water deliveryman said he couldn’t refill the cistern until Monday.  Steven had to wash up with bottled water in the bathroom sink. We agreed not to shit in the toilet.  I told Steven I would shit at the library. But I clenched my ass until I didn’t have to go.

I sat on the porch and watched Steven leave for work.  I would have been at the office had I not decided to quit.  I elbowed my brain and feigned gratitude, but then I took a hit and forgot.  Fat cows grazed in the green hills and birdsong twinkled in my ear. The landlord’s guard dogs, tongues dangling, bandied into my arms and shed handfuls of dirty coat as soft as warm crayons.  The sun smiled like my grandma and even the wasps seemed lazy.

But I couldn’t relax.  Dry mouth and bad breath and eye boogers, dog shit, bullshit, dead flies and glue traps swarmed my mind, among other things.  I felt like a fugitive. I managed to smoke the feeling out of my head, as well as every thought until I achieved dementia.

I never worried about smoking myself stupid—a return to innocence would have been a happy turn of the screw.  No, I worried about smoking myself eccentric and unemployable. I took another hit and blew my brains into the ether.  

When Steven came home, we ate bad pizza and drank vodka with Coke.  We both drank too much. Steven caved and took a shit he couldn’t flush.  I tried to browse porn on my phone, but I didn’t have enough bars.

Steven seemed exasperated after his shit.  I laughed at him.

“Hey, are you sure you don’t want me to pay some rent where I’m here?”

“No.  You’re my guest.  You can stay as long as you want.”  

“Okay, cool.  I’m not going to move in, you know.  Remember, I’m going to Colorado the week after next, so I’ll be out of your hair soon.”

“So, why exactly do you want to move to Colorado again?”

“I don’t know—a change of scenery.  Mountains, I like mountains. And weed is legal—”

Steven smiled.

“Bullshit.  You’re full of shit.  I know why you’re going.”

I made a funny face.

“Why?”

“Because of that girl, right?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Look, man, I don’t mean to doubt your judgment, but I have to say, I’m a little worried.  She requested me on Facebook—”

“Yeah, I told her about you.”

“It says she’s in a domestic partnership with someone.  Is she married or something?”

“What?  No. She has a boyfriend, but I don’t like him.  I mean, I’m definitely a homewrecker. But this time I paid for the home I’m wrecking.”  

“What do you mean?”

“I mailed her five hundred dollars last month so she wouldn’t have to sell her car to make rent.  It’s just that she gets her license next month, provided she doesn’t have another seizure. She’s so close, and I would hate for her to have to sell her car, and I love her—”

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do or anything, but you should be careful.  So she doesn’t take advantage of you.”

“She’s not, no, it’s not like that.  I also bought her some concert tickets and a stuffed animal for her birthday, but she didn’t expect or ask for any of those things, you know?”   

“Okay, I hear you.  You know her better than I do.  I’m just saying, in my experience, poor people can’t love.”  

“Is that right?”

“Look, all I’m saying is, be careful.  You want another beer?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, get it yourself.  Get me one, too.”

Steven waddled toward the bathroom.

“I’m probably going to shit myself.  Jesus Christ! Was there a time when I didn’t have to shit myself?  I guess this is what it means to be a prisoner.”

I tried to browse porn again, but the page wouldn’t load.  I also tried to look up the average salary of technical writers in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.  But the page wouldn’t load.

“Stay out of the bathroom for a while.”

I chuckled and changed the subject.  

“I’m so fucked, man.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I shouldn’t have quit. I should have learned how to code!”

“Maybe, but I think you would kill yourself if you were a coder.”  

“Yeah, probably.  I don’t know how you do what you do.  I know I couldn’t.”

“Well, I’m only working where I’m working because I want to buy the company eventually.”

“What, really?  How?”

“They offered me stock options when I started, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.  They’re full of shit. The reality is that I’m lucky they haven’t fired me. And if I don’t make $300,000 by the end of the year, they might.”

“Damn, man.”

“Yeah.  I’m in sales because I could make a lot more money faster than any engineer.  That’s the carrot they dangle in front of me, anyway. It’s not bad, but I don’t like it.  It’s about the money. Why do you think people do it? It’s funny, my manager told me, you work hard, you buy a Porsche and a nice watch, and then you get a girl.  I’m like, is that true? And he’s like, yeah, that’s what I did! I knew my character wasn’t going to get me by. That’s why I put a spoiler on my car.”

“Well, goddamn.  I don’t know, man.  That’s bleak. I can’t believe people live like that.”

We laughed.  I raised my voice.

“Don’t you want to FIRE, man?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Financial Independence, Retire Early, man!  I’ve been reading this Reddit, the financial independence Reddit, and these people, they’re like bankers and coders and shit.  They advocate living below your means and putting your savings in stocks so you can retire early.”

“That’s just spastic retard shit.  I actually talk to CEOs and people in charge of shit all the time, and once you’ve heard enough about the way stocks are, you know, created, you realize it’s all bullshit.  It’s made up.”

“What, you don’t want to retire early, man?”

“Retire early?  For what?”

“I don’t know, some people said they want to play video games in solitude, you know.”

“So?  They can play video games anytime.”

“But they want to play video games all the time—some of them.”

“Well, good luck with that.  Hey man, I’m sorry, but I don’t feel too great.  I’m going to go to bed, alright?”

“Hey, that’s fine.  Farewell and goodnight!  Feel better, man.”

“Thanks.  Goodnight.”

I woke up in the middle of the night with a stomachache.  I unspooled a wad of toilet paper and stumbled outside. The guard dogs barked and howled somewhere in the valley.  I thought they might ambush me. Panicked, I fumblingly unbuckled my pants and squeezed runny shit in the grass behind the barn.  The odor gagged me. More and more dogs began to bark and howl. I braced myself for a fight.

The dogs didn’t show.  I wiped my ass and attempted to scoop the wet pile into a plastic bag.  Liquid shit speckled my fingers. I sniffed them and threw up. My stomach finally settled.  I tossed the bag of shit and went back to sleep.

The next day, Steven still had the shits.  He thought he might have to go to the hospital, he shit so much.  I held my shit, but I had to piss in the toilet several times. We slowly flooded the toilet.  

It was too hot to go outside.  Having sweated all day and all night, grease slicked my skin and I couldn’t breathe through either nostril.  Using his phone as a mobile hotspot, Steven streamed a South Korean police drama on his laptop. We watched thirteen hours of the show, pausing only to piss and shit and order takeout.  

Steven insisted I try Joella’s Hot Chicken.  

“No, I want the real thing.  Let’s get some Kentucky Fried Chicken,” I drawled in a terrible southern accent.  

“I’m telling you, they don’t have KFC in Kentucky.”

“No way, I definitely saw a KFC near the highway.”

“Well, yeah, there’s KFC, but they’re usually attached to Long John Silver’s.”

“Weird, I’ve only ever seen Taco Bell Pizza Hut.”

“Have you tried Cincinnati chili?”

“What, that orange shit in your sink?”  

Sunday afternoon, the water deliveryman came.  I watched him back up the driveway in a red pickup with a rusty tank chained to the bed.  He slipped a green hose inside a hole in the front yard and poured forty dollars of water into the cistern.  Here’s a productive member of society, I thought, a pillar of the community.

Steven and I cheered when the faucets sputtered water.  We could finally flush the toilet—a small victory. I could smell my crotch through my jeans, so I immediately took a shit and a shower.  

When the cistern ran dry, I thought I was roughing it, but I couldn’t imagine having no electricity, no clothes, no shelter, least of all no money to spin the situation.  The house could burn down, my car could blow up, my clothes could shrink and my family could die. I would still have enough money to live.

I couldn’t believe I had quit my job and wound up staying rent-free in a quaint home on an isolated cattle ranch in rural Kentucky.  People aspire toward my rock bottom, work their whole lives away. I feared the worst was yet to come.

I stared at the ceiling and contemplated suicide. I suppose I should have been grateful for my life and my friend and running water, but I felt undead and lonely and thirsty.  I suppose I should have been grateful for the opportunity to kill myself, but I couldn’t decide how I wanted to die.

I didn’t want to shoot myself because I’m a lousy shot.  I didn’t want to jump because I’m afraid of heights. I didn’t want to slash my wrists because I’m squeamish.  I didn’t want to overdose because I might wind up merely brain-dead, a drooling caricature in a bed of medical bills, confined to my mother’s basement for the rest of my life.

My mother didn’t want children, she wanted dogs.  Turns out she’s allergic to dogs. But she wasn’t back then.  I couldn’t understand why she bothered to create me. Childbearing is busywork, childrearing a career all its own.  She must have loved my father.

I would’ve liked to have been a dog.  I could have shit anywhere. I opened the fridge and grabbed several slices of raw bacon.  I sat on the porch. Waving the bacon, I watched the guard dogs scamper toward me.

Continue Reading...

DUETS AND THE CRACK IN EVERYTHING by Nayt Rundquist

She’ll break open the world, just a bit, and tell them how they’ll end, how they’ll get there, who’ll wrong them along the way. They’ll drown in it, their fates, choking to take it all in, no matter how certain they’d been they could swim. But she’ll be there, on the shore, waiting to pull them sputtering back to present, steaming stew to fend off the chill.

Creaking floorboards in her age-shriveling hut groan as she grunts across them, fists stabbing her curving spine. Her clawhand brandishes her knife, her only artifact that still carries a sheen. The blade slices into its aria she dances to through arthritic muscle memory reinforced by years, decades, centuries? of their duets. But it’s imperfect—a jagged slice through one molecule, split in lopsided halves.

Crack in everything as she punctures a hole in the universe—just a little one, barely big enough to see through—with a finger gnarled and knotted as a tree root. And it pulls at her soulstuffs, tears at it, whipping it like her hair when she walked alone through that hurricane. But she’s used to this vacuum; she knows it and can stand it. And she folds the knife back on itself, back through the years, back through its own past, sharpening it ’til it’s like brand new, ’til it is brand new, ’til it’s sharper than when He’d plunged it into her heart.

Flawless melody this time, and she harmonizes—humming just soft enough of a hoarse to match the vibrations in her chest to those of her instrument. Carrots, ugly and gnarled as her fingers, are first for the cauldron. The knife breezes through, whispering so quiet only the carrot can hear.

She stitches up that crack in everything with a hasty swipe of a clawhand, smearing ethereal sludge through the air, through spacetime. She’ll find that blood last Tuesday and three months in the future. The crack would have self-sealed eventually, but best not to chance it. He’d left them open, slathering gashes—pus-oozing wounds in the flesh of existence. The lesions still find her, dragging behind them slathering reminders of Him, of how He’d haunted her, hunted her, made love to her, whispering so softly only her heart could hear.

Her door will moan open, as He had moaned. A visitor will arrive. She’ll stumble to add more vegetables to the cauldron. She’ll be so off her time, this guest will have a long wait, a longer reading—a deeper well to surface from.

But its bones will creak as it shambles over the threshold. Its claws rasp off the knob, still enough left alive, nearly alive, within to confuse its way through old habits. Heelbones will click ’cross warped floorboards, worn through leather skin from such shambling—stalking. Wisps of remnant hair drift in the gasps of wind it’ll welcome into her home, a jaundiced, shriveled husk drowning in the breeze.

She could shriek a thousand spells, infinite curses, wards, hexes, repellents, but it’s heard those excuses before. Instead, she’ll watch. Cast her eyes into the abyssal pools sunken into its blanched, parchment skull. There, within those swirling pools of nothing, of absolute absence, she’ll find the one thing she dares not search for—the one crack that can’t be mended, that would tear existence from itself, and the universe and everything that ever was and will be and might be and shouldn’t be but will be anyway will whisper out of existence—softer than His nothings, softer than her knife through carrots. Oblivion will be silent. It shows her her own future in this where without a when.

And it’ll sway there, three steps into her home. Creak as what remains of its leathery skin twitches and shifts over shredded muscle. Creak as its eyes clutch hers as tightly as He had, as tightly as she’d grasped his shirt. And her eyes will ask its the same question they’d asked His.

And she’ll get the same answer as it shudders, turns, and slouches back out the door, as though forgetting its reason for stabbing back into her home.

Her breath shivers back into her brittle ribcage, and she digs free the roots that held her in place. She gropes her way to the table and crumples back into her seat, into her stupor, into her waiting.

Still clutched in her clawhand, the knife sings her a solo, so soft it isn’t sure she can hear.

Continue Reading...

TURNS OUT, IT WAS BONE by Mieze Zuber

It was early spring, nearly like now, before Columbine, and I was drinking again in that bar perpendicular to the office where they’d housed me. I was with a couple of the bankers and J., the gay man who refused to admit what he was. He knew I knew, and that I wasn’t going to judge, that I liked him as he was. So he hovered close like security, almost like a pimp, and he was lovely to drink with and say much of nothing to. I slept over at his, overlooking the river. I took men back there. He did, too. It was a good arrangement. It was all right between us.

Drinking in that bar. And as usual, I’d had a lot. It was a Thursday night, and that was the one night in the week when that dead city came alive even when there was no baseball game at the stadium just across the way to flood them all in. Prospect Street. Go a few blocks down and you’d see the hotel that Led Zeppelin trashed in the ’70’s; you could see the hookers coming out and walking up and down until cars stopped and they got in and went for a ride. Ride, yeah. Ride. Thursdays were a good night for rides, with all the businessmen who stayed downtown to drink in anticipation of the weekend.

One of the bankers said that evening,—Your face isn’t the usual. I’d like to paint you.

—Do you paint, I asked him absentmindedly.

—No, but if I could, I would, he said.

—Ah, I said, and took another swallow.

—I need the toilet, I said to J. —And then you’re driving me home.

—Baby, he said. Stay a little longer. It’s too early.

—Yeah, I said. And I made my way up the staircase to the unisex bathroom.

When I came out into the hall, the last one I’d fucked and ended things with was there. K. He saw me and called me. Not a banker, not one of the work colleagues. He was far out of that circle. I was swaying, I’ll admit. I was well on my way. I’d been there for a while. The music was deafening and he leaned into my ear to tell me what he did.

—Come back, baby, he said. —I miss you. Come have a drink with me.

—No, come on, I said, shrugging him off.

—We’re not finished, he said.

—No, we are, I said. —Leave it. It’s over. Get one of your others.

—You’re here now, though, he said. —There’s no one else here. You come with me now.

I didn’t say more. I went back down the stairs to the bar. And then he was behind me; I felt him and there were no words coming from him but his fists were out, I felt them on my head and half turned and got one to the face and then I was falling. And I reached the bottom, the ground floor by the bar, and I tried to stand and someone I didn’t know, she was stopping me and saying, —NO, DON’T MOVE. And then I felt more hands on me, holding me back. I tried to stand and they stopped me. I saw white through my black stockings and thought, —What’s that?

Turns out, it was bone.

They phoned an ambulance while I kept saying, —I’m fine, leave me alone, it’s fine. I was transported to the inner-city charity hospital emergency room. Saint V------'s. Laid there on a slab of an examining table, next to a homeless guy in the next bay. He was crying and I wasn’t. I just ignored the pain running up my leg, into my pelvis. I wanted to smash something. He was crying; he was crying for his mother. I looked over at him in a haze of something and saw his weathered face, his black ashy skin.

—You’ll be okay, man, I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. It was high and thin and cracked. I sensed some kind of feeling, some deep and sharp thing. I still couldn’t identify it as pain.

—I’m going to die, he said. Wailed it.

—No, no. You’re fine. You’re going to be fine.

—I’m BLEEDING, he screamed. EVERYTHING’S BLEEDING.

—Shh, I said. Shh. It’s all OK.

—I’m telling you, bitch, I’m FUCKIN’ BLEEDIN’. I’M DYIN’.

I didn’t say more. The pain had manifested; the pain was making itself known. And I was unable to even turn on my side to see if he actually was bleeding. And there I was lying there on that fucking slab of an examining table, and I just wanted to get up and walk away and I couldn’t. I lay there, trying to erase K.’s face from my head. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth.

+++++++

I’d chosen K. because he was precisely such a brute. I’d met him in that very same bar in late winter. Another Thursday. J. had crinkled his nose at that choice. K. was blue collar and sweaty, garage car mechanic, shaved head and Neubauten tattoos. He bought me a couple of shots and actually sniffed me.

—Don’t tell me that one’s coming home with you, J. said.

—Why not? I’d laughed, and hugged him.

—He’s disgusting, said J. —And he’s a fucking freak. I don’t need a radar for that. Yours is totally broken. Pick someone else.

But I didn’t. I knew J. was right. I’d seen it myself. I knew K. would fuck me up but good, and it was exactly what I wanted that evening. J. wouldn’t let me stay at his that night. He told me that if this was the new romance, I could take it back to mine. And I accepted that, and I did.

I was bleeding from various places the following morning. I let K. out the door at 5 am with stinging promises of more. He came back twice, and we went out together once, and then the fourth time we got together, he kept talking about other women. And he left his pager on and kept using my phone to answer their calls, arguing with them about this and that. Funny I couldn’t put up with it. It wasn’t like I was in love or anything. I just found it annoying.

When he hung up from the last page saying, —Sorry, I’ll turn it off, I told him that I would rather that he leave. We argued and he gave me a few slaps and punches, and I told him, —OK, enough now. Go home.

Surprisingly, he did, and he left me alone. Up until that night in the bar, early spring. April 8th, I think it was, into the early morning hours of the 9th.

+++++++

After the x-rays, they told me my tibia was fractured and close to a break. They would keep my leg mobile. J. was allowed in to see me then.

—I phoned your mother, he said. —Your dad picked up.

—Fuck, I said.

—You’re going to need him tomorrow, baby, he said. —How else are you going to get back to the hospital? They’re about to release you right now. I can't take you.

—They won’t give me anything for the pain, I said. My face was wet, and he wiped it for me.

—I’ll get you something, don’t worry, he said. —We’ll get you home tonight and stay with you.

I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and he didn’t either. J. If I could explain to you how much I miss him in this exact moment, writing this.

—And don’t worry about that fucking asshole, he said, almost as an afterthought.

—K.? I asked.

—Yeah, K. No one called the police. You’re not going to have to worry about him again. A couple of guys from the bar took him out around back.

+++++++

Nearly two decades removed from all that. It’s sordid, it’s shit. I’ll tell you more about that emergency room. I’ll tell you how that man next to me cried for his mother and asked me to sing him a song to keep him occupied. I’ll tell you how I gave in and did it, in a cracked and off-key voice. I’ll tell you how much it hurt, and how much I deserved it or didn’t and got it anyway, how playing with fire guarantees you’ll get burned and how it echoes, how everything from the past resonates, how your entire life of skull fractures and bruises the school nurse questions leads to it. How it echoes. I’m here, safe now, removed. But all the echoes. It goes on and on until you can finally call it past and can finally call it over. And what it means when you reach back and dredge it up because you realize it’s never over until you really call time on it. Just know, this is calling time on it. The narrative from then isn’t finished, but I’m calling time on it now.

Continue Reading...