Here it comes, the buzz I’ve been waiting for. I first start to notice when I can’t hold my hands still, can’t keep my fingers steady on the guitar or grip a pen properly. My writing comes out shoddy and the chords tinny. But it sounds melodic and intentional. The feeling works its way up my arms, constricting and pumping along the way. It pumps out of my chest, banging against my ribcage like an animal trying to escape, each punch more forceful than the next. It hits my brain around the same time. It’s a rhythmic throbbing with my pulse, but in my skull it hurts. My vision goes in waves, the dimensions swimming in and out. I want to run around the block, up the sides of buildings like a fucking super hero. I feel inhuman, just a ball of energy, just a force. It’s my favorite kind of high. These days, it’s my only kind.
I throw back another espresso shot, three melatonin down the hatch, and crawl into bed. A caffeine high is so much more controlled than any other drug I’ve tried. I know that once I’ve reached my peak, once I’ve topped out, then I won’t feel it anymore. Then it’s time to come back down, and I’ve got a bottle of melatonin to pad that landing. It has to be carefully balanced though, the caffeine and the melatonin, or I end up destroying my natural sleep cycle. And tonight I’ve seriously fucked it up, swinging way too far in one direction.
It’s been like this for weeks now. Over the last few years, I’ve eliminated my vices one by one. First was sex, which wasn’t a problem because I wasn’t having any. I gave up alcohol after that, which was tough at first, but the weight I lost and the focus I gained were well worth it. I felt in control, but I could also fall back on weed and cigarettes any time I needed to numb out, needed some detachment. A bout of pneumonia unwillingly broke me of cigarettes last winter, and I finally dropped off the weed a few weeks ago.
Now it’s easy to kid myself that I’m sober, that I’m not dependent on the caffeine or the melatonin to regulate my sanity because they aren’t substances, right? There’s no shame in this shit. You can fucking buy it at Target, have the FedEx guy deliver it to your front door. There’s no requisite ritual of coded speech and gatekeeping to keep it adequately veiled. Fuck it. Keep them coming.
I lay in bed at 2:03AM, my heart still smacking against my breastbone, and my eardrums vibrating with energy. I’ve scrolled to the end of cyberspace on my phone, my eyeballs pulsing from the compelling blue glow. I run my tongue over the topography of my teeth, slipping it into the chip between my incisors. My teeth feel fuzzy from the espresso and my throat cottony from the melatonin I just dry-swallowed. I’m so dehydrated, as if I’ve been wrung out like a dirty rag. I’ve pissed until I’m sure there is nothing left, a steaming golden stream that hits the toilet bowl with ferocity. I worry if all the espresso is going to stain my teeth - that’s the last thing I need.
I roll to my side, feeling my breasts stack on top of each other, my hipbones grinding into the mattress. I am hot so I throw the blankets off, my skin clammy from too much caffeine. A siren wails in the distance, and street lights peek out from underneath the curtains. This fucking city.
I try to rationalize my insomnia, grasping for anything to convince myself that it’s less miserable than it is. I used to stay up for days when the band was on tour, riding the slick high of cocaine. I’d shut myself off when I got on stage, going totally autopilot. I’d look at crumpled set lists after the show, like artifacts or evidence, and not even remember playing the songs. If I could make it through that, I can make it through this, right? Or all the nights I got up to feed the baby, then lay awake until sunrise just listening to her breathe, trying not to feel resentful of my wife - ex-wife - as she drowned out the baby’s breathing with her own, sleeping soundly with her milk-engorged breasts spilling across her chest. Surely, I had to be getting more sleep now. Alone, isolated both by choice and state mandate, the only breathing is my own, sandwiched between these Egyptian cotton sheets. I don’t just deserve a good night’s sleep, it is an expectation. It’s a waste otherwise.
I stumble through the hallway to the bathroom, and fumble for the light switch. My eyes strain as the room fills with light, swelling and contracting like a muscle. I sit down to piss, forgetting that I actually came in to brush my teeth - maybe I am more tired than I thought. I get back up again and just leave the bathroom.
Out in the living room, I lower myself onto the sofa, like it’s going to hurt to sit. I got this stupid vintage couch when I bought the apartment, thinking it would add some classy gothic aesthetic but it just feels like sitting on a cardboard box. It makes me think longingly about the lumpy and sagging sofas in every hostel we crashed in while we were on tour in Europe. They were always crawling with bedbugs, ripped and spilling itchy chunks of cushion, but there was something about feeling like we didn’t deserve better that made them comfortable. A simpler time.
I turn on the TV and scroll through Netflix as mindlessly as I was on my phone, seeing images passing by like a turnstile but nothing catches my eye. I don’t really want to watch anything. I just need something to do. I’m cresting the other side now; I can always tell when I start to lose focus. Pretty soon the energized feeling will give way to overwhelming, unstoppable exhaustion, bone tiredness, and it will happen in a snap - wired one second, and gassed the next, though that doesn’t mean that sleep will come any easier. You can be tired without being sleepy I’m starting to realize.
Now I start to panic. My daughter is coming tomorrow, noon sharp, my ex-wife had said. I haven’t seen her in the four weeks since our last court-approved weekend together, the last time anyone else has been in my home. Four weeks is a massive amount of time, a wealth of potential for change. I was still smoking weed last time she stayed here, sucking on a blunt in the bathroom and blowing it into the heater vent like I was a fucking high schooler. She is ten years old, at an age where four weeks is an especially enormous stretch. Maybe she’s grown since I’ve last seen her, a little bit taller. Maybe she's picked up some new interest or hobby, or my wife acquiesced and let her dye her hair green. Maybe she’s gotten her period - the thought terrifies me. I am not ready for that level of parenthood yet, not now.
Regardless, it isn’t just that I’ll be an exhausted piece of shit parent all day if I don't get any sleep, but I can already picture the look of contempt my wife will give me when she sees my baggy eyes and sallow skin and hears the crunch in my voice. She’ll be afraid to leave her here, not for her safety but because she won’t be ‘stimulated’ enough all weekend. All my daughter and I ever do any more when she comes to stay is order Thai food, watch movies, plink around on the piano. She never complains or asks for more - maybe it’s a welcomed break from the onslaught of in-your-face artsy shit that my wife - yeah, yeah, yeah, ex-wife - is always subjecting her to, stuff that borders on inappropriate for a ten-year-old to be around. I’ve tried telling her this, that maybe performance art about consensual genital mutilation is a little too mature of a scene for our daughter to be exposed to, but she just counters by bringing up the fact that she was living in a tour bus while we were opening for Mastodon when she was two. Like all of our arguments, I’m always wrong, always lose, even when I’m right. You never win against her.
I wander into the kitchen to find something to eat. I’ve been trying to maintain normal eating habits during isolation, still cooking regular meals and trying to eat a balanced diet. But with my sleeping schedule so fucked up, it throws me off of typical meal times. I sleep until the afternoon, eat some breakfast, and then try to stuff lunch in a few hours later, but then I’m still so full by dinnertime that I leave an entire meal untouched, a waste. Then by this time of the night, I’m so desperately starving I binge on the first thing I can find, always shit. I signed up for some stupidly expensive vegan meal-delivery service when the pandemic began, knowing I’d be too panicked to go to the grocery store, but so far they’ve all been left to rot in Tupperware containers in the fridge.
I rifle through the cupboards in the dark - flipping the light switch feels like too much of a commitment. If I keep the lights off, I can still float the possibility that I’m just passing through the kitchen and am not actually going to eat anything. My hands land on that familiar crinkle of a bag - potato chips. Ugh. I don’t feel like something salty. I need sweetness, an asinine urge. Just what I need to help me sleep, a massive sugar rush.
I glance out the window above the sink at the 711, ever-glowing like a beacon across the street. I would be lying if I said I don’t consider pulling out my phone and getting someone to deliver me a Slurpee to the front door of my apartment. I’m such a pampered privileged fucking baby - it disgusts me that it is even an option. No - if I want a fucking Slurpee, I’m going to grow some balls, put on my mask, and go get it myself.
There is always an uneasiness leaving my apartment after dark, at night. I pull my hood up, sinking my head low on my shoulders as I slink down the hallway, like I’m doing something criminal. I’m terrified that one of my neighbors will open their door or come ambling down the hall towards me, expecting privacy at this hour and coming upon this lanky ambiguous figure in a dark hoodie. Nope, nothing to see here, just indulging a late night craving for a fucking Slurpee, guys. Move along.
I exit the building to the alley, hoping that will further decrease the likelihood that I’ll run into anybody, though it also naturally increases the likelihood that whatever interaction I do encounter will be dangerous. I’m not naive to the fact that this city is a hotspot of all types of crime, but I chose this neighborhood for its relative safety, its comfortable distance from the seedier parts of town while still feeling urban and gritty enough to feel genuine. If I’m gonna live in the city, I’m gonna live in the fucking city, not some pretentious gentrification pit. I haven’t given up all self-respect.
Perusing alley garbage is a favorite pastime of mine. The habits of my old anarchist dumpster diving days die hard, and despite my relative financial stability, I still often find myself rummaging through garbage cans and hauling home other people’s trash. The other day I pulled a completely usable Discman out of the dumpster, Shania Twain’s “Come On Over” CD still inside. I let my gaze linger as I walk past, in case anything salvageable catches my eye. Near the end of the alley, a pair of enormous black high heels sits on the asphalt next to a blue recycling can. They are huge, at least a women’s size 12, with a heel that has to be as tall as my hand. The faux leather is still shiny, the heel entirely intact - these aren’t garbage at all. I wonder about the story of how they ended up here - was this a drag queen’s final performance? I’ll never need these uncomfortable fuckers again. Maybe something darker - a sex worker ditched them after having to run for her life away from a trick gone wrong. No, these were set here deliberately, standing straight and parallel, as if they had been put away in a closet. I wish I could pull off a heel like that, but I’m already too fucking tall. I walk past them.
I come around the building, the 711 comes into view. There is no traffic, the streetlights bearing down bright as daylight, so I sprint across the street. I breathe heavily inside of my mask, my own exhaled breath bouncing back against my face. It smells like stale espresso, a scent that reminds me of cigarettes when it is rancid enough, and makes me ache for one. It wasn’t so much the nicotine I had been addicted to - as with coffee, how maybe it isn’t so much the caffeine as the feeling of a mug in my hands - as it was the act of smoking a cigarette. I loved having the excuse to dip out of any situation, the ability to break time up into manageable chunks between smoke breaks. I craved the sensations, the little ritual actions that went along with it - smacking the pack against the heel of your hand, though I was never really sure what that accomplished, the concentration and the flick-flick-flick to get it to light, gripping it between your index and middle fingers like a supermodel or between your index finger and thumb like a stoner, letting it barely hang onto your lip, the thrill of letting the paper burn down as much as you possibly could before ashing it, feeling the heat on your fingertips. Fuck, now I want to smoke as well as have a god damn Slurpee. I will not buy cigarettes. I will not buy cigarettes. I will not buy cigarettes.
I enter the 711 in the standard cacophony of convenience store noise - bang of the glass door, jingle of the bell, sudden assault of shitty pop music over the speaker, not to mention the unflattering fluorescent lights, apt to blind. Every day, all day long, the same environment at any hour. Time doesn’t exist here. It’s around 3:30AM by this point - the only people that walk into a 711 at this hour are either drunk, lawless, or just insomniatic like me. There is no excuse for a functioning, stable person to be in a 711 after midnight. The place is quiet, but skirts the anticipation of danger. The clerk behind the plexiglass is slumped over at an unhealthy angle, scrolling through his phone. Fuck, I hope I don’t look that tired and pathetic when I’m balls deep in a good scroll-sesh. That’s why I try to never let myself do it in public, only in the comfort of my own lonely apartment - the slacken, Neanderthal result of when you let all outside awareness go, mouth hanging open, eyes drooping, spine curving until it snaps. Keep that shit a secret.
I take a cup, frantically grabbing the first one my hand gravitates to - the Super Jumbo XL Bucket O’ Might As Well Be A Dump Truck Back Up To My Throat And Open The Floodgates size - and set it underneath the spigot. It dumps a neon-blue slop of semi-frozen pure-sugar cold-headache into the cup, filling quickly and splattering onto my hand. There is no way this shit could be anything other than lethal to the human body, but I maintain my cognitive dissonance. It’s better than cigarettes - right? Definitely not better than weed, at least that shit is natural. Even cocaine at some point comes out of the ground, doesn’t it? I’m sure sex would be better for me physically, but at this point, my isolation-ravaged psyche would be much better off with a sugar-high and beating off. Alcohol - this definitely beat alcohol, though I’m curious what it would taste like with a couple shots of vodka mixed in. It would take a fucking fifth to dilute this into anything that could get a person buzzed. It’s definitely vegan though, so at least I’m cool there.
I pay my 1.99, the clerk wordless and barely looking up from his phone during the transaction. I glance at his screen while I swipe my card - Instagram feed, some hot topless girl, a profile shot with her wavy black hair cascading down her back, bare breasts as round and plump as fruit with tiny nipples like stems. Fuck, I need to get laid. Just that surreptitious flash is enough to make me horny. I think about my own breasts, small and bashful and hidden in the folds of my hoodie, and feel embarrassed. God dammit, she looks just like my wife.
Ex-wife. Right.
I slip the straw underneath the bottom of my mask and suck down the Slurpee with abandon as I cross the street. Shit, why is junk food so delicious? If anything made me not believe in God, it was that no entity with any level of compassion would make healthy food taste so shitty and garbage food taste so satisfying. Evolutionarily, it makes no sense. Or maybe it makes perfect sense, and I’m just the dipshit falling for the ol’ survival-of-the-fittest trick. Whatever. By the time my shoe makes contact with the curb across the street, half the Slurpee is gone and I’m already feeling the start of a cold headache and a sugar rush.
I hear the squeal of brakes the moment I step on the curb, as if my shoe making contact with the concrete initiated the noise. The scream comes a microsecond later, as I lift myself from the street onto the sidewalk. The thump comes next, dull and heavy, as my other foot comes down to meet my first. It’s a low, full sound. It almost has a pitch to it, or maybe that’s the magic of all the different noises happening at once. It all happens in a fraction of a second, but I disassemble the sound in my head into all its requisite parts, hearing it in all its different dimensions.
I turn around instinctually, the Slurpee straw still in my mouth.
The car is stopped in the middle of the street, tires smoking. It’s a black BMW, low to the ground with tinted windows, though the driver’s side window is rolled down. There’s a spoiler on the back, as if a BMW alone weren’t ostentatious enough. The engine rumbles under the hood, the streetlights bouncing awkwardly off of the sizeable crater dented into it.
The body on the ground in front of the car is a black lump, like a piece of luggage or a garbage bag, heavy and immobile. My brain knows it’s a body, a person, but my inclination towards self-preservative denial tries to convince me that it’s not, that the splay of hair fanning across the pavement is just a tarred-out spot on the asphalt, that the bone white limp fingers reaching out from the outstretched arm is just a piece of litter. The blood pooling from beneath it isn’t blood, but some other liquid, thick and black like motor oil, or a puddle after a rainstorm. It makes my stomach turn.
My instinct isn’t to run to the person, ask if they are okay, which would be a stupid fucking question anyway, frantically call for an ambulance. I am frozen in place, the straw still tucked under my mask, my hood still holding back my hair and my hand in the pocket. My instinct is no instinct. I look to the open window of the BMW. The driver is young, a sheet of straight blonde hair along the side of her face. Her rosy apple cheeks and soft curve of her nose in profile are delicate features. Her mouth is an O, gaping open in shock, and she grips the steering wheel, 10 and 2, with force - I can see her knuckles blanching white next to the pink dots of her fingernails. She turns to me, slow and deliberate, with her face fixed, just spinning on her neck like an axis. We make eye contact, sustaining it for several moments, and say nothing, the silence of the city street drowning out the noise of any belabored breathing coming from the body on the ground. Then I split.
I let the Slurpee fall to the sidewalk, electric blue sludge splashing up my leg, and take off running. Full sprint around the block and back up the alley, past the dumpster heels and my apartment and further up the street, dipping in and out of puddles of streetlights. I’m not thinking about why I’m running, what I am trying to get away from, but I feel like I need to put as much distance as possible between myself and that black lump, the growing reach of the blood, like it’s coming for me. Where had the person come from? The street was empty when I entered the 711, and I hadn’t distinctly noticed anyone hanging around when I came back out, Slurpee in hand, but I could have just missed them. I wonder for a narcissistic second if they had possibly been following me. I occasionally get recognized, even after living in this neighborhood for nearly eight years. Can I take a picture with you? Your music changed my life. Do you wanna see my tattoos? Maybe they were running to catch me. Maybe I had distracted them from looking both ways, leading them to run thoughtlessly into oncoming traffic. Fuck, was this my fault?
I haven’t sprinted like this in ages. It reminds me of the old days running from cops, drunk and swimmy, a nihilistic laugh echoing through me with each step. I don’t quite have that energy anymore. By the time I make it to the park, I have to double over, gasping for air. The Slurpee churns in my stomach, my brain throbbing, my heart punching through my sternum. I hope no one has seen me - who knows what they would be thinking. A tall lanky figure in black, hidden behind a mask and a hood, sprinting through the dark city streets at 3:30AM. There is nothing comforting about that picture. I think about the girl in the car, the split second that we made contact. It was so quick, hardly a frame, but it worries me. Will she remember that someone saw? Will she remember that it was me? Maybe she had been too in shock to realize, but our eye contact was undeniable. If the cops need a witness, I’m toast. I remember the Slurpee splattered all over the sidewalk, the cup rolling into the gutter. Will they be able to pull my DNA from it? I’d been arrested a ton of times, so I am definitely in some database somewhere. Fuck.
Having regained my ability to breathe, I walk along the edge of the park, trying to stay in the shadows of the towering trees. I come upon one that looks decently hidden enough and sit down, leaning back into the bark. I don’t know how long I’ll have to sit here, how long before I feel comfortable enough to step back into the real world, to go back to my apartment. Maybe sunrise - I’m getting close to it anyway. Maybe exiting the liminal state of predawn hours and entering into the morning of another day will make the whole horrid scene feel like a dream, the bout of insomnia feel like someone else’s.
I love this park. I hate everything about this city, but I love this park. When my daughter was younger, we would come here every weekend I had her. I’d chase her around the playground as she squealed in delight, pushing her high on the swings until she could see the city above everyone’s heads. The other parents would gawk at us, at me, this aging androgynous punk rocker freak with this darling little girl, but I didn’t fucking care. When we were at the park, my attention was only on her. We would get ice cream and walk around the pond, hand in hand. Every time she would save her cone so we could bust it into pieces and feed it to the ducks. Those were the best days of my life. Now that she’s ten, she’s too cool for the playground, so we tool around at the skate park or lay out on the grass and read books side by side. I’ll watch her silently as she reads, take in the features of her face that are changing and shifting as she grows, different every time I see her. As a baby, she looked so much like me - big ears, buck teeth, thin lips - but she is starting to look more like her mom, with the same sharp nose and soft jaw, the same dark eyes, just as beautiful. This used to make me sad, feeling like I was losing her to my wife, that it was indicative of a distance between us, but I have made peace with it. I pray the genes of her mother overpower mine - the last thing I want is for her to be anything like me. I can’t imagine her experiencing any of the tumults of life that I’ve had to bumble through.
Ahead of me, the city glows. I have always wondered if there’s a name for this phenomena, when the lights of the city are so bright that you can’t see the sky, the stars, the darkness of the night. So bright that it shuts you in like an insular bubble - nothing else outside of your immediate proximity exists, at least not until morning. Everyone is afraid of the dark, but for me, darkness is comforting. It isn’t about a fear of the unknown, about what could be lurking in the places you cannot see, but the reassurance that you won’t have to see whatever is there, safely hidden in obscurity. You can pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s light that frightens me, so exposing and permeating, nowhere to hide, putting everything on display. I’d much rather lurk in the shadows.
I don’t know what time it is - I left my phone in my apartment. At least they can’t track me through some GPS signal. According to all means of technological tracing, I’m still sitting on my couch, dry-eyed and insomniatic, scrolling through Netflix for eternity. How many minutes have passed? How long has the black lump been sitting there? I wonder if the cops have been summoned yet, if the girl in the BMW has been taken away in handcuffs, or if she’s being questioned in some nondescript interrogation room at the precinct. No, it couldn’t have happened that fast. Maybe she made a run for it, shook herself out of her shock and took off just after I had. Which direction had she run? Had she followed me this way, towards the park? I glance around, but don’t see another soul. No, she’s probably still there. I’m not sure how the protocol goes when you hit someone with your car. Was that reckless driving? Attempted vehicular manslaughter? Murder? Did I just witness a fucking murder?
My stomach churns again, the Slurpee blending with my stomach acid and swimming through my guts. I remember learning in health class that this half-digested mixture is called chyme, and that the term itself thoroughly grossed me out. Hearing it now in my mind’s ear, the drawn-out syllable, sounding too similar to ‘slime’ or ‘cum’, makes me want to gag. Why had I chugged the fucking thing down so quickly, so impulsively? Why had I put something so disgusting into my body, and at a breakneck pace? I have plenty of food at home - why did I even leave my apartment? Why did I ever get out of bed? I could have just laid there for a few more hours, until the sun came up and it felt appropriate to give up on sleep, then just gotten up and went about my day. Yeah, I’d be groggy for sure, but it would have been better than this - hiding out in a park in the darkness, nauseous and detached, having just witnessed a crime, if not a death.
I haven’t really considered that part yet. For some reason I immediately fixated on the perpetrator, the girl behind the wheel, the one who was going to have to live with the guilt of this event forever. I haven’t even thought about the person on the ground, the body, the black lump. I’m not even sure if it was a man or a woman, the hair and the limp white hand genderless and universal, as if it fucking matters anyway. Without a face, it’s hard to attach humanity to a person - a body is impersonal. But now that person, that body, is probably dead. Did I just see someone die? No, no, that’s jumping the gun. I can’t say for sure that they’re dead. People survive that kind of thing all the time, right? It’s not like the girl ran them over - they were just hit, on the ground in front of the car, but not underneath it. That had to be a good sign, right? And who’s to say that that was blood coming from the body? There are a myriad of fluids churning through a car at any given time. Maybe the force of the impact caused one of the lines to rupture, and that’s what was flowing down the street. Right? Right? Right?
Churning. The word makes me remember the Slurpee again. Oozing out of the machine like a sludge, filling that enormous fucking cup in giant plops, swirling through my mouth, coating my teeth and my tongue, clinging to the back of my throat like phlegm, hitting the bottom of my empty stomach just like it hit the sidewalk, splattering like vomit. Swirling and frothing and filling my insides with toxic scum, a blue mire of sugar and melting ice and gastric juices, the pulpy and acidic filth of chyme.
I turn and puke all over the ground next to me. I can’t see it in the dark, but I felt the warm spray on my jeans and my hand as I press into the ground to hold myself up. Syrupy, mucusy strings hang from my mouth as I retch again, this time searing the back of my throat with the acid of an empty stomach.
“Fuck,” I breathe as I wipe my mouth across my sleeve. My chest heaves with the effort, trying to pull air back into my lungs. My heart feels like it’s jangling around in my ribs. My sinuses stung. I try not to think about the taste in my mouth, sugar and coffee and bile. I feel weak and break into a cold sweat. I’m too shaky to stand, so I just scoot over, away from the vomit trickling into the roots of the tree, and lean my head back. Puking is always so shameful - I’m glad no one is there to bear witness to it, the involuntary act of completely giving over control to your body. It always feels preventable, a physical manifestation of some bad decision or questionable situation I’ve gotten myself into. Is this one of those times? I couldn’t have known what I would see, but is it somehow my own fault for leaving the apartment? For drinking too much espresso to fall asleep? For giving into my fucking craving for a Slurpee? Or did this stretch further back, some sort of retribution for selfish indulgences of the past? Maybe I was the one who was supposed to get hit by the car, maybe that was my fate. Had I tricked destiny by slipping by? Was something worse in store for me because I had?
I close my eyes, just for a second. I think of my wife for some reason. My ex-wife. We had sex in a lot of hotels early on in our marriage, when I was on tour. Each time seemed to blur together, all the same dark painted walls and scratchy bed sheets and HBO playing in the background, watching the Sopranos out of the corner of my eye as I fucked her. I was never paying attention. When we were trying to have a baby, she would track the days she was ovulating, and insist we have sex that night. She wouldn’t so much drop sexy hints as remind me incessantly all day, like I needed to take out the garbage or pay the electric bill. It was draining and nauseating and not the least bit erotic. I would never tell her this. We would fuck late at night, when I was exhausted and uninterested. Sometimes I’d get off, but most of the time we would give up after long enough, having lost all enthusiasm. It was a miracle she ever got pregnant.
What a fucking fool I was. I would give anything to have her, to have that chance again, to fuck in dirty sheets on a hotel bed. My complacency is my biggest regret. I deserve this, this pathetic, base, agitated state I was in, hiding in the trees of a city park in the middle of the night next to my own vomit while she’s asleep in her bed on the other side of the city, a bed that was never ours but was supposed to be. Maybe there’s someone there next to her, their arm around her soft belly as she breathes slowly in and out. Maybe she’s fucking somebody. I never ask. I don’t want to know. It should be me.
I slap at the tickle of an ant climbing up my cheek and open my eyes. The sun is so bright it’s nearly white, blinding me for a moment before fading to reveal the sunlit day in Technicolor detail. It’s clearly midday - somehow I managed to fall asleep leaning against the tree, inches from the crusted puddle of my Slurpee puke. I’m sweating profusely under my hoodie. I feel the dampness under my arms and droplets trickling between my breasts. The park beyond is alive now, kids and dogs and joggers in tank tops darting in different directions in front of me, either oblivious or intentionally ignorant of the smelly freak passed out in trees. I’m surprised no one has called the cops on me yet.
The events of last night begin to materialize in my memory, images like pin pricks, data points slowly pooling together into something that makes sense, that feels at least vaguely familiar. The espresso, the insomnia, the Slurpee, the scream, the black lump, the sprinting, the vomit. Like a timeline or a flow chart, each event setting up for the next, like I should have been able to predict them, and thus prevent them from happening. But I did neither of those things, and now here I am, waking up in a city park in the middle of the fucking afternoon. What the hell is wrong with me?
Fuck - afternoon. Noon. My daughter. My wife.
Ex-wife.
I scramble up, Scooby-Doo-style, kicking up dirt and old puke as I rush to my feet. I take off towards my apartment, full-sprint in the opposite direction I had come last night. I don’t care that I look like a crazy person - if I’m not home when they get there, I’ll be as good as dead. I expect a full-body pain fest of ache after sleeping on the hard ground, but my body feels loose and pliable and energized, rejuvenated by the sleep. My head aches a little from hunger and lack of caffeine, but it’s nothing an espresso shot and breakfast can’t fix. I could order takeout from the place down the street, but maybe I’ll make it myself - scramble some tofu, sauté some veggies, melt some soy cheese over the top. My mouth waters thinking about it, as I continue to run, arms pumping, sweat dripping, shoes slapping the ground. I round the corner to the alley, past the dumpsters full of garbage treasure, the dead hooker shoes still standing sentinel at the other end of the block. I pray that they aren’t standing there waiting at the front door, my wife groaning and swearing under her breath as all her calls go directly to voicemail, bitching about how I refuse out of spite to give her a fucking key to the place, as my daughter stands there bewildered and anxious, a backpack full of clothes slung over her shoulder.
I pull open the doors and leap up the stairs two at a time, four flights as fast as I can. My chest tightens with anticipation. I yank the stairwell door open and almost don’t want to look but I do.
Thank fucking Christ. Empty hallway.
I sprint to my apartment door, though there’s no rush any more. My key sticks in the lock like it always does, and my sweaty hands slip as I try to jangle it open. It finally catches and I launch myself inside. It’s jarring to see everything in the daylight after staring for so long at everything in the shadows. I walk into the kitchen, set my keys on the counter, and glance up, accidentally catching the image of the 711 in my vision as I look out the window. It doesn’t glow the same way in the daytime, but the flashing blue and red of the cop cars sure do.
They’re everywhere, like ants drawn to a cookie crumb - three parked in the 711 lot, three more blocking off the intersection to traffic, another slowly crawling up and down the street, as if patrolling for any other wayward cars looking to barrel over humans. The black lump is now literally a black lump - either a dark body bag or a sheet of some sort lying in the street where it had been last night. My mind can’t process that it is the same black lump, that it hasn't been replaced or transformed. I can’t see the splayed hair, the white branch of an arm. The blood is gone. The BMW is gone too, and I wonder where they took the poor girl who’d been driving, or whether she had made a run for it. I squint to try to see the blue Slurpee splatter, but make out nothing. The cup I dropped in the gutter probably blew away in the breeze.
WHAM WHAM WHAM!
My heart jumps into my throat as a loud knock comes from the front door, echoing through the empty house. They’re here.
I try to shake off the adrenaline surging through me from the startle as I walk to the door. I wish I’d had time to change my clothes or splash some water on my face. I’m still sweaty, smell like vomit, and surely have a look of delirium in my eyes.
“Dad!”
My daughter launches at me for a hug the second I open the door, wrapping her small arms around my legs and nearly knocking me to the ground.
“Hey, honey, good to see you.” I pick her up, her lanky legs extending nearly to the ground as she tucks her chin over my shoulder. This is the only time she ever lets me pick her up anymore.
I glance at my wife standing behind her in the hallway as I lower her back to her feet. She’s holding my daughter’s zebra-print backpack in one hand and a coffee in the other. She looks beautiful, every feature as flawless as I always imagine her in my head, from her dark hair laying on her shoulders to her thick black lipstick to the delicate shape of her almond eyes. The scowl on her face is sexy as hell, nasty. I want to kiss her. I know I can’t.
“What the fuck were you doing? You look like you just crawled out of a dumpster.”
She walks around me and into the apartment, giving herself a wide berth to ensure she doesn’t touch me at all. My eyes follow her, my body turning to watch her but not moving to follow. She sets the backpack on the couch where my daughter takes a seat and wraps her in a hug. I try to make out the words of her muffled goodbye as she digs her nose into my daughter’s hair and holds her tight, but I can’t hear a thing. This is deliberate - this is something she’s leaving me out of. My daughter laughs. A joke between the two of them, one I’m not allowed to hear.
She stands and turns on her heel, her smile falling immediately the instant she faces me, like it pains her to even make eye contact.
“So, she’s got her stuff for all the way through Sunday?” I ask.
She looks up at me through her eyelashes, head dipped low. Her disgust has its own frequency, a deep dull hum.
“Yes, she has her stuff for all the way through Sunday. Unless you can’t handle taking her all the way through Sunday? Unless you’ve got some more dumpster diving to do?”
I swallow hard. Each word is like a knife, yet tastes like caramel sauce, thick and decadent.
“No, I’m good.”
“Oh, well that’s great.”
She walks around me quickly, her boots clicking on the hardwood as she makes her way to the door.
I put it in myself, I want to tell her. How I installed the hardwood flooring myself a few weekends ago, watching how-to videos on YouTube and cursing the day I was born as splinters shoved themselves into my nail beds. I’ve been remodeling the entire apartment, one room at a time, at a slow and inefficient pace but I’m fucking trying. I want her to notice. I want her to be proud of me. It looks great! Or better yet, It looks great, babe! But I know she won’t say that. ‘Great’ never comes out of her mouth without the poisoned candy apple coating of sarcasm. I haven’t done anything great in her eyes in years, if ever.
She slams the door behind her.
My daughter has already pulled her tablet out of her backpack and taps away. Her short, pixie hair is tucked behind her tiny ears, bright new streaks of green weaving in between her natural black.
My wife acquiesced.
My ex-wife.
Brittney Uecker is a writer, runner, mother, librarian living in rural MT. While she has gravitated towards various passions in her life, one thing has remained constant – her love for storytelling. She is currently working on her first novel.
