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February 15, 2006
Untitled, very rough short story
Note: This is a rough draft of another story I am writing for a fiction class and I’m not sure if I want tp even use it yet, but here it is. I think I want to use something else or change it.
Untitled short story
The sunset is pouring in and stinging my heavy eyelids, I roll over to curl up against Riley and tuck my hand in the sweet curve of her back and I realize there is a screaming empty spot for the fifth day in a row. I rise and startle her shih tzu Wicket, who looks just like an Ewok. At least someone is licking my face at this time. I look like the uni-bomber after days of not shaving, so I bolt away from the cracked mirror and instead look out to see that I’ve slept the day away yet again.
I light my cigarette and glance at the purple bruise of sky with all it’s amber glory. It’s so sad to have a moment this perfect and still with no one to share it with.
“God, what have I done!” I scream and punch the mirror making my reflection a putrid pink with blood. Everything happens for a reason, but I wish God could tell me why this did.
---
I’ll never forget the day I first saw her. She was a college student and looked like a disheveled hurricane. With a coffee in hand, a dog on a leash, cigarette and keys in her mouth, she was attempting to get into the apartment building we both had lived in. I felt kind of like the creepy playground guy who drives around in a van telling kids he had hamsters for them or something, because of the way I’d been learing through my window at her. She used to say I looked at her like a fat woman at a cupcake. She must’ve not been that creeped out because she always smiled at me showing off her white, cutely crooked teeth and bringing me Maxim magazines (she claimed she read the articles.
“Need some help?”
“No I need you to keep staring at me. I think those Maxims aren’t tiding you over,Jimbo,” she replied shaking her black, messy hair and ashing all over self as always. I hated when she called me that and I still hate the way she could make me blush. Wicket, the dog, noticed me then and decided to pee on my leg as I opened the door (you know you’re obsessed with someone when you don’t notice a sopping wet pant leg and are still trying to hit on her anyway.).
“Chivalry is dying right now, if that’s the thanks I get,” I muttered as she laughed that snorting laugh that annoyed me, but I listen for in the bathroom all the time now.
I got to hear that laugh at least 876 times during our comedic, sporadic, and sometimes bittersweet relationship. As a senior journalism major doing her internship for a women’s magazine that was a pathetic rip-off of Cosmo at best, and me being a 27-year-old mechanic with a degree in Art Therapy that never quite took me anywhere (except as a tattoo artist when I graduated and was too poor to eat anything but ketchup and cracker sandwiches), she decided that I was the perfect candidate for interviews. These were of course on super-important issues such as “What he’s really thinking when he sees you naked,” “What he says about his mother is what he really wants in a woman,” and the very deep “Five quick ways to tell if he’s do-able.” After weeks of these painful interviews, she decided to stop degrading my manhood any further and take me out for beer. At the Bensonville, VFW, while drunk off of Guinness and singing a Johnny Cash/June Carter duet for the annual karaoke contest, Riley grabbed the mike.
“I’d like everyone to give my boyfriend Jake Draven here a big hand, because if we win tonight, he’s buying all of you drinks!”
“So now I actually am somebody besides the bum on the couch you’ve replaced your girlfriends with during Sex and the City re-runs,” I asked, rolling my eyes.
“Why not? I knew you’d never ask and I’m tired of you staring at me like your starving,” she replied taking me by the hand and squeezing it as if we’d always been this way. From that day on, until the day I lost her (one year ago, today), we became one person. I know it’s corny, but there was such a an unspoken bond between us that sometimes I felt that I was talking to myself. Maybe I was, maybe I am.
---
We married within three months, which was wreckless but needed because she was jealous and I was flat-out, the needy chick in the relationship and there was absolutely no doubt in our minds that we’d ever find anyone else who put up with our “cute”, neurotic habits. I tended to sleepwalk and she to go on rampages when she’d be so passionate with me I had to turn her down and times when she was so angry with me I thought I’d have to sleep with Wickett, but we could make up at the drop of a hat. We married at her campus chapel with my best friend, Mike O’Shea as our priest. We’d both grown up with him and he’d always been the first guy to roll in a keg, so he seemed quite fitting for our deliriously happy, white-trash wedding.
After we read our handwritten vows, hers saying that she would always let me win at x-box and then read me a poem by E.E. Cummings, as everyone cried and mine saying I would always tape Sex and the City reruns for her and singing very poorly a few lines from "Walk the Line," by our favorite man in black. From then on things became more of a whirlwind blur than anything I'd imagined.
Our parents got together and decided they'd give buy us plane tickets to wherever we wanted, despite their being a little surprised of our shotgun wedding. The whole next week we debated, slept in separate rooms, made up, and finally decided to go to Amsterdam, which yes, isn't the most romantic, but Riley had family there and we figured we'd visit Grandma, buy tacky souvineers from the Red Light district, and eat at the little cafes.
"We're here," she chirped pushing me onto the runway. After the 3 changeover flights and the arguing Thai people in coach, my head was pounding.
"Alright, Mrs. Draven, where to," I asked, carrying her across the street.
Suddenly, the sunny streets full of hash bars faded.
I woke up in a hotel room that smelled of curry and had a bloody yellow bedspread. Maybe this was a bad dream.
"Riley, did we take some bad acid, Riley?" I screamed. There was blood all over my hands and as I ran into the bathroom, I found a body. It was my bride, but why, how? Red lights pulsated throughout the room like a bad rave and I heard strange voices. Were they my own, had I gone crazy?
They took me away, these men in black, maybe they worked for Mr. Cash, I'm still unclear. They explained to me that there'd been an accident. They fed me pills and men in glasses spoke to me in white rooms. Someone had drugged us on the plane, we had checked into some hotel, and beyond that they were trying to fix me so that I could put the pieces together myself. What had started out innocently had become a crazy obsession on my part that I'd taken too far or perhaps she'd been the one who put drugs into our drinks, maybe I'd made the whole thing up. Either way, my life was over and I'm still trying to understand who did this. Maybe someday, I'll remember, until then, I'll keep waking up in this room, missing work day after day,and waiting for the answers to come. Maybe they were here all along and I'd been to blinded by feelings to notice.
Posted by ErinWaite at February 15, 2006 09:20 AM
Comments
Erin,
I don't know if I'll see you before class tonight, but I would definitely use that story!
Posted by: Lou Gagliardi at February 15, 2006 02:38 PM