By M.C. Zendejas
I. WINTER
He’d asked two people before finding a guy. The whole time he kept saying it was just to relax after a long day at work. That this wasn’t a normal thing for him. The guy didn’t really seem to be listening.
Clock out, pick up, pass out in local parking lots. Almost every day for about a month. Then he began to think. The more he thought, only doing it to relax seemed wasteful.
It could be something to celebrate the weekend. Or mourn.
Sometimes she would call while he was on it. He hated that. She’d always ask what he was doing.
Going to a bar with the guys, just blowing off some steam. She’d buy it so easily, he figured she knew but didn’t want to say anything. He tried not to think about that, though.
After the layoffs they went on less dates. When they did manage to get out, the check was always split. His eyes would look downwards for five minutes after they’d pay.
He became gaunt. Thick waves now thin and wiry, greasy from all the nights of nodding out before showering. Her coworkers told her she might as well go check on him.
“You know you won’t stop worrying if you don’t.”
The loaded syringe had rolled under the couch, but the latex tube tourniquet was still tightly around the forearm. Dots of blood from earlier had fallen like teardrops. Gray-purple rings circled his scrawny brachioradialis.
He heard weeping somewhere in the fog. A hand on his thigh caused a jolt of surprise that kind of shook him out of it. As reality rushed forward, and her vague silhouette faded into more concrete shapes, sharper colors hit his eyes in a barrage. He squinted to lessen their effect. There was so much to say, but he couldn’t even lift his head, groaning and laying it back against the seat.
White coats formed a semi-circle around the front of the bed. They were explaining why they had to amputate the arm. Looking at the bandaged stump, he couldn’t really hear everything that was said. Something about cutting off circulation for that long. He didn’t cry or scream, he just lay there staring at it. Their eyes peered at him as if he were some kind of strange animal. He felt empty, as if everything inside him had been vacuumed out. So many eyes, waiting on a response to a question he hadn’t heard. A response never came.
They gave him a pamphlet on how to inject safely and filed out of the room. Using his mouth and other hand, he tore the pamphlet until it was more confetti than pamphlet, and let the pieces float down into the trash.
At the hospital they fought about her squirting the syringe into the toilet. She didn’t speak to him the whole way home. When they got there, he could hear zippers zipping and unzipping. Anything that didn’t fit in her duffel bags was tossed into the backseat.
The sound of the tires pulling off was still ringing in the silent room. Their kitchen floor was cold beneath his bare feet. He focused all attention on memorizing every detail about it, starting with the tiles. White on white. Interlaced. Ornate. He looked around, remembering how loud they’d laughed when they baked a cake that one time. She got icing all over the place trying to stop him from throwing all that flour.
II. SPRING
For a little more than a month he lived in the car. Dirt and sand started coating the paint, removing its color little by little. His back ached and every morning he’d wake up to the taste of dead air.
Caught dumpster diving in Midtown. The sound of fists.
Lying in the alley afterwards, in the colors and vibrations. Cars, voices, soles on pavement.
He quit cold turkey. Food never staying down. Sweat pouring into the backseat. Cold then hot. It took almost a week.
Sunlight spilled through the window, warming his face. The birds must have just learned to sing like that, but he hoped they’d keep it up.
On the way to work, he passed a flyer for a weekly DAA meeting. He told his coworker about it.
Phillip looked at him from behind a pile of boxes of food. He told him he tried it once five years ago. He hadn’t missed a meeting since.
Taking a wobbly breath, his feet strolled him through the front doors. He smiled and shook his head when it was his turn.
During his second week, he noticed someone that looked new. Gold waves cascading past ruby lips made him aware of how baggy his pants were. Or how his socks had a hole on the side that you might be able to see if he held it at just the right angle. She noticed him staring and offered a smile. His back straightened in the yellow plastic of the small chair. She later told him her name was Cynthia.
It was on their third date that she heard the whole thing.
Afterwards, Cynthia slept on his chest and he looked up at the ceiling. She was leaning on what was left of his right arm and it was starting to get sore. He shrugged out of it without waking her.
They’d gotten snatched by a place in the suburbs and jobs in cubicles. Two weeks after he started, they stuffed another lousy bastard in the same cubicle as him. The shared space made him feel claustrophobic, like he was in a coffin.
Cynthia had been showing for a little over five weeks. They hadn’t discussed names yet, thinking it’d be bad luck.
Outside, it was autumn, and the streets were littered with small clusters of leaves. They crunched under the feet of people walking here and there, twirling into the wind like little cinders.
III. FALL
The leaves had turned from red and yellow and orange to dull variations of brown. More layoffs came. He had to walk out before they finished talking. The way they were looking down at him from behind their shiny eyeglasses. If he’d stayed in there any longer, he’d have lost it.
Avenues hummed outside the windshield of his rusty car as it crawled homewards, lost in the roar of a traffic jam in the city. In front of him was the same road that had been there since he could remember, but it all seemed so unfamiliar. The clouds cracked overhead.
She came home to find him asleep on the couch. Same shirt as two days ago. Beard still untrimmed.
“Don’t worry. I’ll find something. There’s gotta be something.”
In line at the grocery store, he wondered why he hadn’t grabbed a cart. The grip on the milk would slip, then the eggs would waver.
The cashier was an elderly lady in a mesh vest. Her cheeks flared pink under the fluorescent bulbs of the store. Poor lady, he thought, having to see such a mess.
Going home, he passed the motel overlooking the freeway and thought about Room 2341. Soft flesh caressing him from behind the white silk of a peeking high. The late hours like a jailhouse door slammed down around them. He smiled at the memory.
They had thirty days to pay off the loan before seizure would take place. Looking at Cynthia, he couldn’t find the words. Because there were no words. She knew no one in the whole goddamn town would hire him. That something inside him had become like cracked glass. Talking about any of it would be a waste of words. His shape flung into the noise beyond the door. He didn’t look in the rearview until their house had shrunken to the size of a gnawed fingernail.
Outside, now, small droplets land on the windshield with a crash. A while has passed since he first parked here.
The sound of his own knock makes him want to vomit. Room 2341’s where it’s always been. He finds comfort in that.
Two young women sit on the bed. They never move or say anything, but their eyes follow him the whole time. His realizes the guy doesn’t seem to have aged.
There’s a brief quiet, then a wrinkled wad of cash moves between hands. The guy asks him if he wants to do it there. The women can help him with the tourniquet. He says he’d rather do it alone.
“All right. Be safe out there, man.”
The latex tube tourniquet falls from his arm. He leans the seat all the way back, closing his eyes and listening to the lustrous rain pound on the windshield. Like a stranger trying to get in.
M.C. Zendejas is a fiction writer from Texas. He is currently studying creative writing at the University of Houston. His work is featured in Z Publishing’s anthology, Texas’s Best Emerging Poets, as well as in Contemporary Collective Magazine. He likes candy corn, museums, and slamming brutal death metal.
