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You’re driving down I-95. Somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, you think. It feels like it’s been a long time you’ve been on this road but you can’t seem to remember how long exactly it’s been, like the years are just out of reach. Enough to feel them against your fingertips but not enough to grasp.
You have a cigarette burning between two of your fingers, and you’ve zoned out long enough that some ash falls onto the wheel. The cherry burns weakly in the dark of the cabin, a hypnotizing ember-and-smoke. How long have you been driving? The white lines dividing the highway lanes pass you by at a cool 90 miles-an-hour and the music is a low drone, no words you can make out, but a familiar tune. The wan light of the streetlamps pulses.
The air conditioner is on full blast but it’s still humid and so your shirt sticks to your back, making you clammy. The road seems to waver, the d-a-s-h-e-d l-i-n-e-s of the road blinking in-and-out of focus. Out of the darkness the shapes of palm trees and pylons scar the midnight with deeper black, and it makes your eyes strain to catch sight of the cables and wires between the leaves.
A headache crests. It throbs behind your right eye, making splotches of pale unravel across that side of the road like the stretching pseudopodia of an amoeba. When you rub over the aura it breaks into rippling black spots and you curse because you know you have somewhere to be but it’s not safe to be on the road. The turn signal makes a
click click click
as you take the nearest exit advertising a Motel 6.
You check into your room and lock the door behind you. Slide the chain. Through the window screen is the sound of the insects singing in the night, a buzzing symphony. The heat makes sweat bead on the back of your neck but you flop down on the bed next to Kakyoin and he rolls his eyes, throws a handful of ravalgaon candies he stole from the vending machine in the hallway, snaking Hierophant up through the slot with a smirk.
“What took you so long?” he teases as you slide next to him. He's flipping through the channels on the CRT, mostly Bollywood. The graininess of the image and the flurry of channels makes your headache squirm against your temple.
You look back at him, the way the shifting light of the TV fills in the different planes of his face: the arch of his cheekbones, around his eyes, under his lower lip. You pull your hat down over your head and grunt. He nudges you with his pointy elbow and you just swallow around the nausea.
“Let’s just go to bed tonight,” you ask, and he pauses, his hair curling over his face and he just turns off the TV and flops down next to you.
You never needed to talk much for him to get you, you've always loved that about him.
You turn over in bed and roll off onto the tatami on accident.
It’s morning. The light comes through the windows in a strained filter, like it’s taken something of the clouds with it. You must’ve laid funny in your sleep because your vision swims when you sit up too quickly. It must be a Saturday— your alarm hadn’t gone off for school and it’s past 8:00. When you peek your head out of your room you can see Mom hanging the laundry out to dry, humming to herself. You watch her for a minute, just to make sure she’s not sick, then quietly close the door.
Weird dreams, dreams you can’t quite remember. It’s on the tip of your tongue and it’s bitter, oily. Makes your skin itch. In the bathroom mirror you look like shit: dark circles ring your eyes and blur when you try to get a closer look. You hunch over the sink and splash your face but it doesn’t help so you take the safety pin you keep on the inside of your jacket and drag a thin red line along the inside of your thigh. The blood beads up and the vividness of the red helps you focus, the headache dulled as you focus on another pain. For a little while.
When you get up again you find the orange prescription bottle on the sink
AMITRIPTYLINE
Hydrochloride Tablets USP
50 mg RX Only
and you take one pill along with three ibuprofen and a handful of water from the tap. It sticks to the inside of your throat and you remember you've made tea.
You walk back out into the sitting room of your hotel, sit down at the couch, bring the teacup up to your lips but the liquid trembles. You idly flip through Field measurements of feeding and movement rates of the crown-of-thorns starfish Acanthaster planci (L.) but your eyes won’t focus on the words and your muted headache brings you back to Florida, to the other side of the world (as far as you can get), where Jolyne would probably be sleeping. You take another sip, lean down to inhale the vaguely floral scent and
/////
break the surface of the bathwater. The longest you’ve been able to hold your breath without stopping time is six minutes. You force yourself not to gasp when your lungs burn and your vision fades, warmth fluttering around your skull from the lack. You focus instead on the clutch of your hand on the side of the bathtub, the bottles of Jack Daniels lined up along the edge. You don’t have your hat to fidget with so you roll the gold band on your finger with your thumb and find it's no longer there.
Sweat prickles your neck. The water splashes around you and the white tiles when you sink lower. Lungs burn. You use Star to slow your heart rate to a
tha-thumptha-thump-tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump, tha-thump tha-thump
and when you open your eyes again you’re not there anymore.
The everglades stretch out all around you. The slow-moving green sings with the drone of frogs, the rattle of cicadas, the birds crying out to each other. On your boat you let the meager current placidly carry you along as you sit, immersed. You’re supposed to be taking water samples and the tubes are all lined up around you but you close your eyes, blinded by the sunlight dappling the water, by the beauty of the world you want to protect, and you let the time stop around you naturally.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
“Daddy, look!”
Jolyne runs up to a tank with a sunfish, points with a shrill giggle.
“He’s like a pancake, Daddy!”
The lights reflect blue all around the dim aquarium. You got in after-hours, perks of the job, so you don’t have to beat through the crowds. Just the sounds of the water pumps and the air conditioning blowing above. Hands in your pockets you follow her to the wall of glass where the sunfish swims lazily. You can just make out that you are smiling before you turn
/////
before you turn into Kakyion who has his hand on your shoulder and your hands are balled into fists because you didn’t know what else to do but punch and cut and he’s running his hands through your hair in another hotel in another country and tears roll fat rivers down your cheeks and you tell him, tell him you
(don’t have it together, just pretend you do because you have to because your Mom is dying)
and he rubs your back and wraps his arms around you and says he knows and you believe him. Press your face into his neck and smell the hotel shampoo and the sweat and the mineral of tears.
“We have to keep going on,” he says. “We have to do our best.”
I’m going to do my best.
Jolyne is a small, flushed little thing, can be held by one of your big hands. She has a few thin locks of dark hair and coos, yet, when you see the star-shaped curse on her shoulder you can’t stomach to hold her any longer. She looks up at you with big eyes and cries when you hand her off to her Mama and you press the back of your hand to your mouth to keep the bile from coming up and you push out of the hospital room because
what have I done?
Windshield wipers flick back-and-forth, scraping away the downpour and you’re driving but you don’t know on what road and to where, just driving. Your knuckles are bruised and paled from your grip on the steering wheel and your skin prickles like it’s being inundated with needles, and the stagnant heat of the cabin settles like a marsh into your heart. You
S
W
E
R
V
E.
Throwing up on the side of the road. Your open car door makes a ping, ping, ping noise and the rain on the tarmac is sharp and harsh, like knives, raining knives all around and dark and hot. But you don’t have time for this because you’re going to be late, going to be too late and if you don’t hurry then they’ll all be dead and you won’t be able to do a thing and yet you're heaving on the side of the road in the rain and knives and your skin is all pins-and-needles and your head feels sp litting—
“Dad will be here soon,” Jolyne says.
Running. Water running over you. You’re floating on your back and the stars whirl around and around and around and
. Years pass by in an instant and there’s only you and the stars and the water, running, rushing over crawling skin and through you, through the hole in Kakyoin’s abdomen,
through
Water running.
“Dad will be… I did steal… car… school… why… do something like that?
//////
Soon, to save me.”
The CRT screen-light on Kakyoin’s face and
Momma doing laundry
And water water waterwaterwaterwaterwaterwaterwaterwater
"Daddy, look!"
(she’s holding a safety pin and pressing it to her arm)
.
.
.
.
.
And you needed to protect them, need to protect? Stop time, stop stop time
SP LITTING
“Dad will be here soon, to save me.”