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Joey needs a new toaster. Again.
It’s always been annoying, but at least these days he doesn’t have his mom scolding him about breaking her stuff. Problem is, now it’s his stuff and he’s the one who has to get the bus downtown and buy a replacement.
He was at hers yesterday; she still has the weird retro-looking orange microwave that outlived all its predecessors, mainly by virtue of him moving out. He’s better these days, though, as he had told her when he caught her watching him load the dishwasher a little too intently. Nothing to worry about.
And there wasn’t. Hadn’t been for… He even lost count, which is proof enough.
The bus stops and a bunch more people stomp in, trudging puddles through the aisle. An old lady sits beside him, making him tuck his knees closer together to avoid her dripping rain poncho. She tuts at some kid who charges past her impatiently and practically bodies the seat across the carriage, not even lowering his soaked hood. Joey can hear the beats from his headphones from here.
He wonders when he should next call his mom. The visit yesterday is probably enough to buy him some time, and then he definitely won’t need to mention that he’s up to his old frying-the-kitchen-appliances tricks.
Yeah, he’s definitely been a good enough son for the time being. Drove her to dad’s grave and everything, then let her play Blondie the whole way home. She always seems to think he needs some alone time after that, so he went and rooted through his old stuff. She’s never really touched his room, even though she’s never been too sentimental about keeping things. Even he doesn’t think most of it’s worth keeping. Mostly it’s his stupid sketches of his wild ideas for violent films, monsters and metal bands. He flicked through an old journal, wondered what the fuck he was thinking back then.
Seems like whatever was wrong with him is still wrong, though, because he couldn’t stop looking. He checked every page, right up until the end. Things had got even weirder then. The last handful of pages were totally blacked out. Must have taken him a long ass time to colour all those in. Maybe it had been in art class, after they started asking him to draw something a bit more realistic and less disturbing.
But he can’t remember that particular rebellion. He stared at those pages until the black ink looked more like an abyss ready to swallow him, and then he had got a headache bad enough to make him lie down until his mom started clanging around in the kitchen making cookies.
Joey blinks away from those dark pages and finds himself staring out of the dark window of the bus. There’s an ache rising behind his eyes again, so he swipes his palm across them and turns away from the raindrops streaking through the streetlight glow.
The bus reaches his stop, and half the bus gets off with him, the crowd dawdling out into the rain in the way that never fails to annoy him. He throws up his hood and tries to sidestep the slowest ones. He doesn’t have time for this; his head hurts and it’s fucking pissing it down. Better to just get this over with.
He’ll buy something cheap, and it’ll probably break anyway before his hands decide to start short-circuiting things again, in however many months.
There’s a small section of magic-resistant appliances, but he can’t be arsed to see if they have a toaster. Won’t be able to afford it in any case, and most of them are marketed for people with kids who can’t keep their shit together yet, and Joey isn’t about to admit to being one of those. He’s not sure the shopping clerk would assume he’s buying for kids of his own.
Plus he’s not about to be labelling himself with ‘magic’. He doesn’t have enough to do anything with, just an annoying buzz every now and then. Honestly, he would prefer none at all. It wasn’t even enough for his mom to shill out for the afterschool club. She just rented a couple of tapes that told him to take deep breaths and shit.
So he grabs the cheapest toaster they have, pays and stuffs it in his backpack (just about – he worries the corners were going to bust his zip) and paces back to the bus stop, head down.
The bus is emptier this time. There’s a kid in a dark hood curled near the front, crammed in the seat at all kinds of angles. Joey gets déjà-vu as he walks past and hears the pulse of drums from headphones somewhere under that hood.
Slinging his bag beside him, he slides into a seat halfway down. He spares a glance at a guy who charges into the bus at the last minute wearing a beanie with a skull on it. As they pull away, beanie guy sits next to the kid at the front. Joey turns to stare out the opposite window.
Digging his hands into his hoodie, he watches the streetlights passing impatiently, more than ready to get home. Neon signs and traffic lights blur into the bubbles of rain scattered on the window. The thrum of rain hammering at the tinny roof is almost louder than the rumbling bus engine. His own face stares back in the sullen orange-y light inside the bus. He looks translucent, lines of light and dark carving through him from the city outside.
A kid starts crying at the back. Joey winces, a faint throb echoing behind his eyes. He blinks, unfocusing. The bus stops a moment, and he traces the little fuzzy lights outside which hardly seem to add up to the shape of a building.
When it starts moving again, the rain streaks through everything. The reflections melt diagonally along the windows, tugging at his hair and face, his eyes pools of black in the orange haze. Something thunks above him, the shell of the bus ringing a dead note. But he can’t tear his eyes from his reflection. Is that even him?
Liquid like the streams of rain, his eyes bleed outwards, three lines clawing dark trenches down each cheek. The same pattern goes upwards, then, until the thing staring back at him looks blankly back, no longer him at all.
Sharp lights flicker somewhere outside, almost like fire instead of the LEDs of the city. There’s blood falling slowly over his forehead. He can see it drawing closer, closer, until it drops right into his eye-
Flinching, he presses a hand to the eye and squeezes it shut.
There’s nothing there.
But now he’s snapped out of… whatever the fuck that was, the migraine slams into him full-force.
He can’t disguise a choked groan as his head tries to cave in. At least, that’s what it feels like. Shifting his hand to cover both eyes, he hunches down more in his seat. The vibrations of the bus make him feel sick, the baby’s cries like a drill into his skull.
Fuck. He swallows a couple of times, hoping it will pass. He just needs to get home. Breathing through the pain feels impossible, but he breathes anyway because what else is he meant to do?
“Hey, dude. D’you want an aspirin?”
Joey glances up. The migraine is throwing splotches on his vision, but it’s the guy with the beanie. He can’t really make out his face even when he squints, which is fucked up because the guy’s right there. Can he not see?
The bus hits a bump and Joey looks down at the outstretched hand. There’s a pill sitting there on his palm.
He may be desperate, but fuck that. He didn’t even see the packet, and some stranger is offering him drugs? Even if his brain can’t articulate it, he knows he doesn’t trust it. Could be anything in that pill.
He swallows, fixes his eyes just to the side of the face he can’t see.
“I’m good.”
The guy’s silent, and Joey waits, trying to sit upright through the nausea and the storm in his head, willing away the clouds. He can see, can sense the vague shapes of the bus, but the moment he focuses on anything, the image runs away from him, like some dream you can’t catch after you wake up.
“Alright, man,” the guy says.
The bus stops. The baby isn’t crying anymore. It’s just the rain ringing on the roof and the huff of the door opening to let out beanie guy and the headphone kid.
His headache doesn’t disappear, but the waves pull back from over his head so he’s only neck-deep in it. Breathing shallow, he distractedly watches the two guys leaving. By chance, his eyes travel down to the hand that had offered him a painkiller. There’s a wallet there. Black and red striped, just like Joey’s. It passes in a flash as beanie guy darts around the door and away into the street.
Spinning to his bag, Joey jams his hand into the side pocket. The movement sets his nausea in motion again, but all he can feel is the empty space under his fingers. That’s his fucking wallet.
“Fuck,” he curses, jumping up blindly from his seat.
He sprints down the bus in a daze, one shoulder crashing against the doorway as he spills out into the street. Head heavy, he looks sluggishly up and down the road. Cold rain flicks at his face.
There are two figures under a streetlight, apparently not caring about the downpour illuminated around them. At least the rain masks Joey’s loud footfalls as he drags himself towards them. He’s close enough to make out more than just silhouettes when they spot him. The kid looks around first and hits the other’s arm.
Beanie guy turns, and his face is finally clear under the yellow light. Blue eyes stare back at Joey from above a lazy grin.
It’s like they’re waiting for him. They watch him take a couple more steps, and then, all at once, they dash out of the pool of light, near enough sprinting away, and Joey’s chasing after them. He doesn’t even know how his legs are doing it, because his body’s still drowning in lethargy, but he’s running like he’s floating so he doesn’t think about it and just tries to gain some ground.
But there’s that headache, insistent at his temple, boring through his head the longer he runs. He makes it a couple of streets before he loses sight of them. Skidding around the corner, he finds himself by the canal, but the path is clear both ways.
He stops, panting, and the exhaustion he left behind him finally catches up, crashing over him with a physical force that pushes him to his knees. The stranger’s face flashes in his mind, and a white-hot explosion of pain steals his vision.
~
His hair is dripping with frigid water that splashes onto his jeans, but they’re already soaked, too. He’s panting, staring at the ground. Water runs over his mouth, falls from his chin. Grit bites into his knees.
The rain falls thick and heavy, each drop making him blink as he looks up, over the rain-battered water and the rickety railing between him and the grey stream.
The pain is a ghost of itself. It’s gone, but something’s not right, like a flooded house after the water’s gone down. Staring down into rippling puddles with echoes of the streetlights in their depths, Joey hears his own thin breathing again. Dark clouds swirl above the naked trees at the water’s edge, and the storm drones on like static.
He clutches the straps of his backpack with numb hands. What the fuck happened?
He fails miserably at trying to probe his memories. Each one is like mud, and thinking harder just has him sinking more as it sucks and pulls him down.
This is not how he pictured his night going. What stop did he even get off at? Joey struggles to get moving, slowly bringing one knee up. The effort almost winds him. Bracing one hand against the ground, he leans forward, hair hanging around his face as he takes deep breaths, the world tilting dizzyingly.
A harsh wind shoves its way down the alley, bringing something with it. White among the dark street, though flecked with dirt and footprints, a piece of paper flops along and flips over in front of him, catching the toe of his trainer. The top corner sticks to itself as the flyer pastes itself to the asphalt in front of him, halfway in a puddle.
At the top, a vivid red logo swirls around a picture of an eye. It stares unseeingly up at him as he reads.
FOR THE LOST. It proclaims. YOU KNOW WHERE TO GO.
He can’t figure out what it’s advertising. A band? It has a time, a venue. You’re invited, it says at the bottom.
Before he can reach out to pick it up, a new gust whisks it away. It flies through the railing and disintegrates on the jagged surface of the canal, pierced by raindrops.
The only living creatures Joey sees as he trudges home through the unforgiving rain are a crow pecking around the bottom of a signpost and a cat which looks well-fed, but its fur is scraggly like a mongrel. Both of them stare at him and follow him for a block. He wonders if they’re just surprised to see another creature outside.
He’s too worn out to feel relief, just slinging his bag and clothes in a heap the moment he gets back, before proceeding to sleep like the dead.
In the morning, he downs a real aspirin with a shot of coffee and goes to check the damage. He tugs the toaster out of his still-wet bag, and something falls out the side pocket. It’s his wallet.
In the kitchen, he lugs the box onto the counter. The corners are soaked and not corner-shaped anymore, and some of the ink has run. The moment he plugs it in, a bright green spark runs from his fingertips down the wire. Another toaster fried. Probably got damaged by the rain.
That’s the moment the power goes out.