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"now she’s gone and I’m sitting here drunk
and my eyes seem wet with tears.
it’s very quiet and I feel like I have a spear
rammed into the center of my gut."
- Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
Stephanie blinks, the air surrounding her tightens like latex on skin; some sort of electricity -the bad kind- runs through her spine.
She wants to die.
“Is that true?”
The girl’s voice is almost shivery. The redhead shuts his locker in a violent, frustrated manner, Karl doesn’t want to deal with any of this, but it seemed like Stephanie’s pathetic insistence broke through him.
“Why would I lie about something like that?”
Stephanie grimaces, now feeling a bit skeptical after his comment; however, Karl’s unusual seriousness keeps bothering her, digging at her side.
She swallows and Karl whispers.
“Don’t talk to me again.”
He leaves and Stephanie is too broken to even crumble on the floor, her scattered pieces too cracked and brittle to resist the steps of passerby’s.
Kim hadn’t resisted childbirth.
-
She still thought about that single moment in time. The last and first and only time Kim actually listened to her; and the disgust on her angelic face.
Stephanie shivers and grabs her piercing gun; she can’t manage to make another puncture before Orel enters the store and she immediately feels the sting and swiftly puts the gun away in a single movement. Orel looks almost impressed at her dexterity with that thing for a second.
The woman raises an eyebrow when the boy keeps the door open and she can see another kid around his age enter the store.
“Hey, aren’t you a little bold having another shortie here with you in my shop?”
Orel smiles in a not quite mischievous way.
“I just wanted my friend to also meet you, Stephanie… ah, this is Doughy!”
“H-hi...”
The redhead boy looked a little bit familiar, and it only took a minute for her to recognize the shape of his eyes. They were green, like his father’s, but the shape was unmistakably Kim’s. She felt a little bit of unease, but she didn’t dare take the piercing gun out a second time.
There was a minute of awkward silence before she quietly composed herself, and finally, she smiled in a bittersweet way.
“I know you, you’re the Latchkey boy… I knew your mom.”
“You did!?”
All that death and the kid doesn’t even look like her.
“Yeah, Doughy.”
Stephanie hides her pain very well in that moment, the boy was really a carbon copy of his dad. She wished he looked a little bit more like Kim… until she didn’t, because that would only make it harder for her.
It hurt, being a little selfish.
-
She could imagine her teenage body slowly drifting away in the tide, her light pink maternity gown swallowing her whole because a girl of that age is yet too small to properly fit into those cotton robes. She can see her blonde self, her sweaty brow, her blue eyes rolling up and giving up into the unwanted wetness. The rage, impotency and just plain dread Kim must’ve felt.
There was something fundamentally wrong with that whole situation that Kim herself had been dragged into. Or at least that’s what Stephanie wanted to think, teenage hormones dooming a girl to death, Moralton’s lack of proper education surrounding anything related to sex, the fact that Kim wasn’t just satisfied being with her and had to be with… well, a boy.
Stephanie felt misshapen.
It never could’ve worked out, not even if Kim would’ve lived. She had been a Medusa pinning for a Venus.
Something inside her that had been shifting ever since adolescence stopped for a second. Then shifted again.
-
“Your mom was… a complicated person.”
That was better than saying that she was kind of a bitch, in retrospect.
She thought about Kim every day, not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Kim had shaped her way too much as a person to just ignore like a shadow on the wall.
“We used to be best friends, and maybe something more.”
“Something more?”
Doughy fidgets with the hem of his shirt.
“We used to kiss in alleyways.”
The boy raises an eyebrow.
“Was my mom gay?”
Stephanie cackles, misery grinning into flow.
-
Kim looks at her with her cold puppy eyes. More calculating than she ever credited her for.
“I just wished you just kissed me sincerely…”
Her face morphs into a grinning smirk and the metal apparatus on her teeth glares at her as if judging and sentencing. And Kim laughs.
And Karl laughs.
And Doughy laughs.
Stephanie wakes up in a cold sweat and rubs her hand through her face, a piercing falls off and she grabs it, then leaves it on her nightstand. She is twenty-eight years old, and she no longer lives in a house with the scent of mold. Kim isn’t here, she is forever sixteen and her golden hair no longer exists.
The woman can’t help but sob.
-
She and Karl were both trapped into their sixteen-year-old selves. And she hated it. Karl was a living time capsule while Stephanie had apparently grown in mind and body and everything else but her stunted sense of self. Living was often just mimicry of what she didn’t see, but what she wanted to be. Karl acted in the past while she acted in the future. But they were both undoubtedly just acting.
Stephanie wasn’t able to confirm it, but she knew Karl thought about Kim every day, just as often as her. And not because he wanted but because he had to -just like her-, Kim had changed his life in a more physical sense, but she had done it either way.
“Suckers…”
She whispers.
“We’re both suckers in her little game…”
There’s resentment and sadness and yearning for her. But maybe she’s giving Kim a bit more credit than she deserves; even if they’re still both wrapped around her little dead finger.
-
It’s not there.
The piercing she left on the nightstand it’s just not on the nightstand anymore.
She shouldn’t worry too much, it’s a small item and it could’ve just fallen, but it’s not on the floor either… nor on her sheets, or the carpet, or the counter, or the table or the cabinet or the-
It’s gone.
She forgets about the lost piercing a week later when the piercing gun itself is gone; albeit, she would find both neatly tucked inside her closet after yelling at the air for the fifth time.
-
Without any particular reason, an icy poignant sensation hit the center of her back, she could swear she saw something by the corner of her eye. The room feels colder than before, even with the heater on, but it could just be the winter. Winter was always dire for her; it was around the time Kim passed away and she just couldn’t bring herself to visit her grave until that chilly night.
She couldn’t sleep and took an oversized black slick coat and put it on just before going outside. Stephanie couldn’t figure out why was she so desperate to see a grave she hadn’t been at in the last twelve years and just left, her body going there in an automatic motion, as if it was mere custom for her to visit her by midnight.
Her pickup truck was cold, it took around ten minutes for the engine to heat up, meanwhile, Stephanie was just as confused by her neediness to visit that place. She remembers the last time she went there, Kimberly’s funeral, she had avoided that place like Karl avoided his son, with some sort of inevitable itching desperation coated by distress. She wanted to say she couldn’t understand Karl, but she did, in a sense. The way to the graveyard was quiet and long, the night lights of the headlamps almost tilting towards her as an omen would. She wanted to go home but her body moved on her own.
She needed to see her.
-
A toy.
A ballerina music box that came with an integrated chest.
Kimberly smiles and hugs her dad.
Stephanie watches from the sidelines.
A box.
A coffin being lowered to the ground.
An open-casket funeral; Kim as pale as snow, eyes closed, mouth shut, as pretty as ever, just quieter.
Stephanie is surrounded by her classmates, unable to get close.
-
“Doughy?”
The boy jolts and shakes his head, trembling like a leaf.
“Who’s there? Mom?”
“Mom? It’s me, Stephanie.”
Doughy exhales, relief visibly running through his body, shoulders slumping first. The woman approaches and puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Shouldn’t you be at home?”
The moon makes everyone look paler than usual.
“Dad won’t open the door for me and I can’t find the key hidden somewhere in the lawn.”
Stephanie frowns, she knew Karl was a lousy father, but not that awful. The boy’s eyebags spoke by themselves. She didn’t know what to say for a second besides a ‘well, that sucks’ until some sort of inner remnant of maternal instinct -maybe because this was Kim’s child, after all- hit her like a semi-truck.
“You could crash at my house if you don’t have any place to sleep tonight.”
The look Doughy gave her scrunched her heart up, he did look like Kim at certain specific moments.
-
A redhead boy sleeping on the couch. Stephanie looks at him with something akin to sorrow.
-
“I told you it was a joke.”
“You didn’t.”
Kim frowns, the glint of her braces at that certain angle makes her squint. The room is cold and she is cold as well, her eyes seem lighter than usual.
“I can’t go on like this anymore, Stephie.”
The blonde girl twists her body into a fetal position, the fabric of her clothes seems ethereal, the white of her pullover, her blue semi-long skirt, it’s like watching a cloth going with the wind. She isn’t quite floating but she isn’t quite grounded.
Stephanie notices she is not a teenager, but an adult, while Kim is still trapped in her forever adolescence.
She-
-
She wakes up.
-
There is not a shadow in the corner of her room.
Doughy is sleeping in the living room, in the couch, none the wiser.
“Kim?”
Stephanie whispers.
-
A forcefully peppy laugh.
-
“I see her too, in my dreams.”
Stephanie picks up the glass of water after Doughy finishes drinking it.
“She never speaks to me, she just stands… far away, not even looking at me.”
The boy looks sad.
“She has-”
“She has a cheerleading uniform.”
Stephanie grins, but is almost a sneer.
“Is it scary?”
“Not really…”
The boy wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His freckled nose scrunches up.
“I just wish she would talk to me sometime…”
-
“Maybe I should move out.”
The redhead man sighs and pays up his milkshake at Sal’s. The dollar bill is crumpled, he attempts to flatten in it out with the fleshy part of his hand. It’s useless. He hands the dollar anyways.
“You cited me here just to tell me that?”
“No, you should stop being such a crappy dad too.”
Karl begins to stand up.
“Wait, do you dream with her?”
He stops on his tracks.
“Do you?”
“I do, lately.”
Stephanie fidgets with the rim of her glass.
“You know, I think she’s not gone.”
Karl makes a grimace, almost like a pout a child would make. He stops for a couple seconds, and then picks up his high school jacket and leaves.
-
And she dropped it. The piercing gun laid broken on the floor, a couple of metal pieces scattered and disappeared under the bed. Stephanie thought she lost it last week, but she had tried to do something very odd… desperate, even. She grabbed an empty glass from her kitchen and put it upside down on the dinner table.
“Please, Kim, can you give me the gun back?”
She didn’t think it would work, but that old wives’ tale actually did. However, the gun was now broken, she dropped it by surprise when she found it on the inside of her closet neatly tucked alongside the piercing she had lost two weeks ago.
She stayed quiet for a second.
“Thank you, Kim.”
-
“I stopped dreaming about my mom.”
The redhead boy had an expression somewhere in between sweet and sour.
“She never spoke to me. Just looked at me once, waved, and left.”
A small smile appeared in the kid’s face, he wasn’t looking at her, but at the floor. In that moment, Stephanie knew Kim would’ve also been an atrocious mother.
-
Her face was pale… both of their faces were, but Kim’s was paler. They were both sitting in the middle of Stephanie’s living room, but Stephanie had her old high school clothes, and Kim was once again with her cheerleading uniform.
Kimberly smiled, almost sincerely. She lounged on the couch and laid, moving her legs as if she was twelve.
“Let’s have a sleepover.”
It is not a question nor a request.
Stephanie stands up and starts filling a glass with tap water. She feels dizzy.
“You’re not seeing your kid anymore.”
“I’m not really into children.”
The blonde giggles like she just told a joke.
“Why did you see him? In the first place.”
“I didn’t have a lot of options.”
“Do you love him?”
“…”
Stephanie looks by the corner of her eye. Kim shifts uncomfortably around the couch. Doughy is a touchy subject.
“Do you love anyone?”
The black-haired girl drops the glass of water on the floor. The liquid immediately turns into a red goop on impact.
Kim starts sobbing.
“Why are you so mean to me!?”
Stephanie raises an eyebrow.
“Mean to you? Do you have any idea of what Karl and I and Doughy have been through!?” Stephanie steps on the glass, there is a crunching sound under her sneaker. “What do you want? Why are you searching for me after twelve years of radio silence?”
The blonde girl covers her face and her body starts shaking.
“I don’t know!”
Kim threshes around on the couch, her body seems as fragile as ever, her hospital gown swallowing her whole.
“I don’t know!”
Her ponytail comes loose and her blonde hair starts going messy, the pink maternity gown she is wearing now tears apart and suddenly Kim stops crying and screaming and threshing around like a fish out of water.
Her eyes seem dead. She can see part of her nude form under her robe. Stephanie averts her gaze, she can feel her face heating up.
“I don’t know, Stephie.”
“Why me, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you love me?”
“I don’t know.”
Kim is melting away on the couch, she looks like a mix between a goddess and a jellyfish. Her dead stare is looking at nowhere.
And finally, she smiles.
“I don’t know.”
She whispers.
-
“What is that?”
“Oh, that’s a hickey.”
“A hickey?”
“You’ll know when you grow taller, Orel.”
-
Being awake or asleep became irrelevant to her at one point. She could see Kim and she could have her store. What else could be better. Kim stands up right beside her, her teenage self frozen in time. She looks at Stephanie and grins, she died with her braces still on, so she keeps them in death, the mirages of Kim forever having metal in her mouth.
Kim kisses her lips with never-ending tenderness, there is no laughter, but a cheeky smile. Like an inner joke.
Stephanie melts.
Stephanie melts.
Stephanie melts.
Stephanie melts.
And hopes she can never wake up again.