Acid Fizz - 15

Tomorrow is September, which makes it more or less the end of summer today.  I finished gutting the building I've worked at for over a year and there's nothing left but the trash.  And this is the second to last installment of our online serial Acid Fizz.  End times.
Here's what's happened so far:
Acid Fizz - 1

Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9
Acid Fizz - 10

Acid Fizz - 11

Acid Fizz - 12

Acid Fizz - 13

Acid Fizz - 14

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

PAULO QUIRINO

You travel the whole world just to get to one place.  It doesn’t seem like the world should be that big, like everyplace I want to go could just as easily be around the corner.  I walk through Tulio’s backyard and through the bonfire’s smoke I can see Verona in the grass, breaking from her seizure while they dance and chant around her.  She opens her eyes and she’s not Verona, she’s Pomba Gira.  She stands and drinks the Earth in, eager.  It’s a wonderful feeling to wake into the world in a new body.

She catches the chant and puffs off the cigar of the man next to her.  The thick smoke buries her but then it clears and she exhales the tobacco at Rodrigo.  The smoke hits him and he drops and she cackles as he seizures into trance.  One of his two heads of saint, Sete Facadas or Zé-Pelintra, has descended from the village to hatch inside him.

            I lose myself in the charry smoke .  A light glints through, it is Oxalá’s face.  The young initiate has finished his walking rite and put on Oxalá’s mirror mask.   Oxalá will ride in his body for rest of the night.

            I find him on a bench, his back against the wall of Tulio’s house.  We’re the only ones here not dancing or chanting.  “Hello, Oxalá,” I say.  His face is Marcos’, reversed.  “I humbly thank you for allowing me to follow the path here.”  Travel the whole world until your feet bleed to find a reflection.  The path behind you doesn’t even look that long.

            Oxalá says nothing.  Orixás like him, they never speak.  They’re as inscrutable as an Alzheimer’s patient.  You never know if anything gets past the mirror.  I shake his hand, limp as a fresh corpse.  All I get from Oxalá is the heavy breathing from whoever he’s riding.  I nod like it means something and walk away.  The next time I see him, it will be in his house before his true and awesome form, not like this.

            I check my watch.  It’s five till one.  On the other side of the universe, in Milwaukee, Heast should be on his way down to the medical ward, the snores of my wax-skinned, comatose body echoing through the room, moments from being silenced.

There’s nothing left to do but go meet Joana.  Back through the smoke cloud, toward the back of the yard.  I climb a woodpile and don’t bother to look back at the ceremony as I jump the fence.  I land on my left foot in a bad way, fall, and crush one of the dead doves in Joana’s yard.  Joana puts two pieces of melon on the altar, sighs, and walks over to help me up, but I’m already back on my feet before she gets to me.

            She nods and then goes back to building the altar.  Everything is caught up now, this is the mountain peak and there’s nowhere else to go.  I guess there are these few steps to the altar.  I try not to step on any birds.

I brush the dove guts off my shirt and wipe my hand on my pants.  I trace the outline of Joana’s ass in her skirt.  She’s too hard to make love to, the lines in her face too deep.  Not that she’s ugly, not that she’s beautiful, but if I didn’t know her, I might want to.  Her sister, I should have really tried harder to sleep with her.  It’s a shame I never will.  It’s a shame to think of all the people I’ll never fuck, but it won’t matter much soon.

I hear orchestrated brass and strings, something cracking and crumbling.  I turn and see a TV through a neighbor’s window.  There’s a movie, a little girl stands alone on a city street with a stuffed dinosaur in her hand.  A skyscraper collapses, its torso exploding while the head and shoulders sink intact.  It’s a disaster movie I’ve seen before.  The girl stares up at the plummeting cloud of CGI debris.  It’s a callback to a game of Jenga she played with her half-brother earlier in the movie.

In prison I heard a rumor that I have a daughter down here.  I don’t know if it’s true.  The cloud is just about to close in on the girl when a whining comes from her left.  A Yamaha bike zooms past and the rider, whose identity is concealed by a helmet, whisks the girl into their arms.  I turn back to Joana, who comes to me with a live dove in one hand and a long skinny knife in the other.

I wonder where Ginny ended up?  Will I see her again one day?  I was going to send her a care package a minute before.  Weird how things turn out.

I remember they outrun the cloud on the motorcycle and they pull into a park and the rider takes off his helmet and it’s her half-brother, Greg or something.  It seems obvious now, but they make you think he’d already died in a capsized oilrig.

I lie down in the clearing by the altar.  Joana stands over me and cuts the dove’s neck, its wings burst open and closed and the feathers drift down to me and then she drizzles the blood over the feathers.  I smell barbecue from another backyard.  It reminds me of when I first came here eleven years ago, of hot nights and being full of meat and bubbly beer.  I remember them being happy, but maybe I’m wrong.  It’s hard for me to keep my mind on tasks at hand today.  I don’t know what that’s about.

She tips the dove above my head and I drink the blood from its throat.  You travel the whole world, from up in the clouds to lying in the ground with the dirt in your back.

Joana picks the gun up off of the ground next to me.  This is it, really, really it.  She chants with me:  “Oxalá, my head is yours, now and forever.  Oxalá, these offerings are yours.”  I add: “This body is a sacrifice, a trade for my place in the exu village.  Thank you.”

The Yamaha zooms, the little girl screams.  I remember them being safe already.  Where are they?  I can’t see the screen but I picture a chunk of granite smashing in their path, the bike flattening against it, a simple thunk of his helmet on the pavement, the girl sailing through the air with her dinosaur next to her, while right above them is an even bigger chunk of falling granite.  Joana points the gun at my forehead.  She closes one eye and centers the other over the barrel’s center.  This is really it now.  Really, really, really, really, really, really, uh, really

Acid Fizz - 13

It's 1:43 PM and my head is a little stuffy from work stuff, but I like this thing I'm giving you right now.  If you haven't been reading our ongoing online serial Acid Fizz, you can start with the earliest installments and catch up.

Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9
Acid Fizz - 10

Acid Fizz - 11

Acid Fizz - 12

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

PAULO QUIRINO

KkKkKkKkKkKkKkKk – a key: bronze, a “15” etched in its side, between my left thumb and forefinger.  In my right hand, the fob, a flat green diamond painted with a “15” and in italics, under the number: “Casa Do Mundo.”  The key slides between the fob’s metal rings and they sync together.  I drop the entwined pair into a shoebox lid with other sets and pick up fob 16 from a pile on the desk.

            “Bloodaloop.”  I have an AOL instant message.  It says, in Portugese, “Pregnant again.  Third time this year!” The chat window is framed on all sides by a gray Google Earth map of Rio.  My fingers press into the keys to type back.  I don’t bother to focus on what I write back.

            What the fuck just happened?  I struggled through that black pond where something grabbed me again.  I got loose and then came out of Ginny as a death rattle, vibrated through the microphone until I raised into electric volts and slid into a single data bit.  I shot through space, bounced off a satellite, and fucked a zillion wires until I was in this computer thousands of miles away, then crackled out of its speakers as that terrible sound.  That whole time, only a few long seconds really, I was in the world, but I wasn’t a part of it any more than a submarine is a part of the ocean.  I was just an unthinking, unliving, neverending “KkKkKkKkKk,” the sound of blood being gargled.  Suddenly now I’m unfrozen, a man again, pairing keys and fobs and chatting on my computer and listening to the dead air that must be Ginny’s show.  I’m in the world and breathing air and on solid ground and wearing clothes, but I don’t remember what’s so good about these things. They’re supposed to keep me alive, but do I really need them?

            This guy I’m in, Marcos, his mind is in five different directions.  The keys, the online conversation, Google directions to Páoderia Maria, tuning in and out of the dead air hiss from the speaker, and thinking, in Portugese: What was that sound?  Was Ginny choking?  No.  She probably just fucked up her show again.  So what was the sound?  Should I call again?  To say what?  Are you choking?  I apologize for my terrible English.  Let me give you over-the-phone Heimlich.   I’d probably just hang up again.  If they have caller ID, she wouldn’t even pick up.  Why can’t I say something to her?  I need a new station.

            He stops typing his AIM message mid-sentence to open another browser window and search for “WFMU streaming.”  Before the search results come back, he’s typing and sending his message.  He sifts through a bowl for a key with “16” on it.

            The busyness of it makes me sick.  He looks at the world through little periscopes without having to get out of his chair.  This room doesn’t even have windows, nothing on the cracked walls.  A desk, a cot, a hot plate.  I’d say this guy was poor but for the computer.

            I don’t for one second believe I need this.  I need a smelly room and a pudgy, balding body?  I need water, gravity, light, air?

            I shove Marcos into the middle of his brain and hold my breath.  I can get by without it.  A new message bloodaloops: “But she’ll die if she keeps popping them out like that,” it says.  I decide to type back to whoever this is, though I have no idea what she’s talking about.  “Did you know there are octopi that have litters of like 8,000 and they die raising them because it’s so exhausting?” I write.  What do you say to that?  I probably just killed the conversation.

            The need to breath starts for no good reason and pulls at me.  Marcos’ face reflects in the computer monitor.  He seems okay without oxygen so far.  The guy lives like a slob.  Dried gunk sticks food wrappers together.  Soda cans lie on their side.  One corner of his mattress is bared under twisted-away sheets.

My throat contracts like it’s taking in air, but it’s not.  Can’t it stop trying?  My head feels like it’s bruising.  It’s a big myth that we need anything not to die or that we live at all.

            The telephone on the desk rings.  Maybe there is no such thing as air.  There is no sun.  I could live on Neptune if I wanted to.

            My nose tries to take in air and I have to clench it harder.  The phone rings.

            My head is light, there’s pressure on my temples.  What does that have to do with me?  The phone rings.

            My throat is tense and painful.  I convulse in very slight ways like my mouth is fighting me to open up.  Hold it.  Hold it.  Fuck.  My mouth pops open and I gulp a mouthful of air.

            I run to the door, the only way out, and swing it open.  Into a dark hallway and I stub my toe on something hard.  It’s a stair.  I hop onto it, then up and up from nothing but a phone ringing in the middle of nowhere.

            I hear a woman scream something.  A slit of gray light shines from under a door at the top of the stairs.  Another scream.  Something awful is beyond the door.  I don’t want to see it, but I am scared that somehow I’m trapped down here, that the door is sealed from the outside.

            I climb the last step, just outside the bright and screaming world.  I throw the door open and it bounces off of something.  “Fuck,” someone says.  The door only opens halfway so I jump through it sideways.  It’s a dirty half-light on the other side from dusty and broken ceiling fluorescents.  I close the door and behind it in this narrow hallway is a small old man in a tank top, grabbing his eye where I landed the door.  Marcos’ memory supplies his name for me, Vinicius, and I know, like the knowledge one inherits in a dream, where the scar down his right arm came from and how his wife died and how long he’s had his job as a security guard.

            “Sorry,” I say.

            He looks at me with his good eye.  “Fucking Marcos,” he mutters.

            “Sorry.”

            Behind him, on either side of the hallway, are several doors, all numbered 16-10.  The hallway is full of people standing outside these doors, all of them disheveled, most in their underwear.  At the end of the hall, where it breaks into a lobby is a white-haired man in a wheelchair, a button-up unbuttoned enough to expose most of his chest.  He has a cell phone at his ear.  He’s the only one here who looks like he didn’t just wake up.  Another name feeds into my mind, then shrouds and settles around him: Lourges.

            Lourges sees me and puts down the phone.  “I was trying to call you,” he says.  “They need to leave.”

            I turn around and find Ana Flavia, less than five feet tall, almost crying and cocking her head as she screams at her boyfriend, Joáo.  They’ve been here two weeks and were bad news from the get-go.  He’s a dope, scrawny, over a foot taller than her with clothes sagging off of him.  He gawks and grins at her rage.  Not that I need it to know they’re drunk, but I can smell the cachaça from here.  Behind them, more hallway, more stained and feral carpeting, ten more rooms, each with one or two more interrupted dreamers before them, squinting at the spectacle.

            He clucks in a sort of laugh and calls her a puta and she slaps him.

            “You two,” I say.  “Get the fuck out.”

            He turns and tries to stare at me, but can’t quite focus his eyes.

            “These people are trying to sleep.  Time to go.”

Joáo shrugs his shoulders and walks away, toward the peeling door at the end of the hallway.

            She bites her lip and follows him, punching his back the whole way out.

            They walk out the door and I turn back to Lourges.  “Make sure they leave,” he says.

            I squeeze through the guests as they turn back into their rooms.  I peak through the door and look down from a second story fire escape onto a parking lot next to a noisy street.  Joáo starts his rusty Civic, parked with its nose up to the building, and the tailpipe rattles.  The woman jumps behind the car and kicks it a couple times.  “Don’t leave me, motherfucker!” she says.

The man backs up a few inches, then slams the breaks.  She kicks the car again and again, each kick paired with a “fuck you!”  He straightens his body as he steps out, looking like he’s growing out of the car.  He strides to the back and shoves her to the ground.

            Madeinusa, the cute, tired woman behind me with a ten-month-old in her arms, shakes her head.  She has to work at five this morning.  Lourges sighs and rolls his wheelchair back and forth, idling.  He yawns at me.  I push through the doorway and climb down the steps.

            The woman is back on her feet and screaming, “Just go.  Why don’t you go?”

            “Because you’re standing behind my car.  You want me to run over you?  Huh?  You want fucking treadmarks all over your ass?”

            As I reach the bottom of the steps, he slaps her again.

            “Hey!”  I say.  “You two need to get off the property now.”

            The woman looks at me.  “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business,” she says and I see her fist coming at me but am so surprised I don’t react until the punch connects.  The car’s engine revs high and then low even though no one’s on the gas pedal.

            The hotel door flies open and Vinicius runs down the steps and into Ana Flavia’s face.  The eye I banged the door into is squinted shut.  “Who you think you are, hitting him, you skeazy bitch?” he says.

Joáo butts in between them.  “You gonna start shit with my woman?  I’ll kill you, old man.”

            “Yeah,” she says.  “We’ll burn the whole piece of shit hotel down and lock the doors from the outside so you all choke to death.”

            “Fuck you both,” the old man says and winds up to sock Joáo.

            Joáo punches him in the stomach.  The old man looks to me for help and I look over at the Civic as the revving starts to dip down again.

            Ana Flavia hits Vinicius in the face.  I run around them and jump into the driver’s seat.  I back up like I would run them over.  Maybe I would.  They scatter backwards.  Vinicius falls to the pavement and coughs. I jam it in first and vroom the scraping engine out of the parking lot into the rest of the world so dense with noise and lights.

Acid Fizz - 12

Acid Fizz, an insano-fiction online serial for those who like their bread butter side down.  If you haven't been reading, catch up on the earlier segments right here:

Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9
Acid Fizz - 10

Acid Fizz - 11

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

THE JAR MAN

The woods are in the back of the darkness like a stage at the end of a dark theater.  I lead her toward it and I feel as if I am murdering her, not helping her, as I take her to this place where she can rest.  But it is the place she is meant to be, it appeared the moment she let go of the world and her eyes popped open in the darkness.  And beside that, it’s this or the bottomless sludge sea.  If I ever see that thing that did this to her, that stranded her here in the folds of nothingness, I will be sure that it knows what it’s done.

            She didn’t even protest, didn’t ask a question, didn’t try to bargain with me.

            “Is it that easy for you to accept your death?” I ask her.  A thousand insects hum in the woods.

            “I don’t think I do accept it,” she says.  “I understand it, though.  I wish it weren’t true but I’m sure it is.  And you say I should go into those woods.  I believe you.  I hope I accept it later.”

            I feel the thick air from the woods now.  The place is so much more vibrant than the village.  This is all so much easier for her.  Years of darkness and doubt, a pale and mute village as my fickle oasis.  Are they all spared it?  Am I the only one who was made to have to bear it?

            “How long have you been dead?” she asks.

            I don’t even know that I am dead, entirely.  I answer it the easy way.  “Nine years.”

            “Huh.  This place is big, isn’t it?”

            “I think it is.  Yes.”

            “That was a dumb question. Sorry.”

            The woods are bigger now.  We’re almost in them but that they still have a border, like the edge of a photograph.

            “So do you still miss people?  Your family?  Friends?”

            “Yes, I do.”

            “Do they find you when they die?”

            I don’t know, I don’t even know if she should be here.  I want to tell her to run, but run where?

            “Yes,” I say.

            I set my pure black foot down on the mossy floor.  She does the same.  A wind brushes wild anamu leaves against me.  A stony stream chirrups by our side.

            “So, what do I do now?” she asks and smiles at me.  It feels genuine but also like a bandaid sealed over a different emotion.

            I have no idea what to tell her.  To her I am an all-knowing guide to this world but inside I am empty and dumb.  “Keep going,” I say.

            “Oh,” she says.  She takes a step forward then turns back to me.  “Okay.”

            She steps over a stone and cracks a fallen malletwood branch with the ball of her foot.  She slaps a mosquito on her thigh.  “I can’t relate this place to anything I’ve ever seen,” she says.  “I have woods around my hometown, Belleville, Wisconsin, near Madison.  We have woods there, but not as lush as this.  It looks to me like movies or like a folder I would have had in second grade.”

            She disappears for a moment at a time behind the trees.

            “It’s really beautiful out here,” she says.  She’s right.  “You know the whole point of me talking right now is just that I’m terrified and I want to know there’s someone else here with me, so you can join the conversation if you don’t mind.”

            “You’re right.  It is beautiful.”

            “Yeah.  Ow.”

            “Are you alright?”

            “Yeah.  I just scraped my leg a little on a branch.”

            The trees are so thick now I can only see her movement, but not her shape.

            “You know what the real shame is?” she asks.

            “No.  What?”

            “I’m just now figuring out how to end my show.  I’m a radio DJ.”

            “Yes.”

            “Yeah and I had about forty minutes left of the show.  With all the spots I do plus all my chatter, that’s probably about six or seven songs.  And I got them now.  I know exactly what I’d play.”

            “What would you play?” I ask.  I shout because she’s farther away now.

            She shouts too.  “Well, I’ve got this sort of trio of songs I want to do that are all related, it’s Elvis, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, sort of a meditation on the life of songs.  It will be pretty interesting but just to make sure no one’s falling asleep, I’d kick out The Stooges next.  They have this crazy song that just busts right through the speaker but what really makes me gaga is there’s a xylophone in it, what a nutty song.  Do you know The Stooges?”

            “I may have heard of them.”

            “Then I’d slow it down for a piece with Woody Guthrie, keep toes tapping but also make it so their hearts jump when the next song starts.  Oh, Jesus.”

            “What?”

            “Music is all I ever talk about.  I don’t want my last conversation to be about music.”

            “Talk about anything.”  There’s only woods behind me.  I don’t know where we came in.  I walk in the opposite direction of her to find my way out.

            “Oh, shit.  I don’t know what else to talk about.  After that, I’m thinking 96 Tears.  One of those songs I remember listening to in the car with my mom back when oldies stations played sixties music.  Then to close it out, Duke Ellington, Blue Pepper from the Far East Suite.  It’s a crazy song that will cave your head in it’s so crazy.”

There’s a path cutting through the woods, but it doesn’t look like it’s part of the woods.  It’s covered in smoke a few inches high, so thick there might not be a floor underneath it.  It reminds me of the road in the village.

            “I like Duke Ellington,” I say.  I think that’s true.

            “Me too.  Me too.  What other kind of music did you like?”  I can barely hear her.

            I step onto the path and smoke grows over everything like white vines expanding in fast-forward until it is everything.  I would try to answer her but I know she wouldn’t hear me.

            I step forward and there is a moment.  It is only a moment but it feels like it could have been years and I am suddenly exhausted from how far I’ve travelled though I’ve only taken a step.  I’m in the village, standing on the gray white featureless road with the white featureless sky above me and the white featureless houses on either side.

I don’t see anyone else.  I’m not waiting around for them this time.  I walk to the big cloudy house at the end of the street.  I’m going to walk in, whatever happens happens.

As I pass one of the last houses on the right, I startle.  There is someone here, she’s camouflaged the exact same gray as the steps she’s sitting on.  Her hair is long, curly, rowdy.  Her face looks like a stretched out moon.  The patches of her dress hang by one edge, ragged wings like flakes of diseased skin.  She watches me as I pass.  I look straight ahead and walk until my feet scrape the mat outside the front door of the big house.   I put my hand on the knob.

I could open it right now and go through.  I could.  Or I could try to ask her first.  I take my hand off the knob and look at the woman.

“Have you seen…”  My voice works, somehow.  I walk toward her while I start again.  “Have you seen a black mass?” I ask.  “A man-shaped thing, all black, bubbling out of the ground?  I saw it the last time I was here.”

“It was here not long ago.  We tried to kill it.  We don’t allow mortals in our village.  We don’t like strangers at all.”  She looks hard into my eyes.  “But we do not tolerate mortals.”

“It’s mortal?”

“Sure.  If it wasn’t, it would just walk in here like you did instead of bubbling up halfway through the ground.”

I stop a few strides away from her.

“It cleared out about as fast as it came, but not before it took Merl’s finger.”

“It attacked you?”

She shakes her head.  “Merl grabbed it and held it while Bill come at it with a knife.  The thing must have been slippery as all hell because it got loose just as Bill was driving the knife and he put it into Merl’s hand instead.  Now of course Merl won’t stop complaining about it.  Go inside and you’d be sure to get an earful from his surly ass.”

“Where did it go?”

“Skedaddled between those two houses across the road.”

She points over my head at the white gap between the two houses.  I walk toward it.

“Hope you get it, mister,” she calls after me.

I walk faster and leap between the two houses.  The white gap is all dead, dried brush.  I fight through it.  My head starts to feel like it’s on a burner or like something is heating it from the inside.  Something’s pulling at me in the middle of my being, pulling my self away.  Oh no.  I’m losing this place again.  I keep throwing myself through the brush but I know what this is.  I’m going back.

Acid Fizz - 11

nodding off, i post another.
when it's up i'll twist the covers.

if you've been reading, you know it's the tits.
if not, you'll need preceding bits:

Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9
Acid Fizz - 10

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

CLAIRE HOLZKORN

This is what she looks like: her eyes are little domes shut to the world and mascara crystals bind her lashes.   Her nose is like the entrance to a forest cavern.  Her lips are too glossy and too red even after I asked them to dull them and even after I dabbed them myself with my handkerchief.  They’ve never looked like that before.  Her mouth is closed to hide her mangled tongue.  Her cuts are caulked and plastered now.  She looks perfect.  Not perfectly her, just perfect.  Her face is a wax model.  I squeeze her hand.

I’d always thought she was happy.  She looked happy.  Did she come into the house singing like that so that I’d think she was happy?  Because she knew it would make me happy?  How many times has someone looked at me and said to themself, “she looks happy?”  Did I give it to her?  My mask?  Did I pass it down so that she could walk around like I do, looking alright so no one would ever ask if she really was?  Did I doom her?  Did I even know her?

What was so rotten in there?  What poison broached those gleaming sealed lips and sickened her?  She didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke.  I’ve been looking at her and looking at her, just looking for one thing.  I want to know who she was and what was inside of her.  What did she want a week ago?

            The light changes as the rising sun breaks in, lighting her more evenly, less dramatically, and she looks even weirder.  I resent the sunlight coming into the room.  It’s been just me and her for hours now, alone and painted in this room by the night and now the light shines in and the birds are chirping and there’s some creaks from the foyer.  The world is trying to break in.  I’m supposed to burry her today.

            They’re whispering just outside the door.  I don’t care what they’re saying, probably who should check on me.  Am I alright, barely leaving her side for the last day, singing “Plaisir D’amour,” her favorite song as a girl, to her all night until my voice went hoarse and probably keeping up Clyde and the rest of the Matheson Funeral Home family awake?

            Someone’s coming down the steps, Helen probably.  I need more time.

            The door opens.  “Good morning, Ms. Holzkorn,” a man says.

            Who the hell is this now?  I peel my cheek off the edge of the casket where it’s been laying for hours now.  My tears glued it down.  I snort up some phlegm and turn to see this guy who I don’t know at all.  He’s about forty, nerdy with glasses and a short-sleeved button up.

            “I don’t know if you’ve ate, but I went by Alterra on my way here and got a breakfast sandwich and a coffee.”  He walks up to me and offers the white bag and paper cup to me.  I won’t let go of her so he sets them down next to me and rubs his jeans with his palms.  “There’s cream already in it, but the sugar’s on the side.  If you’re not hungry and the sandwich goes cold, there’s a cinnamon bun in the bag too you could have later.  I understand if you’re not hungry.”

            Why is this guy is here?  Why the Mathesons let him down here?  My brain is too exhausted to go farther with a question than just the asking.  I turn back to Ginny and study her neck, the good side.

            He sits down in one of the first row folding chairs.  She never lived to see her breasts sag.  I wish she had grown old enough to get ugly, old enough to know there were worse things than being young and sad.

            “My name is Andrew Chambers,” he says.  He’s probably lived long enough to have ruined his life once or twice, learned its value.  She should have been disillusioned with one life and stepped into another and been disillusioned again and cycled through it until she became unphasable, until she wore rhinoceros skin.  She deserved a decline, she deserved the wisdom that comes with it.  Why couldn’t she just have lived that long?

            “I’m the one who found Virginia,” he says.  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

            I open my mouth and squeak instead of talking.  I clear my throat and rasp,  “Thank you.”  I need this stranger’s consolation less than I need a hole in the head.

            “The real reason I’m here is about a dream I had.  Last night I fell asleep in the lab I work in  and in my dream I saw your daughter.  It was all black so I couldn’t see her but I knew she was there and I could tell that she didn’t know she was there.  Her soul was supposed to go somewhere but her mind kept thinking about where she’d already been so she was just wandering and getting more and more lost.”

            Her stomach is flat because she’s still a girl.  She never had a kid.  Kids rip your world apart and your body too.  I would have liked to see her world ripped into something bigger.  She lived the movie version of her life but I wish it had been a novel, messy and long and with subplots that go nowhere.

            “I woke up back in my lab and it was all dark and for a second I thought I was in that neverending blackness that Virginia was in and I was so terrified I couldn’t breath but after a few seconds I could smell the disinfectant and I felt the seat under me and I took a breath.”  I wish he would leave.  “I knew that something was keeping her here so I looked up the name of her funeral home and I came here and sure enough I find you, holding onto her tight like you’re going to pull her out of deep waters.  Have you been here all night?”

            She died pretty, never lived long enough to see men lose interest, never had to settle for old guys, fat bald old guys.  That Bobby is a hunk.  He came over to console us and ended up balling his eyes out so hard that Nick had to drive him home, poor kid.  Sweet as hell.  Even in the middle of sobbing he thought to congratulate Helen on her baby.  Ginny should have lived long enough for one of them to fuck up the relationship.  Everything ended so perfect with her.  How could she have killed herself?  Just to spare herself the sloppiness of a real life she had to die young and pretty?  Were the cuts some instant approximation of age?

            “I don’t want to come in here and tell you how to handle your pain, but I saw her in the blackness.  It was so cold and so frightening and I’m scared she’ll never find her way out if you don’t let her go.  Will you do that?  Just for a little while?”

            “You are crazy,” I tell him.

            “I just needed to do something.  Whether you let go or not is your business.  I probably wouldn’t listen to what a stranger told me to do right now.  I believe what I’m saying, but, whether you listen to me or not, I am sorry for your loss.  I know how excruciating this is.”

            My hand slides to her fingertips.  I feel along the stitches they sewed over the cuts.  Her head, her nose, her tongue, her fingertips.  Did she scar herself over every point the world could get in to block its entrance?  Or did it open herself to the world before she died?  I can’t think about this anymore.  But I will.

            I unclasp my purse and pull out my cigarette case, pluck one out and fasten it between my lips.

            “Do you have a light?” I ask the nerd.

            “You can smoke in here?”

            “Nevermind.  I found one.”  I pull a Bic out of my purse and start the cigarette.

            “Well, I’m glad to have met you.  I’ll come by the proper service later.”

            I turn and he’s already on his feet.  It’s lonelier in here with the daylight.  “You have someplace to be?” I ask.

            He stops on his way out.  “When I found Virginia there was the stale smoke from a snubbed cigarette in the room and I breathed it the whole time I waited for the cops.  Since then cigarette smoke makes me nauseas.”

            “She smoked?”

            “Um…”

            “She smoked?  Ginny smoked?”

            “Well, there was smoke in the studio when I got there.”

            Then that’s one thing I know, one thing I can see inside that pink petite body of hers, a pair of blackened lungs just like mine.

            “It was the same brand, actually,” he says and backs away from the smoke I’m exhaling.

            “Huh.”

            The stairs creak and suddenly Clyde’s peaking in, wearing his robe, his eyes blinking from early morning re-orientation to the world.

            “Claire,” he says, “I’m sorry but could you please smoke that outside?  It’s a public space.  We can get fined for that.”

            I look back at Ginny, Ginny the pretty, Ginny the young, Ginny the sad, Ginny the happy, Ginny the faker, Ginny the smoker, Ginny the so-many-things.

            “Why don’t you come outside with me?”  Andrew says.

            I let Ginny’s hand go for the first time in six hours.  My knees pop when I stand up.

            Andrew goes out the door around Clyde.  As I pass Clyde I grumble, “Sorry,” and take another drag.

            We walk up the stairs and toward the up-angled golden sunlight coming in through the front door.