The Wakeful Death

Her darkness blooms red from her finger’s muzzle. Led only by the intimations that no coincidences exist in this interpenetrating universe and the flips of a battered quarter she found on the street the previous day, S. has traveled fifty blocks to this penthouse lousy with romanesque porticos and irisless statues, and finds her paycheck in the indoor pool. The chlorine clings to her nostrils; the moisture hangs around her; she watches him and his walrus-like body, all hair and blubber and leathery skin, pull himself out of the pool at the sight of the gore in her wake, the expanding halo of blood from the security guard whose body props the pool door open, then slip on the tile and turn, begging for her mercy—mercy that she will refuse to grant, as she extends her finger and aims for the space between the eyes…

S. comes home from the deli with a pastrami on rye, no mustard; a piece of apple cake; a single bottle of water; and an envelope passed under the table by a mysterious man in a white suit and a chartreuse tie, bursting with hundred-dollar bills—and already the next job waits for her as a photo in one of S.'s picture frames, the one that her mother used to occupy. Smashing the frame with a hammer, she pulls the photo out, licks the blood from her cut fingers. An old woman, gray ringlets infecting her head, coral pants suit, a professional gaze behind rounded glasses.

"Sis boom bah." She says, putting the photo to her forehead and shuttering her eyes. Things present themselves: a large hallway, corpses dressed in security-blue with their heads blown out. The old woman quaking in her office chair as S. steps closer, finger loaded. A gold-leaf dome atop a governmental building. And then a final flash of sound, an antiseptic beep with no beginning or end, attack or decay, that pulls her back to her apartment and leaves her shaking and confused and strangely sad.

Weeks pass. S. gains weight and then loses it, watches it slough off herself in the bathroom one morning, the scale’s dial a blur of numbers. The mangos at the grocery store have almost completely rotted away into blackness until she places them in her cart, where their fragrance and color returns. With eyes wide open she takes naps on the Turkish rug in her apartment—below which, underneath floorboards rickety from being repeatedly pulled up, slumbers her earnings in a black iron safe—and then wakens by closing her eyes. She takes small-time work: middle-class spouses trying to off their loved ones with their rainy-day funds and overfilled swear jars, jaded business owners needing their stores (and, often, employees) “taken care of” as an insurance ploy, and more poor souls looking to put their elderly and/or terminally ill parents/grandparents/etc. out of their misery than she knows what to do with.

On a right day, chosen only by a special swerve in her gut, signaled by the egg she fries for breakfast landing yolk-side down when she flips it onto her toast, a walk is taken at lunch, down to the city center, and at the point on the street next to the town hall and its gold dome that feels most right, she steps through the walls, viewing the literal insides of stone and drywall, piping, fiberglass insulation in pink loaves, wires and fuseboxes and the occasional family of mice. Once or twice she walks right through a security guard, who collapses in a blue-uniformed mass once she's exited their body. On and on until she enters an office, with an iron-haired woman typing at a computer, who notices her only when it's too late that S. has a hand on the back of the woman's head. Her brains, eyeballs, the cartilage of her nose, her lips, concuss themselves into the wall at the other side of the room; and S. disappears even before the corpse’s remains trickle into the labyrinths between the keyboard keys.

He finds her trying to feed oats to the ducks at the park.

"You'd probably do better with plain white bread," he says as he sits at the bench next to her. The ducks ignore her; they waddle, flutter into the pond, float away. A team of joggers passes them, and once they're gone he leaves an envelope next to him, and leaves.

Not even the squirrels want the oats. She shakes her hand free of them over a nearby trash can.

Her bloody guts lead her over to the corner grocery store by her apartment, and begin squirming in the middle of the cereal aisle, surrounded by myriad multihued cardboard ad  various sugar-pushing cartoon animals, photos "enlarged to show texture", milky spoonful after milky spoonful. 

She grabs a box—Choco-Stuffs, with a radical skateboarding penguin pimping for it—opens it up, spills its contents onto the floor, pulls out a red plastic top sealed in cellophane that was taped to to the bottom.

Another box—Cornholes this time, with its similarly chill, sunglasses-wearing hippo—and dumps it out. An old lady pushing her walker through the aisle gives S., a dirty look. She rips the prize out: a lenticular photo that, from one angle, exhibits the hippo chowing down on a big bowl of Cornholes, and from another, becomes a too-serious-for-her-own-good woman with a wizened slash of a mouth. Back and forth, back and forth; then in the middle between the two she finds another image, of three tennis balls in an unsealed can.

Back at her apartment, she lays a street map out flat, spins the red top, watches it explore the city, exploring for nearly ten minutes, before stopping at a sports club near the duck pound she goes to.

Happenings string themselves throughout the days, weeks, months—S.’s eyes change color one day, from chartreuse to fog-gray; the lightbulbs she buys make her living room darker, prompting an attempted, but failed, store return; in an alley behind a sleazy pool hall she blows out the brains of a troublesome bookie; the vein in her wrist rearranges itself one morning to spell the phrase this message is false in exceptional calligraphy—then pulling out a potato chip shaped like a tennis racket during lunch tips her off that it’s time. Now she ducks through the hallway of a certain sports club, clouds of recently applied carpet powder and the jet engine of an employee with a backpack vacuum, into the women’s locker room. Near the back where the lockers are full-length and paneled in mahogany, putting on the last of her workout clothes, is the old sourpuss. She sends an empty smile S.’s way and sits on a nearby bench to tie her shoelaces.

S. blows her head off with a trusty index finger, watches the body tumble. Then: its hands break out in tremors that travel up its arms; the corpse should be literal dead meat, but it just keeps moving and shaking, and causing everything it touches to quiver and shift. She watches a can of unsealed tennis balls tumble off the top of the locker, and clatter down, one of the tennis balls falling out, revealing a split in its side like a mouth. All her nerves cry out; she resists the overwhelming, inexplicable urge to run, and sweats as she leaves the locker room.

“The showers are too hot, right?” A woman says, passing her. “I swear, it’s as if I need to take another one as soon as I get home.”

Her fingers burn with the coffee that drips down the sides of the cup she’s unable to hold without sloshing. The napkins she pulls out of the dispenser come with a bonus: another photo, this time of a woman with long black hair and stony eyes, who looks into the lens with a tired resignation. She crumples it and drops it into her coffee, which promptly begins to bubble and boil over.

The bell welded to the deli’s door ding-a-lings, catches her attention. Of all people to be walking outside…but that’s too coincidental. This existence she’s eked out has never worked this simply. But S. also follows things to the letter. She watches the woman with her sad eyes, follows her down the street, watches her sit on a stoop and light a cigarette, and, slowly, aims.

The pills have never worked before, but Sandra takes one anyway, and sits on the edge of her bed, staring out into the purple sky. A dragon flies by, spiraling higher and higher, evanescing into violet haze. Half an hour later, contradictory to the medicalese instructions on the bottle, her head still aches, like steel bands wrapped around her skull, crushing ever inward.

And as if reminding her of her headache, the medical alarm’s buzzy chirp rips through the silence, and Sandra rushes out to the other bedroom, and takes the button out from her mother's wrinkled fingers.

"What is it?"

"I'm hungry," her mother says, a lemon-sucking pout on her face.

"Okay, I'll..." the bands constrict more. "I'll reheat—"

"No! No reheating. No microwave. I want to eat like I'm pregnant again!"

"Mom, I don’t—"

"When I was pregnant with you the only thing I could eat was a pastrami on rye with mustard from Mort’s…” Her mother has that blank expression on her face again, staring into the void of memory. “your father would get three or four with some apfelkuchen for dessert, and then some rosé from Harry’s—remember the Gablers, you used to play with their son?” She sighs. “They say you shouldn't drink when you're pregnant, but you turned out mostly alright, don't you think?"

Sandra waits in line at the deli; the music playing floats out of the radio with mass, the sound literally crashing into and cracking the tile floor in time to the four-to-the-floor beat, and further tightens the pressure in her head. The boys at the deli work and bustle along, singing like they’re in a barbershop; they dodge the cracks on the floor in their mad proletariat dance until someone slips and falls in a fountain of tile chips and freshly sliced prosciutto.

The cat lounging at the counter asks Sandra for a smoke when it’s her turn to order.

"Sorry, I don't smoke."

"I don't like being lied to," the cat says, righting itself and staring straight into her soul with lambent amber eyes. “I can see you. Nothing about you is real. You better watch out and hope that your fucking sandwich doesn't have anything extra in it, if you catch my drift.”

"Ignore him," the girl at the counter says, "he won't let us shave his fur for a nicotine patch, so all he has is gum. Now, what can I getcha?"

While her mother eats, Sandra sits on the edge of her own bed. She aches; tremors wrack her body as she tries to press the emotion that so desperately wants to come out into a diamond. The repeating patterns on the carpet below her feet catch her eye; she tries to follow their curves, but find they stretch into shapes that don’t exist in two, or even three, dimensions that hurt her head to even conceive of.

The alarm sounds.

She wishes that this could be that one, final, schadenfreude-filled alarm. Upon arriving, her mother announces she needs to use the bathroom, and that she also needs new tennis balls for her walker, and why hasn’t her only daughter noticed that yet?

Sandra smokes out on the stoop in front of her apartment, looking left, watching the street stretch downtown; she tries to blow rings with each exhalation, but the shapes twist into spirals and Xs that evaporate into the city air. The water tower on the building across the street looms, its shadow liquid, rippling and reforming with each change in the wind. A man with a white suit accidentally knocks into her on his way out of the building; she notices his tie is a lime-green snake that hisses at her when she gets too close, and he smiles and puts his fingers to his lips as if to say "no closer!"

She wants to see...meteorites. One taking out the water tower; another exploding miles away in big clouds of dust and building rubble; a big one, the size of her apartment, hurtling towards her, showing her her reflection in its oily rainbow face. Instead, via the windows of the parked sedan in front of her, she notices something in the windshield of a parked sedan in front of her—a woman, with her thumb and index finger pointed out like a gun.