Sunday, December 27, 2015

A Place Between

I will live forever in this red inch between the bullet and the back of my skull. And when this forever ends I will spend the next three in the ringing stillness of a dead man’s bedroom.
The gun is cold in my hand. Its heavy. How I maintained my grip on the thing after squeezing the trigger is beyond me. The rictus of death is surely forever away.

This is the only peace I will ever know. Its a realization that is slow to dawn. Takes forever.
I expected something - I don’t know what - different. Something other than this freezing stillness of time. Where I come from there are only two options when the electrical impulses of a man’s brain cease. You either go to the beyond - heaven or hell or whatever the hell is out there beyond the slow torture of life. Or, option two, you get nothing. Black. Stillness. The void of nonexistence. Which isn’t something that can really be experienced I guess. My grandmother alluded to waiting in blackness until the return of that guy everybody thumps their blue leather bound books for. The ones with the silky pages.
I’d hoped for the nothingness. Or at least fire. Movement of some kind. Secretly, in the months and years leading up to today, if it even still was today so many forevers later, that there’d be freedom. A definitive end or re-beginning.
I’m right here though. Stuck. Forever.
Still it has got to better than that piece of shit I’d called an existence prior.
He’s there rather suddenly, the man under the bed. I see the gleam of his eye in the darkness beneath the box spring. Did he fade in? Did just he just appear? Was he there before, and if so how had I not noticed?
He wasn’t there before. I know he wasn’t there before.
He shifts, turning his face slightly to the side. An unstill thing isn’t natural is this place. I want it to go away. He slides slowly upon his back from under the bed, his head tilted at the oddest angle. He’s watching me.
“You don’t have to sit there like that.” His voice is lilting, high pitched fora man’s. Soft. He rolls across the floor a few times, then stops on his stomach. His fingers spread and he rubs his hands back and forth over the carpet. “I love shag.” He says into the floor before pushing himself up. His face is inches from mine. Greasy Seattle locks hand obscure his forehead and left eye.
He purses his lips and blows hot breath into my face. It smells like a garlic and tobacco smoke and a recent nap.
I pull away as violently as I can and fall back into the counter.
I fall out of myself. My legs run through a frozen clone’s feet. The bullet. The blood, the skull, and the brain all hang over me for a second. Sound kicks in first. The gunshot finishes its boom. The bullet finishes its path and my body falls on top of me, passes through to the floor. I climb clean out of the mess.
He chuckles. “There we go. Much better.”
I can hear Clara shouting in the other side of the house. She’s calling my name. The doorknob turns quickly and she bursts into the room with a steak knife in her hand. She knows what she’s going to find, but I guess its best to be prepared. She drops the knife, her hand goes to her mouth and she disappears. Blinks out of existence. My body does too.
The room is quiet again. The curtains settle from the sudden wind of the opening door. “Huh.” Its the only thing I can say.
The long haired man produces two rolling papers and a mint green bag of American Spirits tobacco. “Roll you one?” He asks pinching the dried leaves from the bag into the papers after placing them on the countertop. Its still fucked up
.
“No. I’m alright.”
“You sure? They’re organic.” He says with a smile as he pockets the bag starts to roll them.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
His fingers - he’s got long spindly ones- work the components into spiral. The fingers are rough and rigid like naked tree branches swaying in a January wind. Or a spider’s legs.
“What was that?” I ask.
“You killed yourself.” He places one of the cigarettes between his lips and pushes the other toward my face. I blink, and I take it.
“I know that. But Why’d Clara and my body disappear? And you who are you? And how’d you get in here?”
He shrugs and holds an imaginary gun up. A flame appears at the tip of his index finger. He lights his cigarette, and then mine. Suddenly, I’m taking a drag with him. He makes no further attempt at explaining why what happened happened. Instead he blows a long thick plume of smoke into the air and eyes his reflection. “Do you have a hairbrush?” He asks.
I do. Its purple with thick synthetic bristles. Its in my cabinet drawer. I hand it to him.
Maybe death is sleep, and its not dreamless. Maybe the big sleep is nothing but dreams. That’s why things are so strange so suddenly. Or maybe, “Are you the angel of death or something?”
He laughs, “Death! Goddamn myth if you ask me. I met a guy that said he’d seen ‘em a few weeks ago. If he is real he flew off a long time ago, with all those other cowards that ran into hiding back in the 90s.” He raises and lowers his arms, mimicking the flapping wings of a bird. “No. My name’s Pote,” rhymes with moat, “well, not really, but that’s what people started calling me after that thing with Leslie a while ago.” He bobs  the cigarette as he forms sentences.
“But what are you doing here then? In my house?”
“You got stuck. Seems to happen with suicides, so I popped on over to give you a hand.”
“What?”
“You ate that bullet right? How was it by the way? Spicy. I always thought they’d be spicy. Anyway you ate it, and then you just kind of got frozen right?”
“I guess so.”  
“I think,” he says between puffs, “that people just get so sold an idea of what happens when they die that they don’t consider this possibility.”

“Oh.” I flick the ash into the sink.

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