The Lazarus Effect

Chapter 6: The View from Halfway Down

Halfway down the dark street, I would call his phone. I had already taken the hook and the bait; it was better to only thrash once they go to pick you apart. When we arrived at school, I did not hurry for my bag. If I had wanted to escape with haste, I would have sat in the front. I was content with waiting until all eyes had left my form. I was essentially a zombie, tearing at the object of my compulsion. I started wearing all-white dresses with flowers I couldn't name. I wore knives and choke chains for him to bruise.

Maybe this was why I was always convinced my teachers hated me. Walking infestations of abominable contradictions of the beginnings of love and its end. This meant contradicting her every word, always reaching out to the little devil on her shoulder with mine. I was frequently 'excused' from class and made to stand idle in the halls. Other times, I was sequestered into rooms where I was to sit noiseless.

Sometimes, I was allowed a desk to finish my work on. I finished it all as soon as it was assigned and would stare blankly at the door, chanting, "Abracadabra, or open sesame."

As if I could invite myself back in.

I laugh through his retelling; I'd be dumb to do anything else. Astonishingly, you can love someone with hazy details. I was a bay host, and he was a food runner. I could not help but think that this was no accident. I woke up in a neon jersey, with all questions and no answers. I rotated through a state of drunkenness and a sick fog of reality for years. How many tears had I dried while plugging up my own dry well? Only in the last couple of days did it click why everyone...

Where can I draw a line in the sand that won't be erased by the tides? I grew tired of the ocean's wishy-washy nature as it drowns you. I don't appreciate any screen that stares back at me. What did you expect, for me to go screaming into the night?

"How is the water?"

She looked skyward as if checking for rain by the beginnings of its pour. They gave me a jean jacket first. 

The sea reunited us. We drug our feet through the mud to feel for the shells. I'd never seen her livelier than when wading in the ocean's give and take. She waved, not at me, but at the tiny fiddler crab crawling towards her toes. When it went to climb up her legs, she did not heed it with a warning shoo. She punted the poor thing back into the oceans depth.

I fell ill in the bushes at the sight of my poor bike torn into pieces. I would hear the neighbor kids hiss whenever I grew nauseous at the sight of handlebars. "What a dramatic little girl, can't hold her stomach in, can she?" I'd grow into it; I was sure I was halfway there. Tasha asked about the mess she had seen me leave. I told her what she wanted to hear.

Who else besides me mourned the glass they broke? Or the shatter that bled them? The birds were perched on a power line, playing chicken with electrocution. We floated two to a tube looped around the wine coolers back to the four of us. Belle Isle was the town's resident midnight spot, split the difference by peaks of boulders.

The kids dealt cards. Spoons without the silver, BlackJack, and then Euchre. A family of four splashed about the bits of water teasing the stone seats. How would the bonds of flesh break the double-sided chain? What hunter could track everything except their father's scent? How often did the camera pan back to me, and I was just sitting there in my waiting? 

One of us had missed the train. Or never bought a ticket. I recite lines from the Romans. Stealing kisses in between, "If you declare with your mouth," and "Jesus..."

All I could do was imitate their mating rituals as I ran the midnight oil into a scorch of impenetrable fire mist. There were only two types of people down at the river: I either never saw them again, or you could swap our frames out interchangeably.

Memories were tricky. You can lie to and believe yourself. Sometimes you get lost in yellow, in time, in shoulders that aren't yours. In places, you've been and will never be again. If someone asked right now my favorite color, I would say any shade except gray. They might laugh, or they might not. They probably won't ask me another question after that. A belief does not have to go anywhere. I know not what wire goes to what circuit board. What rats were in the walls, and which were underneath the floorboard?

Spiders nest in my car, leaving silk homes in my engine. I had two moms, I told them. There was no shame then. Quite the opposite, all that love in four corners. They used to separate us into our opinions. I would always pick B when I didn't know the answer. Or the one with the least amount of people. Rarely did I go with the one I knew to be correct. We could arrange a bank heist if we drew a hard target.

You sic your older sibling on your playground bullies. I wouldn't know. I fought all of my own battles. No matter how I style my hair out of my face I realigned the strands into pigtails that I expected a boy to yank.

You put a lion on a leash. I shake you off from my coattails.

I could not change my name or cross many bridges of my attachment with a piece missing in the middle. Go around, rappel down, or fall to your death. Either way, you're almost there. Thank God the game had a winner and a loser. From a bee sting on, I was fated to live with a festering wound. Ever since I was carried from the car to my bed, I acted as a dead man.

Let the body get cold...

Who needs the person when you have their office cubicle. Are you the bat hanging from the ceiling of my childhood bedroom?

No one breaks more rules than the rich.