“Triplets?” he whispered, “How are we ever going to take care of triplets?”
“Sir, I—” the doctor began.
“No, you don’t understand, I’m unemployed and my wife’s in school. We can’t afford to raise three kids.”
“I understand, sir, but—”
The man bean to cry softly. “All I ever wanted to do was take care of her. We were happy, just the two of us.”
“Sir, I…I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”
It’s raining outside. The wind is hard and cold. I'm not sure if it’s the flu or the medicine, but I feel tired and anxious.
We’ve been outside talking and laughing. Now I’m coughing and sniffling up a storm that rivals the thunder in the distance.
Her normally curly hair is dripping and stuck to her shoulders. My shirt doesn’t really fit and my knee is all muddy.
But that’s okay; she said yes.
I look out of the window and see the moon. Diana’s pale chariot lights enough of the road that I turn off the headlights. As I drive, the green glow of the dashboard clock screams in incessant silence that it is twenty-four minutes until tomorrow. I’m driving a beat-up Saturn the color and texture of scraped-off rust, and I would swear the car was from around 1904. The passenger seat is drowning in trash: empty beer cans, McDonald’s take-out bags, candy wrappers and a couple of greasy shirts. I haven’t bothered to take them out yet.
I look at my hands: one on the steering wheel, one on the gearshift and I notice for the first time how incredibly dirty they are. Mud and grease make little stains beneath my nails while little cuts and scratches all over the back of my hand form an odd topography of miniature red rivers. My vision travels up my arm; I can trace the highlights of my life though the map of scars on my skin. There’s the time I jumped out of a car for $20. This one was from an attempted back flip at the beach—I landed on my side where a conch shell buried itself into my shoulder. That one’s from a fight in my junior year. I almost smile when I think of my father’s reaction when he heard I had been suspended for fighting:
“I got a call from the principal today.”
“Yeah…”
“He said you were nearly arrested for fighting.”
I gave him the blank stare that all children give when they see the repercussions of their actions on the horizon.
“Well, is there anything you want to tell me about it?”
“…Like what?”
“Did you win?”
That was just like my father; he would act completely serious and then start laughing before you could realize he was joking. He always was his own biggest fan. He and I never really saw eye to eye. We disagreed on politics, religion, and nearly every social standard you can think of; we would even argue over what music to listen to on the radio. But no matter how much I didn’t like his personality there was something intrinsically reassuring about his deep, basso voice. I miss him.
I can see a nasty storm up ahead—all lightning and frozen rain—and I guess that makes sense in a sadly existential sort of way. When in my life am I not headed directly into a storm?
That great huntress above must have known my father because she makes her disapproval of the classic rock streaming from my solely AM radio suddenly apparent; I can feel the tension in the sky. The air goes suddenly stale and it seems like the music from my radio falls onto the floor as soon as it leaves the speakers.
A brilliant flash of white splits the sky in two and the frozen tears of that goddess above me begin to fall. The hail snaps and twangs off my car in rapid succession. Dents appear and scratches blossom from beneath the centuries-old paint job. One of these mal intended frozen rocks hits my windshield and cracks it; a nice and neat white line travels the length of the windshield like a miniature juggernaut. Two more hailstones bounce off the glass and send two more hairline fractures off the main line in my windshield. Lightning strikes the road in front in an ear-splitting crack.
I swerve in a sudden panic, Stairway to Heaven slowly climbing to its climax of confusion in the background. My car runs off the road and flips onto its side. The force slams me into the windshield; so that’s why they say the seatbelt’s important….
The glass shatters under the impact and I flip through the air. I enjoy the sensation of weightlessness until the cold arms of a broken sign catch me mid-flight. The metal slides through my stomach, sending a cold shiver followed by numb fire throughout my body. I sink halfway to the ground, slowly—ever so slowly—does that cold metal push its way out of my stomach. It looks like there’s a steel post growing out of my belly like some satanic plant from a nightmare of Stephen King. I can’t feel them actually hit me, but I can feel the constant whack of hailstones against my chest.
As my vision begins to fade, I think about earlier that night. A few friends had gone to the mall to run around committing petty crimes like disturbing the peace in their pointless, college-life way. I wish I could have wanted to go with them.
Instead, I thought I would go out for a drive, take in the cool night air and listen to the acid trips of 80s rock stars. It is a brisk autumn night—cloudless except for the one that hammers me with ice. The cornfields to my right and my left sway in some unknown rhythm like seaweed caught in a current.
I twist my neck and look up at the sky to see Apollo’s sister laughing at me. Or maybe that’s a rabbit—I never have been too sure.
Lying here, with this post through my stomach, I notice everything. Nothing, from the barest flicker of a butterfly’s wings to the grandest movement of the heavens can escape my attention as I sit upon my throne. And I realize that this is death creeping slowly upon me.
But this doesn’t bother me.
And it’s weird.
With that thought, I feel my shadow become stronger than my soul, and my first genuinely happy smile steals its way onto my face.
The police found him in his bed two days later. He had never shown up for work and hadn’t returned calls from concerned friends. His alarm clock had been beeping for nearly 35 hours when the detectives broke down the door to his small apartment.
The apartment was bare. There was a table in the kitchen and a couch in the living room but that was about it. The police chief noted in his report the lack of material possessions: no T.V., no computer, no sound system. The boring apartment seemed like it didn’t belong to a twenty-something college kid.
He looked like he was still sleeping but he was colder than the air silently escaping the AC unit. He had the covers pulled up above his chin. His eyes were closed peacefully and the smile on his face was oddly comforting. He had the look of a man who was at peace with the decisions he had made.
Nothing out of the ordinary was seen at first except the uncapped pill-bottle on the nightstand. The young man, it seemed, had taken too many sleeping pills and never woken up.
However, as the last police inspector began to leave the scene he noticed muddy tracks on the carpet. He was about to get very angry: one of his boys must have carelessly tracked in mud to the scene of the suicide. As he thought about which new recruit to scream at first, he realized that none of his officers would leave tracks like that. These were the tracks of sandals, of women’s sandals even; not the standard police-issue steel toed work boots.
The inspector scratched his balding head in confusion and walked to the door. He gripped the doorknob, his mind still musing over the tracks, and flicked the light switch. The stress upon his overworked mind began to steadily increase when the light would not turn off. The inspector flipped the switch two or three more times and still, nothing happened. The inspector shrugged and turned, muttering to himself about how he doesn’t get paid enough, and closed the door to the apartment behind him.
The light in the apartment that refused to extinguish itself hung from the ceiling on a string. It was a small light, only forty or fifty watts, so it cast only enough radiance to illuminate a small portion of the room before graying out into fuzzy and confusing shadows. The light swayed slowly back and forth giving the room an eerie glow.
The naked bulb shone pale like the moon.
