I am the courier of emotions.
When everyone is asleep, I shuttle from house to house seeking a person receptive to my particular extreme of positives and negatives. I slide through windows, like water seeping through linen, and make my way to a sleeping body. The easiest transfers are to those who sleep with their mouths open. I place my lips around theirs, breathe out, then in, and out again.
In the morning, some will awaken rested and peaceful and some will awaken sorrowful and unsettled.
What is my payment? Satisfaction. Balance. A state of perfect equilibrium. I am the math problem solved. I am the end of proof. I am reason and logic. And the world moves forward and I move on.
But once in a great while, I mistakenly breathe into the mouth of a dying body. Diluted and stale, their breath infects me. For days, my own body is crooked. My mind races. I am reminded that I will never die, will never experience love or loss or loneliness.
There’s something in that dying breath that damages me. It’s the forever and the naught. Two equal and unequal ideas, lingering on their tongues and mine, a bitter aftertaste that becomes a curse, reminding me that I am forever, showing me what I can never have no matter how long I live.
Forever, I’ll be the courier. But to live forever, to live alone, to live without mystery – there is no balance in that.
He doesn’t come from the sky. He comes from under my bed.
He falls up, his parachute exploding behind him, one arm pressed against the ceiling.
He falls toward the window and holds his hands out to me. I don’t want to touch him, this stranger who crashes about my room like a heavy kite spiraling out of control. He smashes through the window pane and disappears.
My hair stands on end. My stomach turns. A parachute bursts from my shoulder blades. Now I’m falling too. I grab at sheets, at curtains. No use.
Through the window I go.
I fall up and up. Soon I’ll touch the moon!
But then —
My head hits wood.
And there I am, falling up from beneath a different strange man’s bed.
He smiles, his eye squinting in welcome and surprise.
My head hits the windowpane. I extend a hand and he grabs it.
His turn.
Together, we launch through another window, shards of glass cutting our exposed skin, the cold night wind drying the tiny beads of blood on our faces.
Up we go.
There are thousands of us in this darkened sky, falling, flailing, flying. Moving so fast we can’t catch our breath, moving so slowly we get nowhere.
We pump our fingers in the air, a silent code to God, S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S.
Issue 4 of A cappella Zoo, in which my story “Stain” appears, is available for pre-order. Only $5 right now. You can see the full table of contents here.
Before the first bomb hit, the talking heads had already predicted we’d become a nation of zombies. What they didn’t know was that you’d have a choice. We’d also end up with a scavenger race, nocturnal humans with severe anti-social behaviors, feeding on the refuse of others, leaving the zombies to prey on the young and the weak.
Quick now: Which would you rather be? A zombie or a cockroach?
In other words, would you rather eat brains or shit?
It was like that one episode of Roseanne, where Dan’s mom (played by Debbie Reynolds) shows up in the middle of the night and then tries to kill him but fails every time. It was just like that. Except first you dug the grave and then I got stuck in the closed garage with the car running. I managed to let myself out, through the unlocked side door that you forgot about and which led straight into the kitchen where you were sitting at the breakfast bar drinking coffee from my “I’m a musician and I can HANDEL it” mug and eating dry toast. You looked surprised and at first I thought it was because I was hacking up a lung, not because you were disappointed I wasn’t dead. “What’s wrong?” you asked, tracing the edge of the coffee mug with the tip of your finger. Your fingernail was framed in dirt and your upper lip twitched just enough for me to realize what you’d been up to. And then, somehow, the mug ended up shattered on the floor, the brown ooze of coffee speckling the white vinyl like decay on teeth. You tried to run, but I pinned you to the table. You shoved me back against the buffet, my elbow knocking your glass ashtray collection to the floor. “My ashtrays!” you yelled, which almost made me laugh because screaming about your ashtray collection when you don’t even smoke is probably the stupidest thing you could ever scream about. “I hate you,” you said, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” pulling me into the living room by my hair, which was in a ponytail so it didn’t hurt as much as you thought. We dragged each other over to the couch: You on top of me, me smashed beneath the weight of your body. And then — well. And then for a moment we were both silent, staring into each other’s eyes, my hand gripping your waist, your hand still wrapped up in my hair. I thought you were going to kiss me so I spit at you. Spit at your face a second time and a third until it looked like you had cried some fizzy, semi-translucent discharge. You didn’t spit back. You didn’t even try to force me to kiss you. Instead, you went fucking hysterical with laughter. I didn’t know I was so hilarious. God, I thought. She’s such a loser. Can’t even kill me. Can’t get a kiss out of me. Can’t even keep it together in the middle of a girl fight. I went back into the garage and raised open the door, then sat in my truck for a while, tired and lonely, waiting for the next attempt, hoping it would come sooner rather than later, thinking about Roseanne and Dan and how if one of them had died the other would probably end up sitting in a busted-down truck numb with devastation, not broken-hearted confusion. Not knowing what you want — that’s something like love, right?
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February 22, 2010 12:14 am | 
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