THE GOING AWAY PARTY PART ONE
I ran the two blocks home from the coffee shop where I had started working a few months earlier. It was a balmy August night and there was that consistent Chicago haze hanging above our heads; thick but not suffocating, it rested easily on my tongue and I was content to taste this night. The stairs slammed hard into the bottoms of my feet as I climbed up the two flights to my apartment. There are six units, but never more than five occupied at any given time. The woman in the apartment next to mine was screaming at a man whose deep bass vocals shook the already quivering windows. I walked up to my own black door and pushed inside of it. He was sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. He was using that shitty old suitcase we had found at Value World four years earlier. It had deep tears in the front of it, as if someone purposefully pulled a knife across it. He had separated our vinyl and his sat in a milk crate next to him. Movies and books were absent from our bookshelf and it looked like a man with missing teeth. He kissed me one last time before he left, and I have never had such a bad taste in my mouth.
A CASUAL ENCOUNTER
We had left our empty glasses and glassy eyed friends behind at the bar. The wind crashed hard into our faces leaving them raw and warm to touch. We stood wrapped up in each other staring down Halsted for a bus that would never come. We wandered in the direction of home, walking straight into the night’s angry gusts of air, taking turns holding onto your bike. Your brand new bicycle that was the color of dry blood remained between us when you turned me around as we stood over the Chicago River, the metal bridge shuddering every time a car would drive by. My back pressed against the cold metal of the railing and the water shivered beneath us, colder than the air. You kissed my eyelids, my cheeks, your bicycle caught on my sweater and your beard tickling my face.
OLD WOMAN
Her skin crinkled the way fire burns paper, creasing to connect and release. The lines around her mouth revealed her teeth and she smiled. They were jagged and yellow with vast slopes and holes in the back of her mouth where she was once whole. They were the kind of teeth you see in old storybooks that tell about an old wicked witch that bakes children in a fiery oven. I wanted to reach forward and place my hands on either side of her sagging and leathery face. I could hear the soft “swish” of air escaping her cracked and bleeding lips. She breathed in short, steep breaths and her chest deflated over and over again. I leaned forward, just in case she whispered something to me as I handed her the $2.81 in change. Her bottom lip seemed adhered to her top lip as they struggled to part, and I moved in even closer, the counter digging hard into my side, in order to hear anything this woman would say.
UNTITLED
He had sent us messages to say that he was done with us, and so long. He wouldn’t be our friend anymore. He was finished with us in the worst way he had said. And that was day one. Day three came and he called me on the phone. His voice dripped through the receiver like a slow jazz song. He was apologizing but I couldn’t quite follow. He spoke in metaphors and analogies, but he had always been inelegant when it came to dialogue. Day four he disappeared completely. When we saw him next, his face was blank and dark, situated next to the dirty taupe colored walls behind his head. The walls, that looked disgustingly similar to day old sauerkraut, or maybe that was just the smell.
I don’t remember what I said to him that day.
THE GOING AWAY PARTY PART TWO
The pint of gin shook in my hand as I chain-smoked. I surveyed my apartment, running my hand over the thick lines I had pained on the walls a few days earlier, trying my best to imitate some kind of 1970s bowling alley. A nervous laughter broke out of my lips and I stifled it with my bottle. I poured it down my throat and it was dry, rough and noticeably cheap. But it coated my mouth like tar, dripping down thickly and slowly inside my throat and through my chest before making a heavy splash in my stomach. I began to move fluently throughout the cramped apartment, gathering all the things that smelled like, looked like, felt like him. I climbed outside onto the fire escape and began to relinquish all of these parts of him. They floated lazily down to the pavement, but I wanted them to crash, shatter, burn. As soon as they rested on the pavement their shapes changed form, an old toaster turned into a mortgage payment, and that old Bowie record became a screaming infant. And his old dented drumsticks barely made a clatter against the ground before turning into a sad sort of couple that looked remarkably like a fusion of our parents, except older. When I had finally woke up from Seagram’s-induced coma the sun was bleeding through my blinds and I remembered that I had never made it to Amanda’s going away party. Today she would fly to her new home in Hawaii. That seemed to be a bigger loss than living alone.
