SLUSH GUIDE. BIT ONE.

“I swear to you, when I saw the bag on the bus bench, when I picked it up, I had no idea what was in it.”

 

 The black woman in the black slack and blue blouse combo shuddered as her face fell in on itself like a disturbed cake. Her hands went to her forehead, and with a guttural groan of pure dismay and exhaustion, she slid down the bare east wall of her apartment’s living room and onto the floor, which was covered with a thin layer of nearly powdered glass.

 

“Of course,” whispered a cool male voice, (in the darkness of lonely desperation, how can the voices of outsiders sound anything else but cool?) “Of course you didn’t know, but there’s nothing for it now, is there? There’s nothing else to do but tell the truth and suffer for your ignorance. That’s what we all do in the end, Patty. We suffer for our ignorance.”

 

“N-no,” said Patty, and now her voice was close to the tremulous point of no return. She sighed and drew the back of her left hand across her eyes. Her right hand crawled down her face with something that looked like its own will and fell to the floor at her side. A moment later, the hand slithered into her pocket. “I have to suffer for being stupid enough to pick up what ended up being trash on a bus bench? Even in a world like this, Vic, how…why should I have to suffer so badly? Why has it come to this?”

 

Vic shrugged and squatted in front of Patty, (who was now dangerously close to that all-time worse haunt of the female half of humanity, Despair) and took hold of the hand that wasn’t in her pocket. He began to stroke the hand slowly. Her eyes cast somewhere in the vicinity of her lap, Patty felt his touch before her eyes came to a rest on the connection. His hands, she thought. How tender and thin they are. How coarse and potentially malign and calculating in their motion, but oh God, how tender they are. The touch of them was what she imagined the stamen of a deserted flower must experience at the approach of a careful bee.

 

How could a man’s hands be so clever and cold, yet so sweet and knowing?

 

“This is what we’re going to do, Patty,” Vic said. His gaze rested on the wall just above her head, as though he’d just walked into the middle of a play that was being run on the wall she leaned against, but his voice never wavered. Not for one instant did it waver in its tone and honest conviction. “We’re going to get you cleaned up. After that, we’re going down to Prim’s Bar…you know Prim’s Bar?”

 

Patty nodded, snorted, coughed, and then nodded again. “I know it.”

 

“Good,” said Vic with a small nod. His eyes were still on the wall behind her. “It is good that you know Prim’s Bar, because after we’ve gotten you all cleaned up, we’re going there to have a couple of drinks. Your choice, my tab. I know Prim. She’s a good lady who has never turned down a chance to besot me or any guest I choose to bring.” He smiled at his own dead-pan humor, or at least at what he thought of as dead-pan humor. Patty coughed and shook.

 

From what seemed to Vic to be a great distance away, a set of tires laid bloody murder onto Denver blacktop. To Vic, this sounded like the scream of patience and virtue dying in concert in a tiny, undiscovered abattoir.

 

“I’m going to take care of you, Patty, and Prim’s going to take care of us both. Your choice of drink as long as it’s alcohol-based. You dig?”

 

With a tiny nod, Patty made it clear that she did indeed dig.

 

“After we’ve calmed you down a little, we’re going to take a trip to the police station.”

 

Patty’s body, which had until Vic spoke the word 'police', seemed nearly done with its inarticulate and involuntary jig, now exploded to life again. Her teeth chattered as if the truth of the uncompromising horror of her situation was a freezing cloud which now enveloped her. Her heels bucked on the floor beneath her. Her head came away from the wall and began to shake back and forth with an animalistic vigor. Her entire body seemed to be rejecting the ridiculousness of her friend’s suggestion. Her friend, Victor Cross, may’ve once been one of Denver’s finest and brightest defenders, but now he was just a washed out ex-detective who liked to tip the bottle a bit too far, a bit too often. He was her friend, but Patty hadn’t really believed in him (or his ideas, which now seemed weirdly watered-down and feeble) since his disgraceful fall from public service. The idea of talking to Vic made her feel weak and unctuous, but the idea of describing what she’d found resting within a brown shopping bag on a bus bench while on a day away from work and responsibility to sanctioned law enforcers made her absolutely sick to her stomach.

 

"No, Vic,” she sighed. To her own ears, the word, stark in its tone and volume in the silence of the apartment, sounded like air rushing out of a pricked balloon. “I can’t. I can’t tell the police. They’d never believe me, and even if they did, what I did with what I found in the bag will be sure to force them to lock me in a rubber room.” All the time, her head shook back and forth. To Vic, she looked like a petulant child on the verge of full revolt.

 

“Patty,” whispered Vic. “Patty.” Now his eyes fell down the wall and locked onto hers.

 

“Vic, what I d-did, with the thing in the bag…oh God, what’s going to happen to me?”

 

“We’ll figure that out after we talk to the cops. Up you get. Prim knows we’re coming, and Prim hates to be left waiting.”

 

II

 

The blood-curdling scream pierced the whole of Colfax Avenue.

 

Something fell away from something else and made a soft sound on a carpeted floor. The carpet was shag, a deep auburn color; the color of wine and dim lust.

 

The color of unending torture.

 

A brown shopping bag rested on a couch in a plastic cover while one Lonnie Crest was shown the weird expanse of the reality known as Pain & Suffering.

 

III

 

One hundred miles away and 15 hours earlier, a man in gray coveralls and motorcycle boots coughed Cancer into a handmade handkerchief. A gift from his sister.

 

This man, how could he have had the slightest idea that his sickness, his death, would come to mean life and vision for someone else?

Reviews

[Dms]

The touch of them was what she imagined the stamen of a deserted flower must experience at the approach of a careful bee. (Brilliant line here)

Real strong dialogue in here bro. I'm interested in the story, and I have a good sense of the characters.

I really would be hard pressed to change anything about it. I've always been told that when writing it's better to "show" emotions than to tell about them. I think you did a great job of that in this piece.

[Hairy and Confused]

Bloody brilliant writing, but I'm a little confused... is there more coming?

[mirui]

this is really great and descriptive.