Friends

A psychosomatic response is one in which the subject's mental state determines their physical health. To which lengths can this phenomenon manifest?

“Ow!”

I stumbled forward as a bramble pricked my heel in between my Old Navy dollar flip-flop. This was the fourth time in the past five minutes that that had happened. Charlene spurted out a high-pitched squeal and shoved me in the shoulder, two-handed. I toppled and landed on my knee in the dirty gravel.

“B***h,” I moaned.

I got back up and dusted the grime off of my knee and the hem of my shorts. We had just entered the jogging trail inside of J.F. Gregory park, the only effort of environmental integrity in podunk Richmond Hill, GA, the latest pet project of the state in their pursuit in transitioning the many passerby towns that served as a haven for weary truckers into a family-friendly suburbs with standing local economies. School had just let out a half-hour before and the crisp Fall air stung my dried nostrils with every furtive inhale. A few steps ahead of us was a small bridge that overarched a trickling stream that lead into the next town. I shuffled forward, with Charlene in tow, kicked off my flip-flops, picked them up and slapped them against the cracked and dirt-caked beam that partitioned the edge of the bridge. On the other side of the bridge stretched the rest of the mile-long run of the jogging trail that wrapped around and connected back a few yards ahead of us, marked by a browned crabapple tree rooted upon the fork. Like hell we were going that far.

Charlene sauntered next to me and leaned an elbow against the beam, fishing out a couple of peach-flavored cigarillos and a lighter from her hoodie pocket. She handed me a cigarillo and handed me the lighter after her own cigarillo was quietly blazing. Smoke lazily seeped from the corner of her mouth as she took her first whicked inhale. Charlene and I didn’t really like each other but we hung out together because we didn’t really have anyone else to hang out with. We had met the year before, in Special Ed. I had just come back from missing a full semester of school after I was diagnosed and began treatment for schizophrenia. Charlene had mild bipolar disorder, which spiraled into frequent bouts of depression and eventual cutting.

I was more comfortable hanging out with Charlene than I did with my old friends. The meds I was on made me weird. My friends tried to adjust, tried to act like there was still the same guy under there, and there was, but it was just too much for them; the far-away gaze in my sunken eyes; the brittleness of my hair that haphazardly kinked, uncombed; the new chubbiness in the weight I had gained. Charlene didn’t stand a chance from the get-go. Her family had moved into town from Trinidad during the summer. I hear that for the first few weeks of school, she reeked of curry and fell into uncontrollable fits of laughter if the classroom got too quiet. The black eye-liner, black nail polish, and black armbands appeared gradually after in the following days since being moved to Special Ed. In once last, pathetic, attempt to reach out to her “normal” peers she lobbied to have everyone to call her “Kandy Kayne,” which backfired tremendously on account of it making her sound like a stripper. It was just too easy, even I had to admit. It was around that time that her right armband moved further up her arm.

“Your feet aren’t cold?” Charlene asked, and flicked a crust of ash at the end of her cigarillo into the stream. She nodded downward toward my bare feet maneuvering atop the jagged gravel rolling beneath them. The smell of the pungent wet rocks beneath us rose and spread like a blanket in the soft breeze.

I shrugged. “I never understood that. I mean, my feet get cold, yeah, but I don’t really mind. They’re like hands, yeah?”

I flicked a glowing bit of ash away from us. A gentle billow of wind promptly blew the ash back, swooping onto my foot. I picked my foot up to try to shake it off, pressing my other foot deeper into the ground for leverage, but the grey and orange ball lazily shuffled back and forth. A sharp prick shot up the bottom pad of my other foot and I suddenly jumped up, stamping the ash-carrying foot onto the ground. I yelped, which prompted Charlene to take a step back and exclaim a gauffling “Oh s**t!” The burning sensation came, stinging, and I quickly turned my foot downward and furiously wiggled. The ashball finally fell aside. I picked up my other foot and inspected the underside. Another bramble had pricked me, daintily lodged in the skin in the center. A dot of blood was already pooling underneath the skin. I groaned and, with the index finger that curled around the cigarillo, plucked it out.

“Aww,” Charlene whimpered through a Cheshire grin. “You just can’t get a break, can you?”

I chuckled. “F**k… I guess not.” I shook my head and took a drag. “S**t…”

I smirked.

“Bad things happen to good people.”

“Bad things just happen,” Charlene grunted back.

“Tell me about it.”

I actually didn’t want her to tell me about it. Charlene made me feel safe because we never had that “talk.” When I came back to school, the bolder of my friends would situate themselves near, fidget nervously as they tried to figure out how best to broach the subject. I was patient with them while the question welled up inside them, boiling in their diaphragm, rising up and spewing out like a geyser.

So what happened!?

How did you know? Did you hear voices or something?

The questions never got easier, no matter how genially they were delivered. The answers were still the same painful reality. It did begin with voices. I had a record player that I had gotten from Urban Outfitters a few months before my diagnosis and stocked up on records from Goodwill. One of the albums that I had bought online for full price was Trilogy by The Weeknd. It was my favorite. I played it on end for weeks. I knew every word of every lyric, and then I began to listen deeper. Something was off, sinister. It was a slow realization that the lead singer was speaking to me. The message was so clear under the layer of synths - my mother was trying to kill me. There was such an urgency in his seemingly crooning falsetto. Why hadn’t I heard it before?

I began to prepare my own meals, lock myself in my room, and only came out when I knew that the rest of my family was around to watch her should that monster make a move. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I could see it. The fiery hunger there; the yearning to place my bones in both of her hands and rend them apart. I was so scared that sometimes I would rush to the bathroom and throw up in the toilet, shivering in a cold sweat. When it was only me and her in the house, I chose to go to the bathroom in my trash bin.

I got treatment soon after. My thoughts became a little more lucid again. I was better, more or less.

Charlene and I had never had that conversation. She probably didn’t care. Neither of us did when we were together. We only cared about passing the time by trying to maintain some sort of social camaraderie in each other that was just barely surpassing the line of fulfillment.

I leaned against the wooden railing.

CRACK

I pitched forward, cigarillo spiraling loose from my fingers. I heard Charlene yelp in humored surprised. The world spun and twisted - flashes of dry leaves, beams of sunlight, water, mud, rocks. Then black.

I opened my eyes and pressed my hands, which were laid down on either side of myself, into whatever I was laying on. Fabric. I pressed my head down backward. My head sank into a pillow. I tried lifting it. My vision exploded in a kaleidoscopic static as my head bloomed in pain. I let out a groan.

“You’re awake?”

Gingerly, I turned my head towards the voice. My mom was walking towards me. I watched her wiry body move closer past the metal guardrail that was secured lining the cushion frame, her Korean features one of directness bevvied with concern. I tried to lift my arms towards my chest and found that my wrists were strapped.

I heaved out a confused whimper.

“You were in a coma but you were suffering from spasms, baby. The doctor didn’t want you to hurt yourself.” She reached over the railing and squeezed my arm.

“I was in a coma?” I paused. “How long?”

“A week,” she sighed. She glided over towards the end of the bed until she was standing facing me directly. Something was off about her. She was going to hurt me. I began to tear up.

My mom lifted the blanket, uncovering my feet and pinched my big toe in between her thumb and forefinger, wiggling it playfully.

She looked up and her lips curled upward in a loving, maternal smile.

“Don’t fret, poppet.”

I looked down at Lavon, hoping that he was okay. I didn’t see him land, but I heard the splash as he landed on the half-submerged lump of rocks smoothed over by the water flowing at their middle. I was surprised at how prostrate his body lay. His arms and legs were pretty much totally vertical as if he were bound. The broken piece of railing lay a couple feet away, at the edge of the stream bed. I stood there, above him, shocked.

“Lavon!?” I called down through a nervous giggle.

krak!

It was a small noise. I could barely hear it against the trickle of the flowing water and the rustling dry leaves that surrounded us. I was about to write it off as a twig snapping. I saw it happen, though. From my periphery, I saw Lavon’s big toe crick at a 90-degree angle, as if it were some macabre parody of a turn signal.

“What…” I began.

Before I could fully register what had just happened, Lavon’s other foot folded in on itself, as if it were ducking for cover. I could see the ridged jaggedness of the bone pushing against the inside of the stretched skin. The knee above the foot with the broken toe began to crunch as if the bone and cartilage were being scrambled from the inside, the socket rising and contorting and breaking apart. SPROOSH! Lavon’s thigh on the other leg violently collapsed in the middle as if a sledgehammer had angrily rained down on it. Blood pooled into the stream and seeped past Lavon’s body as the bone tore through behind where I couldn’t see.

I began to scream. The damage to Lavon’s body continued to climb upward. His hips snapped and twisted to the side, forcing his midsection to sink and give the effect that he had nearly severed himself in two. His fingers gnarled and broke every which way. crackcrackcrackcrackcrackcrack. His forearms snapped like twigs. The bones stretched and tore out of his dark skin in a spray of blood, spurting marrow and blood onto his biceps like twin spigots pumping beside each other. A bellowing moan reverbed past Lavon’s lips as his ribs were savagely torn apart and, from what I assumed, began piercing his lungs.

Lavon’s eyes suddenly flicked open. His wide eyes stared at me in horror; his mouth gaping, opening and closing like a fish. I knew that whatever wrecked his body had passed.

I didn’t run for help. I screamed. I screamed until my voice became raw. Then, after his gaze became unseeing and his lips had turned blue, I began to laugh. Bad things just happen.