A Star Above a Muted World

A Story by Megan Harris

I had nothing and I became nothing. That is, at least, how it started. I opened my eyes and saw shining dark green to the side of me. I felt the chill of the metal on the side of my face. I felt the pain, the burn, the fear when my body rushed back to me.

Before it started, before I felt cold metal, before the fear – I was a happy individual. At least I thought I was. I guess I’ve always been mildly self destructive.

It was the drugs first. I would be sitting in friend’s basements smoking weed and blowing through bath tissue tubes wrapped in dryer sheets. I grew up in a small town the houses were so far spaced apart that it didn’t matter if your father beat you at night. No one could hear you scream.

I ran off to college in the city and quit the weed. The lure of addiction was hard to resist though and I quickly got into stashing a bottle of vodka in my dorm room. My rational: at least my addiction was more legal now.

I wasn’t alone though, I had addiction friends, or what I thought were. They were the fuel that helped me indulge in my blatant alcoholism. Nat, a Spanish major, who is a recovering Catholic and Mitch, a gay 26 year old man, married and divorced twice. I loved them both with all of my heart.

Every Thursday night like clockwork we would meet at a local bar off campus to order cheap drinks or show some cleavage for some free drinks. Every Thursday, I would push out my breasts and lean over the table to get the bartender’s attention.

“Another vodka cranberry?” The bartender would ask.

“Yes please. I would like to destroy more of my brain cells,” I replied pulling back up my low cut neck shirt and sitting back.

__________

On this particular Thursday, a numb November night and Mitch and I had walked down to meet Nat in a drunken stupor sitting on a bar stool. Nat was flashing the bartender frequently and with a few more drinks I too was pulling up my shirt for vodka. After we were pretty intoxicated Mitch hustled us into a taxi to adventure to the gay bar. I don’t remember what was said while I was on my tenth beer and my twentieth alcoholic drink for the night but I said something awkward that Nat took offence too. After she screamed at me for a while she ran off into the rainbow tinted smoke.

Nat was angry and lost to me out in the misty smog and Mitch was dancing on a thickly built Russian man with eyeliner. I think his name was Serheiy. Sometime after midnight I walked around the perimeter of the dance floor and found Nat curled into a chair. I tried to talk Nat out of hating me and eventually she just pushed me into a crowd of people and ran out of my line of sight once more.

I ran to Mitch, he was less drunk of the three of us. He ignored me for the blond Russian’s tongue and shooed me away from their space on the dance floor. I backed away from them and then they became lost in a crowd of people. There was another crowd of people next to me it had formed a while ago and out of the crowd a chubby faced, dark haired man emerged. He looked young and not my type but out of boredom I tolerated his voice.

“Hello, what’s your name?” He asked grabbing my arm and dragging me to a quieter area.

“It’s irrelevant.” I said and laughed. I knew well that giving someone your name can lead to a tricking game of dodge and stalk.

“Mine’s irrelevant too. What a coincidence.” He looked into my eyes and for a moment I felt something bad. Something horrid. I felt it coming and I didn’t look away. I realized this wasn’t some normal bar creeper one that you could trick away. I was hoping that Nat or Mitch would come to my rescue. That out of the darkness of the gay bar they would grab my shoulder and tell me they were heading out.

“I should try to find my friends,” my eyes bolted around the room quickly after I half turned away from him.

“They’ll find you eventually,” he tried to sound consoling but his voice just became darker. My still not intoxicated brain cells were screaming, “Run away. Run away fast.” I still couldn’t get myself to move, run, or even look away. My eyes would scan the room and still fall back on him.

“We should be friends,” he said again trying to kick the conversation back in.

“I already have too many friends,” I replied trying to back away and he grabbed me to pull me back. My consciousness declined as more alcohol kicked into my system. I looked into my drink, it wasn’t normal for me to black out. My eyes started to become heavy and I couldn’t remember where I was. I looked back into his dark blue eyes and then saw nothing.

When I came to, the chubby faced man was leading me behind the building far out of sight of the busy main road and the cars. The trash container’s green metal met my back. I started to scream and cry. He had both my wrists in his thick hands and no matter how hard I wriggled I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t work in any words, I just couldn’t form them. He told me to be quiet and slammed my head up against the metal as he covered my mouth. That is when I felt the piercing cold. I looked up at the darkness and tried to focus on the stars.

_________

This signaled the end of our Thursday’s and worried Nat and she invited me out the next week for dinner.

“You’ve changed.” Nat said while she ordered a beer from the deer-in-headlights blond waitress at the university’s pizza parlor.

“I just don’t want to flash bartenders for drinks anymore.” I said plainly and the bartender across from us raised his head and eyebrows toward us. I squinted at him and continued to pick at my pizza.

Maybe I had and if I did what did it matter? I was not myself and I hadn’t been myself in a long time. What the chubby faced man took away from me was just the last remnant of a life I barely remembered. I had drunk dead all the brain-cells that stored childhood memories. So I only have fragmented pictures of what I was like.

“Where did you go that night at the bar?” Nat asked.

I shrugged and excused myself from her interrogation walking my body back toward the residential halls. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating home. It is late at this time and the shadows on the asphalt made me nervous for no reason. It was seven o’clock at night and I pressured myself to be safely inside the brick walls of Barrett House. I noticed I was coming up to a bus stop and I felt the chill of December on my back. The bus going to the north side of campus stopped in front of me and I jumped on afraid of walking into the chubby faced man on this particular walk home.

I noticed on the bus that there weren’t any chubby faced men. This was something I did all the time now. I breathed a sigh of relief and look out the window. The stars looked down on me and I felt safe curled against the cushions of the university shuttle.

A few minutes later the bus dropped me off by my dorm and I jogged toward the door. Shadows were behind me and I could feel the labored breath of his. I ran up to my dorm room and simultaneously felt alone but also as if I was being followed. I closed the door behind me and dead bolt it shut so that I could breathe and peered through the peephole I made sure no one was standing outside of my door.

_________

Sometimes I have dreams now when I lay myself down to sleep in my cold cinderblocked dorm room. Dreams of me running, in a spectacular possibility of what would become of me, through park swings and see-saws. I don’t remember what color I was wearing in these dreams, maybe white, but I fall in the dirt and arms lift me. A picturesque face of a mother who promises me I will be alright.

Then everything goes blurry and the world starts quietly screaming. Life goes on mute, and for a moment the world is paused.

Suddenly both my arms are being held by one hand behind my back and he removes his hand from my mouth to lift my skirt. I want to yell for Nat or Mitch but I have forgotten who I am. I become star instantly. I am burning gas above the Earth. I am hanging in the night sky. I am looking down on myself, neutral and warm.

I watch him walk away from my body. It slides from the metal and curls, arms between its legs, crying on the pavement. I watch it scream for its lost friends. I stare blindly above my body and I can’t come back down. I struggle from my place in the darkness of the night to reach my unconscious body but I can’t get any closer to it.

When I wake up from these dreams, I remember, only for a moment all of the things I have buried. I can put myself above and I lift my spirit covered in filth. But I will never be able to find the words to form a promise of safety and I’ll always know that I can never be cleaned.