Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,21

fuck me,” I said through the tears.

He jerked his way through the orgasm, and then he fell on top of me. The first few times, I had thought maybe he’d had a heart attack. Then, for a while, it had been endearing. Now I lay there, pinned by his weight, by sweaty, sagging skin, his mouth hot against my neck.

I visualized the farthest point in space I could imagine, the farthest distance a particle could travel away from anything else—no stars, no planets, no comets, not even a black hole. That distant place. Just a particle, floating by itself. I kept telling myself I felt nothing, felt absolutely nothing, felt absolutely nothing at all. I was distantly aware that I was sobbing so hard I was shaking, even with Richard’s weight on top of me.

After a while, he got up, favoring one knee, and made his way to the locked bag where he kept the good stuff. He fumbled with something. A hypodermic needle flashed in the light of the clock radio. He tapped the syringe, tested the plunger.

“Ok,” he whispered as he sat next to me, stroking my hair. “Give me an arm.” The cold wetness of a sterilizing wipe ran over my bicep, and then the sting of the needle followed.

I cried for a while, my head in Richard’s lap, and then I wasn’t me anymore. I was a thousand drops of something better, suspended in ether. I was blue. I was a swarm of fireflies.

In my last moments of clarity, I remembered Mason’s eyes as he tried to kill me, the glint of blue fire. I had to know. I had to know. I had to know.

And then the wind blew, and I was nothing.

DAG (2)

I was slumped over the kitchen table, listening to a really nice beluga track, when Mom sat down next to me. She took out one of my earbuds and said, “Dagobert, your father and I would like to talk to you.”

I took the earbud and put it back in.

It had been a week.

A week since I had looked in my rearview mirror and seen Mason on the steps of DuPage First Methodist.

A week since I had watched my best friend from high school pull a gun on an innocent man.

A week since I had grappled with him.

A week since the gun had bucked in my hand, and a blue firefly had floated out of Mason’s mouth, and the world had stopped making sense.

“Dagobert. Dagobert!”

I thumbed up the volume on the iPod, and after a while, my mom went away.

The kitchen smelled like chili powder and garlic, like sage and oregano, like trout done in Mom’s cast iron skillet. The table was smooth and cool under my cheek. From where I sat, I could see out the back door, across the little stretch of grass, all the way to the Montgomery’s shed on the lot behind us. I might as well have been looking across an ocean.

A hand came to rest on my back; even through my shirt, I could tell it was my dad’s: the calluses, the size, the way he nudged the same vertebra with his thumb every time. He sat down in the seat Mom had vacated. He took the iPod from me, mashed it—the poor guy had no idea what he was doing—and eventually swore and gave up.

“This is pathetic,” I said, plucking out the earbuds.

“Oh,” he said. “You should see me with the VCR. I’m a whiz with the VCR.”

“You still own a VCR?”

“Some of your mom’s favorite movies are on videocassette. Black Beauty, The Buttercream Gang, that one about the dumplings. The Dumpling Gang. Is that it?”

“Lot of movies about gangs.”

“I’m not sure.” He called over my head. “Sweetheart, what was the dumpling movie?”

Mom’s footsteps moved behind me. “The Buttercream Gang.”

“No, the one about dumplings.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about with dumplings, Hubert, I really don’t.”

“Mom, sit down,” I said. “Let’s get this over with so you can both go back to feeling incredibly self-satisfied about how good you are as parents.”

“Ouch,” Mom said as she took a seat at the table.

“That’s not very fair,” Dad said.

“It’s true. You were so proud when I came out. You were so proud when I decided to be a cop. You were so proud when I got a participation trophy in soccer in third grade.”

“You kicked a goal,” Dad said.

“Against my own team,” I said, and then I had to pinch the corners of my eyes and breathe slowly.