Alice (part III)

I've realized a lot of ways I wand to edit this piece since I finished it, so eventually I plan on making some pretty major changes, probably adding a lot more, and cutting a lot of what I already have. Anyways, here's the end of what it is for now:

“And by tracing it twice/I fell through the ice”
=====The velvet moonlight bathed the frozen surface of the lake with a pale glow. Russell and Jeremy sat in the car, parked a dozen feet away. Jeremy continued to furiously drum on the dashboard, accompanying his pathetic attempts to imitate David Burne’s spacey tone on “Once in a Lifetime.”
=====“Let’s go outside,” Russell half-yelled, necessary to crack through the walls of sound from the blaring speakers.
=====“I’d rather not freeze my balls off,” Jeremy replied without skipping a beat in his drumming.
=====“I’m going outside either way. You can wait here.”
=====“Suit yourself.”
=====Russell exited the car, and was welcomed by a gust of icy air, wrapping a thin chilled film across the exposed skin of his face and arms. He could hear the thumping of the music from the car still, even though he’d closed the door. Slowly meandering onto the surface of the lake, Russell scolded himself for not bringing shoes with better treads, the smooth surface of the worn down bottoms of his sneakers sliding on the slick surface of the ice with each step, threatening to disrupt his delicate balance.
=====He wandered farther out into the middle of the lake in a sort of meditative trance, one of the few times in his life that his head was completely devoid of thoughts; the internal silence mirroring the quiet surrounding him; the only sound the whispering of the wind through distant trees, and the almost audible dance of the moonlight across the glittering frosted-glass of the lake’s surface.
=====Russell suddenly found himself dancing in the middle of the lake, whimsically skipping across ice. Russell never danced. At least besides when he was in his room late at night by himself, with the curtains closed on a head full of weed. He could feel the music coursing through him—not that of a particular song, but some strange abstract concept of music, vibrating through his muscle fibers and impelling his limbs to move in a coordinated, continuous motion.
=====Russell felt something stirring beneath him, a slight creaking beneath his feet, but paid it no heed. The profound stillness of the night was broken by a jarring explosion of sound as the glass gave way and the lake opened up to him. The rush of sensations as he plunged into the water was so intense his system shut down; he didn’t feel cold, only numb. The thought of trying to move didn’t even occur to Russell, and even if it did it was unlikely he could’ve moved his frozen limbs.

“The only strings that hold me here/Are tangled up around the pier”
=====Russell was confused as he suddenly felt motion. He heard the sound of a person groaning from exertion behind him. Then he was on his back on the ice again.
=====“What the fuck were you thinking you idiot?” Jeremy asked him, sitting next to him on the ice, his chest dramatically rising and falling as he tried to catch his breath. “No, don’t even answer, let’s just get back to the car before you give yourself goddamn hypothermia or something.”
=====Russell managed to get back on his feet, even though the sensation still had barely returned to his legs. Jeremy helped support him as they made their way back to the car. They shut the doors, turned on the heat, and sat in silence for a few minutes.
=====“You could’ve gotten yourself killed, you know that?” Jeremy asked, Russell detecting a tone of annoyance.
=====Russell nodded.
=====“You’re fucking lucky I saw you dancing out there like an idiot and decided to come make sure you were okay,” Jeremy went on, the anger gradually heightening in his speech with every word. “Or that we both didn’t fall in and freeze to death out here.”
=====“I know,” Russell replied. “Thanks for pulling me out.”
=====“It’s not like I was just going to let you fucking die out there or shit.”
=====Jeremy shook his head, and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “Are you okay?”
=====Russell’s face split with a giant smile. “Never been better,” he said as he turned the key in the ignition. The car was revived with the pounding vibrations as the music turned back on, ricocheting off the walls and windows and filling the car with a bewildering orchestra of auditory sensation.

Alice (part II)

“Set me adrift and I’m lost over there”
=====Russell should have known from the slight hesitation in Alice’s phone message, the stop-and-go rhythm of awkwardness a dead giveaway. But he didn’t realize until he saw the look in her eyes right before she said it to him when they met.
=====“I don’t think it’s working out between us.”
=====He only heard scattered fragments of the rest of what she said—it’s not anything he did…he’s a good guy…still be friends, etc.
=====“I’m really sorry Russell…” Alice said, and Russell could tell from the look in her eyes when she briefly met his gaze before dropping them back to the ground that she meant it too.
=====He couldn’t remember what he said to her before he left. Not even a trace of any of it was left in his mind. All he remembered was the drive back home: blasting excessively loud music not to drown out his thoughts, but to fill the empty cavity inside his head with the vibrations—with anything.

“And I must be insane/To go skating on your name”
=====“You just have to let it go man,” Jeremy said before exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It’s the only thing you can do. It sucks, but that’s all there is to it.”
=====“It’s only been two days,” Russell muttered, taking the bong from him.
=====“The sooner you get over it the easier it’ll be.”
=====“Easier said then done,” Russell picked the lighter up from the ground.
=====“I hear you,” Jeremy settled onto the carpet, propping himself up with his elbows. “Nothing else I can tell you though. No short-cuts for this shit.”
=====Russell inhaled deeply, removing the slide and sucking in every last particle of smoke as he cleared the chamber. He held it in steady for a few seconds, and then relaxed his diaphragm, the smoke lazily snaking out from his barely opened lips.
=====“I’m really sorry though man,” Jeremy said.
=====“Thanks,” Russell replied flatly.
=====They remained silent, staring off into their respective spaces.
=====“I need to do something,” Russell said, breaking the stasis.
=====“Wanna watch something?” Jeremy asked, starting to move towards the cabinet with various DVD’s by the television.
=====“No, I mean like something different. I don’t want to just sit here.”
=====“Like what? It’s two in the morning, there isn’t shit to do.”
=====Russell paused, musing on what to do. “Let’s go to the lake.”
=====“The lake?” Jeremy asked skeptically.
=====“Yeah.”
=====“It’s cold as fuck out.”
=====“So what?”
=====Jeremy took a slow breath, in and out. “I guess we could.”
=====“Let’s go then.”
=====“I don’t think I’m up for driving honestly.”
=====“I’ll drive.”
=====Jeremy eyed Russell up and down slowly, inspecting his condition. “Are you sure you’re okay to?”
=====“A hundred percent.”
=====“Alright.”
=====Russell slowly opened to the door to the hallway, then eased it shut behind them. Jeremy opened his mouth to speak, but Russell shushed him as a reminder. “Don’t wake my parents up,” he whispered, Jeremy nodding in response and dropping whatever it was he was going to say.
=====They crept through the hallway and out the front door. Jeremy was right: it was cold as fuck. They rushed to the car, and both let out relieved sighs when Russell started the car and the heat kicked in.
=====A few minutes later found them gliding down the highway towards the lake. Jeremy was beating his hands on the dashboard, pounding in synch with the drums to the first song on Remain in Light. Russell’s eyes were stapled to the road, staring ahead vacantly, the knuckles on his hands white from his death-grip on the steering wheel.

Alice (part I)

(Note: all quotes from the song "Alice," by Tom Waits)

“And so a secret kiss/Brings madness with the bliss”
=====Russell stretched his legs out even further, the back of his head planted in the slightly stained tan cushion on the back of the couch, his back stretched across the seat; his legs and butt suspended in mid air, not actually making contact with the couch. His gray eyes wandered across the ceiling as he ran his right hand through the slightly tangled waves of dark brown hair piled on top of his head. A handful of people sat around him in a vague circle, sprawled on the other couch, chairs, and even a couple of them on the ground.
=====“Russell?” A voice to his right impatiently intoned.
=====Russell rolled his head to the right on the cushion to look, and saw Jeremy’s hand extended towards him, a joint wedged between his index and middle fingers, a thin curling trail of smoke dancing in slow motion through the air from its tip.
=====“Just take it man,” Jeremy repeated, shaking his head slightly.
=====Russell carefully extricated it from Jeremy’s fingers, taking care not to drop it. His fingers brought it to his lips, and he inhaled deeply, feeling the tendrils of smoke creep through the folded labyrinths of the walls of his lungs. Straining to hold it in, he could feel his heart pounding to the music from his Darrell’s speakers in every vein in his body, pulsing to the beat of the bass behind the screaming of Jimi’s warbling electric blues riffs. A cloud exploded from his mouth as he coughed, unable to hold it in any longer. He took another small hit after the brief coughing spasm tapered off, and held out the joint to his left as he exhaled. A fuzzy hand reached out in his peripheral vision and took it from his outstretched hand.
=====Russell was rather pleased with his current state of mind—several beers and lung-fulls of pot mingling, wrapping his brain in the a thick wool blanket of hazy detachment; all sensory input muffled, jumbled as it came through the layers of substance-induced insulation. A figure leaned over him in the center of his pixilated field of vision.
=====“Wanna come talk with me Russell?” a female voice emanated from the figure—it was Alice.
=====Russell willed his eyes to focus, and he could see the light reflecting off her dilated pupils, twin pools of jet-clack ink surrounded by the thin line of her deep-green irises.
=====“Sure. You can sit here,” Russell replied, gesturing to the empty seat on the couch next to him.
=====“Alone,” Alice said, extending a hand to help him up.
=====Russell stood up without taking her hand—he didn’t need any help—and followed her out of the room. Beads of sweat formed on his palms, and he could feel the beating of his heart picking up ever-so-slightly. Alice led him to a room down the hall, to her room. She sat down on the edge of her bed, and he sat beside her.
=====Russell became a bit disoriented, thoughts flitting past in his head before he could even process them—what should he do?...should he try to kiss her?...what if he sucked at it?...did she even like him?...what if she freaked out if he tried something?....did she want him to do something?...why was he so bad at knowing what to do with this stuff?...why was he so nervous?...what should he do? He felt he was watching a merry-go-round on crack spin in front of him, trying to focus on each animal as it flew past, but they were going by so fast he couldn’t even focus his eyes on one before it would disappear from his vision, never letting him get even remotely grounded.
=====His head spun faster and faster, until Alice leaned in and kissed him. He was too stunned to kiss her back.
=====She pulled away.
=====“I’m sorry…I thought—” She started.
=====“No…I do…” The words stumbled of his bewildered mouth.
=====“So you do want—”
=====“Yeah.”
=====Alice smiled, and he lost himself as they leaned in and kissed again.

Landscaping (part II)

=====“They went to the bathroom,” Aaron replied.
=====“Oh, okay.”
=====“You want some Jake?” Aaron asked me, extending a bottle of champagne towards me. He must’ve gotten it from one of the early-teenage kids that walked around selling alcohol (the same way we got the wine earlier) while I was spacing out.
=====“Yeah, sure.” I held out my plastic cup and Aaron poured a sizeable amount in, the foam overflowing and trickling down the side of the cup onto the grass and my hand a little. I jettisoned the drink into my mouth, downing it in one gulp, and felt the liquid heat surge down my esophagus.
=====Aaron kept talking to the girls as I stared at my empty cup, debating whether to have some more. Their words buzzed around the background of my thoughts, relegated to white noise without the filter of my conscious mind to make sense of them. I looked up to ask Aaron for another glass, and all three of them were staring at me with a look of anticipation.
=====“What?” I asked, thoroughly confused.
=====“You should take her offer,” Aaron said to me with a smile.
=====“What offer?”
=====“I asked you if you wanted a French kiss,” Alyssa said in an incredibly matter-of-fact manner.
=====My mind went of like one of those Chinese fireworks, filling with the explosions of billions of neurons firing like crazy.
=====“How could you turn down a French kiss from a real French girl?” Aaron asked.
=====My hands were tearing out grass by the handful now.
=====“Umm…”
=====“We can do it better than any American,” Marin said, her smile a mirror of Aaron’s.
=====“Well?” Alyssa asked with an undertone of impatience this time.
=====“Uh…” My throat contorted, trying to resist allowing any answer to pass through. “Sorry…I…no thanks.”
=====“What?” Alyssa leaned in slightly, not having heard my response.
=====“No thanks…” I managed to eke out, my eyes falling to the grass.
=====Alyssa and Marin looked confused by my response, but not quite as much as Aaron.
=====“Come on man,” He said. “As I said, how could you pass that up?”
=====“Why not?” Alyssa asked me, her eyes locking in on mine as I looked back up at her.
=====“I don’t know…” My grass pulling reached a crescendo, my hands trying to keep up with the frenetic pulsations of my heart. “I’m just shy…”
=====“Shy?” Marin asked.
=====“Why not?” Alyssa repeated, still confused.
=====“It’s nothing personal. I’m just...” My voice trailed off.
=====“He’s just shy,” Aaron interjected, mercifully ending that line of questioning. He paused a second, then turned to Alyssa. “I’d be glad to though, if the offer’s still on the table…”
=====“Sure,” She replied. They leaned in towards each other and made out for a few seconds before pulling away from each other. Marin gave Aaron a questioning look. He grinned, and then leaned in towards her as they repeated the process. My eyes remained fixed on my hands as they continued their gradual destruction of the area of the lawn directly surrounding me.

Landscaping

Here's (yet another) beginning to a story, but unlike the other ones, I actually know where this one is going now, so the rest should be up sometime in the near future.

=====I unsuccessfully tried to hide a wince as I gulped down another mouthful of cheap red wine from a tiny clear plastic cup. Two bottles for ten—sometimes quantity beats quality, fuck what they tell you in school. I was pulling up blades of grass one by one as my friends talked to the two French girls, pulling gently and gradually adding more and more pressure, trying to pull up the whitish bottom part—someone showed me how you could do that back in elementary school, ever since whenever I’m sitting on grass I find myself doing it; just another one of my endless nervous habits.
=====We were sitting on one of the long lawns that stretch out from the base of the Eiffel tower in a line, like the red carpet of a movie premiere, but green, and not continuous, but broken into segments. The last electric blue twinges of twilight had long since faded into a deep midnight blue bordering on black. Streetlamps lined the sides of the green, splashing us with just enough pale orange light to see pretty clearly.
=====I drifted back into the conversation. My friends—Aaron, Ivan, and Peter—were asking the French girls—Marin and Alyssa were the first names that came to mind, but I wasn’t sure whether I was remembering them correctly or just making those up—about Paris. The conversation was fairly amusing to watch, it’s always funny seeing awkward teenage boys trying to spit game at girls; not that I was any less awkward, I just didn’t even put in the effort to try most the time.
=====A sparkling light in my peripheral vision made me turn my head to the tower. Various lights were flashing on and off in a coordinated sequence all over it, a dizzying pattern of light dancing up and down the metal mesh frame.
=====“Does it just come on randomly?” I asked. It was the first thing I’d said in minutes.
=====“No, it, uh…” Marin (or whatever her name actually was) said. Her head tilted slightly and her eyes searched the top of the insides of her eyelids for the words. Her eyes re-descended. “It comes on every hour.”
=====I looked down at my watch: 12:00. “That makes sense.” I said, and then settled back into silence.
=====“I’m gonna go take a piss,” Ivan said as he stood up.
=====“Yeah, same here,” Peter seconded, and followed Ivan as he headed off in the direction of the bushes off to the side of the green.
=====“Where did they go?” Alyssa asked Aaron. We discovered early on in the conversation that if we said anything idiomatic, quickly, or softly (or better yet, some combination of the three), they had no idea what we were saying, since their English was pretty rudimentary (our French was non-existent, and neither of them spoke Spanish, so English it was). We took advantage of it a little, slipping fast-paced slang to each other when we didn’t want them to here something.
=====“They went to the bathroom,” Aaron replied.
=====“Oh, okay.”

Don't Tell (Revisisted)

This is a piece I wrote a couple years ago, and I've been meaning to make some major changes to it, so I finally decided to get around to it. It's probably not completely done yet, there's still a few things I know I should change, and also I'll probably continue to do some minor fine-tuning still. Anyways, here's where it is for now:

Don’t Tell

=====“What’re you talking about?” Cory asks him.
=====“Do you remember what I fucking told you?” Damon hisses, and grabs Cory by his left shoulder.
=====“I….I…” Cory stutters. He tries to pull back from Damon’s grip, but his hand tightens around Cory’s shoulder. It hurts, his nails are digging into it.
=====“I told you not to tell nobody what you saw you little shit!” Damon’s yelling now.
=====“I didn’t!” Cory says, he’s shaking. “I didn’t tell nobody, I swear Damon!”
=====“Oh yeah?” Damon asks, and Cory can see his hand reach into his sweatshirt pocket. It comes back out; a gun’s in it.
“I didn’t tell, I swear, please, I didn’t! I didn’t!” Cory screams, he’s flailing around, trying to escape Damon’s grip.
=====Damon holds the cold barrel of the gun to Cory’s sweat-soaked head. “I told you not to tell, just one damn thing. I told you I’d kill you.”
=====“Damon, please!” Cory pleads.
=====“Damn fool,” Damon says, and he pulls the trigger.

=====Cory wonders why he always has to do this. He’s hunched over under the weight of his backpack, his feet move reluctantly over the cracked and worn sidewalk. He lifts one hand from the strap of his backpack to itch the back of his head; it always itches a few days after he shaves it; when the black stubble is barely visible on his coffee skin. He’s always hated walking alone, he wishes his mom could be there, wishes she could walk by him and hold his hand; wishes she could walk between him and everyone he passed to shield him like she always does when they walk around here.
The old man who’s always on the middle of this sidewalk asks him for some change, lifting his arm sheathed in a torn jacket to raise the old Styrofoam coffee cup in his constantly shaking hand, the few coins in it clanking. “Sorry,” Cory says as he passes him, he doesn’t bother to respond.
=====But it’s not the beggars or the addicts (or both—most the time they’re the same) that bother Cory the most, but the men on almost every street corner in this neighborhood. They stand, or sit on the stoops, wearing loose shirts or jackets and jeans. Even as Cory walks down the block towards the corner at the end he can see a few people pass them, two old black men in threadbare jackets and pants stop to exchange crumpled bills for a few small glass vials: Cory’s seen it enough times to notice them moving between their hands, even though they try to do it discretely.
=====Cory finally comes to the corner, and by the time he gets there both of the old men are already gone; they have what they came for. He walks by the men on the corner—it’s hard to call them men though, two are only a few years older than Cory. One of the younger ones sitting on a stoop says “red caps, ten a piece” as Cory passes, he’ll say it to anyone, young or old, black or white, rich or poor, it doesn’t matter to him. Cory doesn’t open his mouth; he keeps walking on.
=====His mom knows as well as anyone else that she shouldn’t let Cory walk home alone. Cory thinks about when these walks alone started. He can’t remember for sure, but he thinks it’s probably when his dad left, when his mom started having to work late. That’s not when it started he realizes though, Damon used to walk him home. He’d always come pick Cory up at school, Damon’s school was a couple blocks away. It’s been a while since those times though. At least a few months. Now Damon never walks him home, even though their mom thinks he does; Damon told Cory he had to keep telling her so, they both know she doesn’t want Cory walking home alone. Now Damon always comes back a couple hours later than him, probably hanging out with his older high school friends, Cory thinks, doesn’t have time for twelve year olds any more.
=====He misses those walks with Damon. They’d talk about school, mom, anything on their minds. It’s been a while since they’ve talked like that though, Cory’s not sure why. Damon’s been around less, he comes home just a bit before mom does, and he’s always up in his room or out with friends at night. But it’s more than that. He’s more quiet, never talks about school and his teachers and friends at dinner anymore, doesn’t hang out with Cory, watching TV or playing video games or just being there with him like he used to. Sometimes Cory tries to talk to him still, once he asked him about why he comes home late. He yelled, “Mind your own damn business!” and shoved Cory in the shoulder. He never used to shove him like that; Cory hasn’t asked him again since.
It’s as he’s thinking this though, that he hears it: the sickening crack.
=====He turns around, and sees two figures shrouded in black hooded sweatshirts holding metal bats. One of the men from the group on the corner he just passed is lying on the ground, clutching his shoulder. The two that are still standing lunge at the hooded attackers, trying to get the jump on them, but two swings later and they join their fallen companion. The bats rain down on them, blow after blow, dull thuds and loud cracks and blood splattering all over sidewalk and the brick walls of the building by them.
=====“Serves you right for being on our fucking corners, bitch!” one of the standing figures shouts at the fallen bodies, punctuating it by raising the bat over his head and smashing it into one of their backs—Cory thinks he can hear a rib breaking.
=====Cory is about to turn and run when one of the figures notices him. He looks at Cory, his crimson-coated bat suspended mid-swing. Their eyes meet. They freeze.
=====The second figure turns. “Come on, we gotta get the fuck outta here!”
=====The first figure remains still for a second or two, his gaze still pointed towards Cory. “Listen, don’t tell nobody nothin’ about this Cory,” he yells, his voice just barely wavering, “you do…I swear I’ll fucking kill you. You hear me?”
=====Cory remains silent, his mouth dry; he can’t open it to say anything.
=====“You hear me?!”
=====“Damon!” the other one screams.
=====“Shut the fuck up, I’m coming man!” Damon shouts back, and the two run off around the corner and out of sight.
=====Cory remains still for a few seconds, unable to move, unable to tear his stare from where his brother had stood a moment before and the three bodies. They writhe around on the ground, moaning in pain, holding varies body parts. One is crying as he holds a shattered kneecap. Finally, Cory takes his eyes away from the corner. He runs all the way home, his eyes darting around. His hand searches his pocket for his key as he goes up three worn wooden steps to his front door. He rams the key into the hole, turns it quickly, and bolts inside. The door slams shut behind him, and he locks it. He walks the last dozen feet to the couch and collapses onto it, panting for breath.
=====Cory stares at the black of the TV screen, unblinking for a while, until he finally thinks to turn the TV on. He starts to search the ground around the couch with his hand for the remote, when he hears the sound of a key rattling in the door. Must be Damon, he thinks. The door creaks open, and he can hear footsteps coming towards him.
=====“Cory, Damon, where’ve you guys gone off too?” Cory can hear his mother’s voice say from the kitchen. That’s odd, he thinks, she’s normally not home until at least two or three hours after he does, and it can’t have been more than a half an hour at most. He glances down at his black watch: 6:17, its been three hours.
=====“I’m in here mom!” Cory yells.
=====His mom walks into the room, and pauses in the doorway, one hand on the doorframe. “What are you up to?” she asks.
=====“Just about to watch some TV”
=====“Was school good?”
=====“Yeah, it was fine.”
=====“That’s good honey. I’m gonna go make us some dinner.” She takes her hand of the doorframe and turns to leave the room, but pauses to ask, “You know where Damon is?”
=====Cory pauses for a minute, the image of Damon standing there with the blood-stained bat in his hand flashes through his head. Don’t tell nobody. “No, I don’t, he’s probably just off with some friends and forgot what time it is or something.”
=====“That boy better be back soon is all I have to say” Cory’s mom says, and walks off into the kitchen. He can hear her turn on the stove and hears some pots rattling. He picks the remote off the floor and turns the TV on.
=====Cory’s mom is still in the kitchen, and the credits are rolling for the show Cory had been watching when the door creaks open again.
=====“Damon, that you?” His mom shouts from the kitchen.
=====“Yeah.” He says.
=====“Where you been at?”
=====“Just hanging out with some friends, sorry I’m late, none of us had no watches.”
=====“It’s okay this time Damon, dinner still ain’t ready. But you better not make this a habit, you hear me?”
=====“Yeah, I hear you.” He says, and goes up the stairs to his room. About a half hour later Cory hears his mom calling them for dinner. He turns the TV off and walks into the kitchen, his mom’s just putting the dinner out on the table. Damon comes down from his rooms a few seconds later and sits next to Cory in his chair.
=====“So, how was your day Damon?” their mom asks as she sits down.
=====“Good.” He says, popping open a can of coke and taking a sip.
=====“Any tests or anything?”
=====“Nah.” He takes another sip. “Or, yeah, just one in math.”
=====“How’d it go?”
=====“I don’t really wanna talk about it,” he says, his eyes fall to his plate.
=====“Not again boy, I told you you gotta start working harder again.”
=====“I know.”
=====“What’s been happenin’ with you Damon, you always used to do so well in school?”
=====“Look, can we just not talk about this right now?” His eyes remain stuck to his plate. A minute goes by with the sound of forks and knives on plates, of mouths chewing.
=====“How was your day Cory?”
=====“It was fine.”
=====“That’s good.”
=====“Hey mom, can I be excused?” Damon asks.
=====“But you haven’t eaten half the food on your plate.”
=====“I ain’t too hungry.”
=====She pauses. “Fine, go ahead.”
=====“Thanks,” he says, and puts his plate next to the sink before leaving.
=====Cory keeps looking down at his plate, his fork’s in his hand but he hasn’t eaten a bite in a few minutes. “Hey mom, I’m not hungry either. Can I be excused too?”
=====She sighs. “Yeah, fine, go ahead Cory.”
=====“Thanks.” He brings his plate to the sink and walks to the door. “I’m really tired, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”
=====“But its only—“ his mom pauses in mid sentence to look at the clock on the counter next to the sink, “—8:07.”
=====“Yeah, I know, just tired though.” He walks out and up the stairs to his room. He goes on his tiptoes down the hallway past Damon’s room. When he gets into his room he flips the lights switch off, gets in his bed, and pulls the blanket around himself. After trying for a while, he finally manages to get to sleep.

=====Cory is suddenly jerked awake by the sound of his door opening slowly. A hooded form walks up to his bed, in the dark he can’t see who it is. “Do you remember what I told you Cory?” he can hear the figure say. It’s Damon; he can tell from his voice.
=====“What’re you talking about?” Cory asks him.
=====“Do you remember what I fucking told you?” Damon hisses, and grabs Cory by his left shoulder.
=====“I….I…” Cory stutters. He tries to pull back from Damon’s grip, but his hand tightens around Cory’s shoulder. It hurts, his nails are digging into it.
=====“I told you not to tell nobody what you saw you little shit!” Damon’s yelling now.
=====“I didn’t!” Cory says, he’s shaking. “I didn’t tell nobody, I swear Damon!”
=====“Oh yeah?” Damon asks, and Cory can see his hand reach into his sweatshirt pocket. It comes back out; a gun’s in it.
=====“I didn’t tell, I swear, please, I didn’t! I didn’t!” Cory screams, he’s flailing around, trying to escape Damon’s grip.
=====Damon holds the cold barrel of the gun to Cory’s sweat-soaked head. “I told you not to tell, just one damn thing. I told you I’d kill you.”
=====“Damon, please!” Cory pleads.
=====“Damn fool,” Damon says, and he pulls the trigger.
=====Cory jerks awake in his bed. His pajamas are soaked in sweat; he’s shaking and he can feel his heart beating in every part of his body. His eyes dart around the room—it’s empty. He feels his head where the gun had been, there’s no hole. He takes a deep breath, then another, and with one last look around the room, he lies back down. He turns onto his side, away from the doorway, and curls up, pulling the blankets over his head. After a few minutes, he hears a knock at the door. His muscles tense up and he buries his head in the pillow and blankets.
=====“Cory, can I come in?” he can hear Damon say from outside.
Cory curls up tighter into a ball. The door creaks open, and Damon walks in, closing it just as quietly behind himself.
=====“Cory…you know what I said earlier today?”
=====Cory remains still, maybe if Damon doesn’t know he’s awake he’ll go away.
=====“Well…I just wanted to say…I’m sorry.”
=====Cory rolls over to face Damon, pulling the blankets from over his head.
=====“I shouldn’t’ve said none of that. I didn’t mean it, I was just scared. I’d never do nothin’ like that that to you. We brothers. You know that, right Cory?”
=====“Yeah, course we are.” Cory pauses for a few seconds. “You know, I miss those walks home from school we used to have.”
=====Damon pauses. “Yeah,” he says, his eyes fall to the ground, “Me too Cory.”
=====“Then why don’t you walk home with me no more?”
=====“You know it’s not that easy.”
=====“Why not?”
=====“Cause it’s not. You know mom’s been having a hard time paying for everything. I gotta help.”
=====Cory pauses for a second. “You mean she knows about it?”
=====“No, no, course she doesn’t. Most the time I slip it in her purse when she asleep, she doesn’t notice.”
=====“But why can’t you just work after school or something, why you have to be involved with…”
=====“You know it doesn’t work like that Cory. This here’s easy money, sometimes I don’t feel right about it, but I can’t just sit here watching mom worry about us all the time. It’s not forever, just for a bit.”
=====“That’s what everyone says.”
=====“I’m not like the others. This isn’t my world. You know that Cory.”
=====“Yeah, but Damon, today—“
=====“You didn’t see what you think you did.”
=====“Then what did I see?”
=====“Look Cory…nevermind, you wouldn’t understand.”
=====“Why?”
=====“You just wouldn’t. Listen, I gotta go, but…I just wanted to say sorry for what I said. Sorry for how I’ve been. For it all. Just…sorry.”
=====“Are you gonna stop?”
=====Damon pauses, his voice is soft when he finally speaks again. “No.”
=====“Damon—“
=====“—Look, I gotta get to sleep.” His voice is frail, Cory’s never heard him talk like this. He thinks he can see Damon wiping his eyes off with his arm in the dark.
=====“G’night.”
=====“Night.”
=====Damon leaves the room just as quietly as he entered, and Cory can hear the faint sound of his footsteps down the hall and his door closing. Cory stays where he was, propped up on one elbow on his bed, his blankets still wrapped around his body. He lies back down and rolls over onto his side. But he knows he won’t sleep tonight. Somehow he doubts Damon will either.

Fade to Black

=====At his level of exhaustion, everything began to blur together. The gray of the road melting into the black sky, his eyes tracing constellations between the pinpoint lights of the stars above and the streaks of white paint flying past him below. The cars streaking by him on the other side of the road blended together, a continuous mass of steel hurtling past. Tiredness demolished the walls that separated everything, and he lost himself in the unbridled speed, his consciousness drifting away as he became one with the motion that surrounded him.
=====Suddenly he became aware of truck. It was on the other side of the road, heading towards him. He couldn’t say why it distinguished itself from the chaotic blur of its surroundings, but he became fixated on it. His eyes slowly rotated to follow its path, leading it ever closer to him.
=====Something shifted. He didn’t notice it so much as feel it. It took him a few seconds to place what it was, but then it hit him: his trajectory had changed. He became vaguely aware of the fact that his hands had shifted ever so slightly on the steering wheel, almost imperceptibly, but just enough to skew the path of the car so that it intersected that of the truck. For a second, a thought fluttered across his mind, that maybe he should alter his path again, correct it. But he immediately rejected this idea. He could do nothing to alter the current situation—two steel cocoons hurtling inevitably towards each other in space. It had been pre-determined, pre-ordained, all he could do was immerse himself in the current of time and let it carry him where it would.
=====The truck honked, then seeing he had no intention of changing course, veered to the right to try to avoid him. He laughed at the sheer futility of the gesture; a pathetic, powerless act of rebellion against the laws of nature that had schemed to bring them together in this moment. His hands turned, his knuckles white from his tight grip on the steering wheel. The truck expanded in his vision, until it filled the entire windshield, its headlights flooding his eyes until he could barely see; but he still noticed the look of horror flash through the truck-driver’s eyes: finally, he too understood their fate.
=====The world exploded. Everything resisting the stop, torn apart by its desire to keep moving and the too-sudden necessity of stillness. Twisted metal and flying glass and broken bones and bloody mist. Pressure and pain and shattering and jerking.
=====The world exploded. And then it went black.