Thinking thoughts about suicide, but not in a desperate/dramatic way, more so like the way in which someone might consider joining the Army as an option for the future.
Halfway through the coffee, you pee in the shower.
The pee burns and smells bad.
You’re staring at the peeling paint where the ceiling meets the showertile, and the black mold behind it.
Thinking about how when people say, “It could be worse”—that suggests it could be better too, and deciding to only think of it one way or another is to just make shit worse.
What you really want is to never be stupid enough to have feelings at all.
To be steady and unfeeling.
After the shower, you and your ex girlfriend sit on the Kiiiddzzz bed, putting on socks and shoes.
“What’s Kiiiddzzzz,” she says, touching one of the places where “Kiiidddzzzz” is printed on the bed.
“Kiiidddzz is who I am, basically. It’s what I’m about. It’s a lifestyle.”
She sniffs like she’s going to sneeze, then doesn’t. “This bed is a fucking joke,” she says. “It’s like, for a baby. An actual newborn baby, I think. I’m not even joking.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” you say, looking at your blistered feet.
There’s a nickel-sized blood blister on your little toe.
Filled with reddish-maroon liquid.
You hold out your bare foot to her.
“This is, somewhere on the bed family-tree between the ground and a real bed,” she says.
“Look at the blister on my little toe, it’s huge.”
She holds her hair back and looks at the blister. “Oh shit,” she says. “It looks like a little cranberry. Don’t you have to pop it. Can I do it.”
“No, the blood-ones you let heal,” you say. “Then you can cut them off after they dry. Otherwise the blood can get infected if you do it while it’s still juicy.”
“Think you’re wrong,” she says, and stands up to button her coat. “You have to cut it to get the juice out.”
You lift your foot a little higher and move the blistered toe back and forth. “Have a taste. Bite my little cranberry, eh.”
She fakes like she’s going to bite your blister.
A moment of intense fear happens inside you.
You say, “For some reason I’ve been fixated lately on imagining a metal grater of some kind going over my toenails, like backwards.”
“Are all the lights off,” she says.
“Yeah.”
You leave the apartment together.
Going down the stairs she says, “Hey is your friend going to be there today, can I meet him.”
“Theodore?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think he works Thursdays.”
“Shit,” she says.
Stepping outside, you find yourself thinking — They’re all over my face.
Unsure of what.
*
On the walk to the store the sidewalks are still a little icy from an unseasonable snowstorm.
You and your ex girlfriend walk just off the sidewalk on the dirt.
She’s a few feet behind you at all points except for crosswalks, where you watch opposite sides of traffic go opposite ways.
Talking about how when her mom still lived with them a long time ago, the mom always walked around naked and she had a huge bush between her legs.
“Like, it’s just full in the front when she’s wearing underwear too, and like, coming out the sides,” your ex girlfriend says. “Like a diaper. Like imagine a chicken-legged woman with no ass and just these old, saggy-ass underwear on. With a giant bush in the front holding the underwear up.”
“Shit,” you say. “I just imagined it and it made me dizzy.”
The only things you know about your ex girlfriend’s mom is what your ex girlfriend told you — that the mom made your ex girlfriend and her sister run around outside with garbage bags taped to them to lose weight when they were really young, and made them dress up and participate in beauty pageants, and that she also instilled in them (at a young age) the fear of getting raped by their dad, because when the mom was younger, she got kidnapped and gangraped in Mexico.
That’s all you’ve been told.
That and now the huge bush thing.
“Yeah a huge bush,” she says, catching up behind you. “She had really nice boobs though, I’ll give her that. She’d always call me into the bathroom to talk while she was in the bath and her boobs still looked really good. Why don’t you want to walk with me. Are you thinking about my mom’s boobs.”
You don’t say anything.
You’ve been just not answering people sometimes now.
This is becoming normal — you think. The highest freedom. To not say anything. To let it pass.
She says, “Why are you walking that fast, are you trying to ditch me.”
“I’m just walking normal. It’s how I always walk.”
“I want to hold hands though,” she says.
“I don’t want to hold hands.”
What you want is to walk into a giant bush of pubic hair and never return, to be taken in.
By the front entrance of the store, a homeless woman in a wheelchair asks for money.
She has a sweatshirt on with a sparkly American flag on the front and she’s wearing post-eyesurgery sunglasses.
There’s a golden retriever laying by her feet, smelling garbagey.
You give the woman a dollar.
“Two’d be better,” she says, still holding out her hand, looking up with her post-eyesurgery sunglasses.
“No problem,” you say, and give her another dollar. “Is two good. I have three more dollars but I was going to use them on my lunchbreak.”
“No, two’s good,” she says, putting the money into a fannypack. “Thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah honey, thanks.”
“Alright have a nice day,” you say, noticing yourself as an ugly face on her sunglasses.
She wheels herself towards the bus stop.
The golden retriever follows.
Inside the store, a couple of the other backroom employees are up front.
Sour Cream is there.
He says, “Hey hey, what’s going on what’s going on”—typing things into his laser gun.
You don’t say anything and neither does your ex girlfriend and everyone just stands there like assholes.
The store is loud.
A lot of people are shopping.
It creates a single sound.
Fluid leaks from your ear and you’re dizzy.
Goddamnit — you think.
Another employee walks up, dropping off his keys at the front.
He has an earpiece walkie talkie on.
He works in electronics.
“Fucking done,” he says, taking out the earpiece. He nods upward to your ex girlfriend then looks at you. He points at you, narrowing his eyes. “Oh hey,” he says, “Did you know Timothy — we were all talking about him before — backroom guy, started here in the summer same time as you?”
“No, I didn’t know Timothy,” you say.
“Oh,” he says, pushing up his glasses. “The guy who had all the seizures.”
Sour Cream laughs twice in a high pitch and says, “Oh yeah, that guy. We found him having a seizure in the electronics stockroom once, right. That bald-ass white dude.”
“Yeah,” says the electronics employee, gesturing, “Then he got moved to the overnight shift. Well, he died today.”
No one says anything.
You think about the punch combination George Foreman landed on Michael Moorer to become the oldest heavyweight champion in boxing history.
Two punches in close succession.
Left right.
The electronics employee says, “Yeah he had another seizure and swallowed his tongue, so—” he looks at the earpiece in his hand, folding his lips inward a little.
You find yourself folding your lips inward too.