rockyspine
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- Posted: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 05:20:15 +0000
Look, guys, here's a sample!
An intro. I make no claims of historical accuracy.
Quote:
Her daddy died in this desert.
William Parker abandoned the name Wild Bill when her mama said she wouldn’t marry a man whose face and name were nailed into every post in town, but every now and then he just got an itch. Something in him was dark, there was no escaping it. He could keep it locked up in a cell somewhere in the pit of his stomach, but sometimes the darkness oozed between the bars and settled right on his skin like a case of pox. Only going out with Jim Thompson and his gang could quell it.
Her daddy’s last bank robbery went sour and the gang hightailed it out of town, the sheriff and his men not far behind. Three of their seven men went down in the volley of bullets that whizzed past and into the desert beyond, but it wasn’t the swarm of rangers that did him in. William Parker emerged from the dust clouds rattled, but unscathed, thanks to the grace of God, and he swore he’d never associate with the notorious Jim Thompson again. They escaped and made camp in the desert, and that’s when her daddy died while taking a piss.
It wasn’t the rattlesnake that killed him. It was the devil in him, her ma swore it. The Lord doomed the devil to live the rest of his days slithering on his stomach in the red dirt, she said, so when that rattler lashed out quicker than a bowie knife, It was no accident; it was a sign from God. Bill Parker was no victim of circumstance; he was a victim of his own wickedness. He had toyed with the devil, and the devil bit back.
There was a devil somewhere in Grace Parker, too, and there was no ridding it.
She and her horse cut through the dirt like a sidewinder. The sun fell heavy on the dust, the prickly pear, the horned lizards that scattered at the sound of galloping hooves.
The papers had called them the Quaker Gang, because someone, somewhere, heard from someone, somewhere, that the notorious outlaw Jim Thompson had roots that clung to the Pennsylvania dirt. Some swore that the sharp-shootin’, bank-robbin’ son of a gun first rode down to West Texas as a Quaker missionary, armed only with the light of God. Like a vaudevillian sideshow he traveled from town to town in a wagon with the words “There is one, even, Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition” carved into the wood, preaching in saloons over the pummeled piano keys and the men who hissed at him like rattlesnakes. That’s when they say Jim Thompson changed. No one was sure why - he met a woman, some said. A band of outlaws ransacked his wagon, said others. More still insisted that it was Texas that did it. The gold, and the blood, and the whiskey of the west led all men astray from their shepherd, so even the most devout eventually found their faith trampled in the dust.
Of course, Grace Parker had known Jim Thompson her entire life, and not once did she suspect him of havin’ any faith to trample. And now, just shy of a year after she rode away from her mama, the papers were calling them Lady Grace and her Quaker Gang, and, why, that just didn’t have the same ring to it, Jim said. “So why don’t you go on home to your ma, little girl,” he said in a slow Texan drawl, divvying up cash after a heist to his men. “Put on a clean dress. Find a good man.”
He stiffed her on her share of the loot and gave her just enough to find a way home.
The next morning, while he still slept off the cactus wine in the saloon owner’s daughter’s room, she stole his horse and his money and galloped out of town. Now, as she rode through the desert on his painted quarter-horse, Lady Grace Parker knew she’d stolen from the meanest gang in West Texas. She imagined she might pay for it, someday, but that day wasn’t going to be today. In all likelihood Jim Thompson was just now wakin’ up, maybe down in the saloon for breakfast and warm beer, but it wouldn’t be until he reached down in his pockets, or looked out the window for the blanket of white stretched across his horse’s back, that he realized someone did a bang-up job of chiseling him. The double-crossin’ Lady Grace Parker would be halfway to Helena by the time he did that.
All she could see for miles was brittle brush and cacti, and the peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains that jutted into the blue sky like fenceposts. Then there was a clump of something so covered in dust Grace might've mistaken it for a boulder, if she hadn't pulled back on the reins and slowed her paint. Still seated on the horse, she circled it a couple of times: a body near ripe enough for the buzzards, deathly still. Not even a small breeze ruffled the hem of the woman's dress or the curls in her hair. She hopped down from the saddle.
"I think she's dead, Poncho," she told the horse.
She'd seen dead bodies before, slumped over like limp dolls and studded with bullets, but most of them had been men, and most of them had deserved it. Maybe the lady that lay in the dirt deserved the punishment, her own piece of divine retribution handed down from God himself, but something told Grace she hadn’t. The red marks leftover from where she’d been hogtied, maybe, or the blue and purple patch of skin that swelled on her temple. Grace’s dark eyes narrowed in search of any sign of life. Then she nudged the body with her boot, gently.
“What’s a lady doing out here all by herself, anyhow?” she asked the horse, the body, the mountains that towered tall as God over the desert in the distance - and realized her daddy’s ghost might have damn well asked her the same question.
William Parker abandoned the name Wild Bill when her mama said she wouldn’t marry a man whose face and name were nailed into every post in town, but every now and then he just got an itch. Something in him was dark, there was no escaping it. He could keep it locked up in a cell somewhere in the pit of his stomach, but sometimes the darkness oozed between the bars and settled right on his skin like a case of pox. Only going out with Jim Thompson and his gang could quell it.
Her daddy’s last bank robbery went sour and the gang hightailed it out of town, the sheriff and his men not far behind. Three of their seven men went down in the volley of bullets that whizzed past and into the desert beyond, but it wasn’t the swarm of rangers that did him in. William Parker emerged from the dust clouds rattled, but unscathed, thanks to the grace of God, and he swore he’d never associate with the notorious Jim Thompson again. They escaped and made camp in the desert, and that’s when her daddy died while taking a piss.
It wasn’t the rattlesnake that killed him. It was the devil in him, her ma swore it. The Lord doomed the devil to live the rest of his days slithering on his stomach in the red dirt, she said, so when that rattler lashed out quicker than a bowie knife, It was no accident; it was a sign from God. Bill Parker was no victim of circumstance; he was a victim of his own wickedness. He had toyed with the devil, and the devil bit back.
There was a devil somewhere in Grace Parker, too, and there was no ridding it.
She and her horse cut through the dirt like a sidewinder. The sun fell heavy on the dust, the prickly pear, the horned lizards that scattered at the sound of galloping hooves.
The papers had called them the Quaker Gang, because someone, somewhere, heard from someone, somewhere, that the notorious outlaw Jim Thompson had roots that clung to the Pennsylvania dirt. Some swore that the sharp-shootin’, bank-robbin’ son of a gun first rode down to West Texas as a Quaker missionary, armed only with the light of God. Like a vaudevillian sideshow he traveled from town to town in a wagon with the words “There is one, even, Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition” carved into the wood, preaching in saloons over the pummeled piano keys and the men who hissed at him like rattlesnakes. That’s when they say Jim Thompson changed. No one was sure why - he met a woman, some said. A band of outlaws ransacked his wagon, said others. More still insisted that it was Texas that did it. The gold, and the blood, and the whiskey of the west led all men astray from their shepherd, so even the most devout eventually found their faith trampled in the dust.
Of course, Grace Parker had known Jim Thompson her entire life, and not once did she suspect him of havin’ any faith to trample. And now, just shy of a year after she rode away from her mama, the papers were calling them Lady Grace and her Quaker Gang, and, why, that just didn’t have the same ring to it, Jim said. “So why don’t you go on home to your ma, little girl,” he said in a slow Texan drawl, divvying up cash after a heist to his men. “Put on a clean dress. Find a good man.”
He stiffed her on her share of the loot and gave her just enough to find a way home.
The next morning, while he still slept off the cactus wine in the saloon owner’s daughter’s room, she stole his horse and his money and galloped out of town. Now, as she rode through the desert on his painted quarter-horse, Lady Grace Parker knew she’d stolen from the meanest gang in West Texas. She imagined she might pay for it, someday, but that day wasn’t going to be today. In all likelihood Jim Thompson was just now wakin’ up, maybe down in the saloon for breakfast and warm beer, but it wouldn’t be until he reached down in his pockets, or looked out the window for the blanket of white stretched across his horse’s back, that he realized someone did a bang-up job of chiseling him. The double-crossin’ Lady Grace Parker would be halfway to Helena by the time he did that.
All she could see for miles was brittle brush and cacti, and the peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains that jutted into the blue sky like fenceposts. Then there was a clump of something so covered in dust Grace might've mistaken it for a boulder, if she hadn't pulled back on the reins and slowed her paint. Still seated on the horse, she circled it a couple of times: a body near ripe enough for the buzzards, deathly still. Not even a small breeze ruffled the hem of the woman's dress or the curls in her hair. She hopped down from the saddle.
"I think she's dead, Poncho," she told the horse.
She'd seen dead bodies before, slumped over like limp dolls and studded with bullets, but most of them had been men, and most of them had deserved it. Maybe the lady that lay in the dirt deserved the punishment, her own piece of divine retribution handed down from God himself, but something told Grace she hadn’t. The red marks leftover from where she’d been hogtied, maybe, or the blue and purple patch of skin that swelled on her temple. Grace’s dark eyes narrowed in search of any sign of life. Then she nudged the body with her boot, gently.
“What’s a lady doing out here all by herself, anyhow?” she asked the horse, the body, the mountains that towered tall as God over the desert in the distance - and realized her daddy’s ghost might have damn well asked her the same question.
Look, here's another.
A regular post.
Quote:
The earth takes care of its dead, even when the rest of us forget.
In due time, after the buzzards tore away at her desiccated flesh and the sun bleached her bones, the desert's dust would blow across her remains and settle there, like a rust-colored quilt, like a mother tucking her child into bed for one long, last sleep. From dust we came, the Bible said, and when we return to it, the dust surges forth to meet us in a long overdue embrace.
wait just kidding womp womp this one's in progress
In due time, after the buzzards tore away at her desiccated flesh and the sun bleached her bones, the desert's dust would blow across her remains and settle there, like a rust-colored quilt, like a mother tucking her child into bed for one long, last sleep. From dust we came, the Bible said, and when we return to it, the dust surges forth to meet us in a long overdue embrace.
wait just kidding womp womp this one's in progress
This is one of the most recent things I've written and I'm sorry it's long just skim it so you can get an idea for what kind of stuff I write plz don't be intimidated by length.
Quote:
He’s all gunpowder and stars: the stuff of fireworks and magic. By all means he should be up in the dark sky in a thousand shimmering sparks, but there’s something wrong with his fuse. It doesn’t catch fire; he’s a dud. His brother and sister are a pair of boom stars spreading their light into the murky depths of the night, and Augustus watches from the grass, playing with matches and waiting for sparks.
Why doesn't he just explode already? He only wants to dissolve into the stars.
----------------------
The night sky in London is black as sin and hiding infinite worlds.
Sirius is a faint glimmer somewhere in the murk and the dogs can feel it. They howl and growl on street corners and in alleyways, nipping at each other's thighs, barking at shadows, and digging claws into fur at an itch they can't quite scratch. And while the dogs pant and whine in the heat, Augustus sweats and squirms. During the dog days of summer, humans and hounds alike are known to get a little restless. It's the way the stars are aligned.
But when people ask, he doesn't say it's the stars that make him visit the fortune-teller. He says it's because he's nineteen, and he's drunk. After he says it, though, he shrugs his shoulders, as if shrugging them shifts some of the weight that bears down on them, and you can tell that there's more to it than that.
He's nineteen, and he's drunk, and he's thinking about dogs, you see, because the strays in Knockturn Alley, they aren't shy. Skinny things. This close to tearing the meat off of their own bones. Some like to lurk on the pavement in front of the Spiny Serpent, not because its patrons are any more generous than the rest - they're just more drunk. They are human doorsteps propping open doors to cool rooms and free meals. And when Augustus totters out of the pub somewhere between night and morning, there's one filthy mongrel sitting on the pavement. Half of her tail is missing but she wags it anyway.
Inside the pub, the waitress's back is turned. "Well, go on now, be quick about it," Augustus mumbles to the dog, who darts between his legs, swipes a turkey leg from the nearest table, then scampers back into the darkness.
He read in his muggle textbooks that the first animals to survive a trip to space were dogs. Belka and Strelka were two flea-bitten strays skulking in the shadows when the Soviets plucked them from the streets and pitched them into the blackness. And Augustus knows that they were only first because Laika boarded Sputnik 2 and died ten minutes later from the stress of it all, but as he wanders down Knockturn Alley like a big, black dog, he envies their place among the stars.
He is nineteen; he is drunk; he is also lost. He's starting to think he might need to contact his brother, somehow. Knockturn Alley is one long, crooked spine, but the backstreets branch off of it like ribs. He can't remember which one leads home, because it's been six years since he's needed to. The last time he was here he was eleven years old, and the slender bones in his mother's fingers clenched too hard to his hand. "Don't worry, August," she told him as she jangled the few sickles left in her coin purse. "I've written to the headmistress. Something must've happened to the owl carrying your letter. Come on, now, let's go down to Potage's and buy your cauldron."
It's inevitable that he picks the wrong alley, of course. And here's where the fortune-teller's shop sits, all leaning, rickety wood sandwiched between more substantial buildings of stone. The sign is dark purple dotted with stars; Augustus recognizes a cluster of them in the corner as the constellation Sagittarius. The name of the shop glows a white, flickering light in the black alley.
FORTUNE-TELLER
ULYSSES SEES YOUR PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE IN THE STARS
For every one true Seer in the wizarding world, there are a thousand false prophets peddling their predictions in the streets. Augustus knows this - but walks in, anyway. Because remember: he's nineteen. He's drunk. He's lost. It's not because he hopes beyond reason that there are answers in the stars. That he is not a cosmic fluke. That he is who he is because the universe wanted it so.
The shop smells of mallowsweet and sage, and when Augustus stumbles in, they're both surprised. Ulysses, though he does most of his business at night, does not expect a customer at 3:30am on a Tuesday. And Augustus, well - he does not expect to meet a centaur at 3:30am on a Tuesday.
"Hello," Ulysses says, looking up from his work. His voice is far-off and dreamy - like incense. Exactly what you'd expect from a fortune-teller who spends more time in the future than in the present. There's barely enough room in the fortune-telling shop for him. He stands at least seven feet tall, Augustus would guess, but he can't be sure, because he's hunched over a table - the surface of it is bewitched to reflect the night sky. A pair of glasses is perched over the bridge of his broad nose, and the oily hair on his head is nearly as long and as black as his tail.
"Hello. I thought centaurs didn't like humans," says Augustus in response - a rather unorthodox greeting, but he's suddenly nervous and has forgotten his manners. He steps closer to the stars on the table, which is a couple feet taller than the average wizard is accustomed to. Luckily there's a stool, so he can get a closer look.
"Most don't, not particularly."
"Do you?"
"I have a couple of favorites. Are you here for a reading?"
"I'm not...sure," Augustus says, glancing at the rates painted in fine, looping cursive on the wall. 1 Galleon, 1 hour. He isn't sure that he has a Galleon to spare. "You really should advertise the centaur bit a little more," he says instead and focuses on the sky laid out before him on the table. A satellite orbits past.
"Your sign is way too ******** subtle." He finds Sagittarius and traces its shape. Where his fingers trail across the surface, thin white lines materialize to connect the stars: the vague skeleton of a centaur appears, aiming his bow and arrow for the scorpion’s heart. Ulysses watches this closely.
"Ah, but I run a fortune-telling service, not a petting zoo."
"I'm just saying. How do you expect to get any customers if they don't know there's a real live centaur in here? "
"You did, didn't you?"
"Yeah, well."
Sagittarius evaporates from the table. Augustus connects the stars to form dicks instead.
"Something tells me that you're not here because you want to see a centaur," Ulysses says. Augustus shrugs, and the centaur continues. "But if you want a reading, I will need your cooperation. The stars are sometimes unclear. I may see an image that means more to you than it means to me."
Augustus suddenly does not have high expectations.
"Alright, then, let's hear it."
"In the stars I see you in a wood. You follow a trail until it splits in two and you're faced with a choice. Both forks end in darkness. Their ends are unknowable. Would you say that you're at a crossroads in your life? That what stands before you are two choices and you aren't sure what lies ahead?"
"Sure, I'm at a crossroads, who isn't?" he says, unconvinced. "But I know what lies ahead. You said it yourself. Darkness."
Because it all amounts to fumbling in the black when you don't have wand-waving, spell-casting Lumos shite to light the way. Augustus has just graduated, a year behind, from the muggle school down the road - this is one path. Life as a muggle, devoid of magic, a life that demands that he forget the first eleven years of his upbringing. The other leads to a life scampering on the fringes of the wizarding world, life as the skinny stray that begs for your food and only gets your pity.
"And who's responsible for this darkness? I see a family member, or perhaps an old friend. Someone whose acceptance you've yet to receive."
Augustus squirms a little in his seat, and thinks of his mother: the woman who came to the conclusion that her youngest child was a squib - something so vile and impure that had taken up residence in her body for a whole nine months, breathed through her and fed through her and was a part of her - and it was as if the first eleven years barely mattered. And his brother, who was so kind to him to make up for their mother's thinly veiled resentment, but so prone to pitying him...
"So you search for acceptance elsewhere."
From fortune-tellers who might find some comforting words in their crystal balls. From acquaintances, not friends, that he collects like stamps, or rare coins - but then sells before they appreciate any value. From his muggle classmates, who can't process why he doesn't have a telephone number, or dresses so funny, or opens a book for the first time and is surprised that the pictures don't wave back at him. "Are you an alien?" they ask him. "Are you from Mars?" Eventually he just settles for "No, I'm from Jupiter," because it makes people laugh.
"But you can't find it. You feel out of place. You feel like a - what do your people call it? A black dog?"
Augustus goes white.
"It's black sheep," he says, but it's muffled because he's got his hands covering his face. His heart thunks hard and fast against his ribs and he leans far back in his stool, away from Ulysses and the stars and all the god damn truth the centaur's siphoned out of them. He should've stayed out in the street with the strays where he belongs because this is quickly becoming too much. "I'm sorry, I don't actually have a Galleon."
He dumps out the contents of his pockets, which amounts to a sickle and a few knuts, and makes for the door because he can feel the snot collecting in his nose.
"No - wait - kid - listen," Ulysses calls out after him, harsh and sharp. His voice suddenly grounds itself, as if the aloof, all-seeing tone to his voice was just an affectation. Augustus can hear his hooves scrape against the wooden floor. "I'm making the whole damn thing up. It's clever guesses. Body language. Yours is shite. And, more importantly, you still owe me...fifteen sickles and twenty-four knuts. "
Augustus wipes his nose on his arm. Something about this makes him feel worse.
"You mean you can't even - you're not even an astrologist? I thought all centaurs were."
"Well, to be quite honest, I prefer astronomer. Astrologists ask for your zodiac sign so they can tell you you'll meet the love of your life tomorrow and you'll pay them a generous tip. I read the stars - but there are more important events on the horizon than the petty worries of witches and wizards. Unfortunately they don't make as much of a profit, so tell me your sign and I'll tell you to keep a look out for a lass or lad with brown eyes tomorrow." The centaur pauses. "You're going to be okay, kid."
"Did you see that in your stars?"
"Yeah. I also see you working off your debt."
----------------------
The Seers shroud the future in magic. They trap it in their crystal balls and pour it into their teacups. They trace it in their palms. But how can you find the future in things so small? The centaurs see the infinite possibilities in the limitless skies. August is trying to. He looks up from the gutter at the wide black expanse. There are answers here. There is a pattern. If only he can chart it all, scribble starmaps on old newspapers and scrawl equations in the margins, he can translate it. If he was born without magic in his bones, he'll have to pluck it from the bright strings of the universe.
Ulysses will teach him.
And one day, five years later, Ulysses will leave Augustus at the shop after a long night of exchanging customers' galleons for pretty lies. When he walks in late next morning, he will find his star table scattered with yellowing newspapers that repeat the same names over and over: Fawley. Finnegan. Greengrass. Shafiq. Pucey. August's back will curve like a crescent over his star charts and his eyes will be rimmed with red.
"Hey, kid. You try too hard," the centaur will tell him and toss a scone on top of his apprentice's work. August will rub his eyes and reach for it as Ulysses says: "What's done is done."
"This is not trying too hard," August will say, mouth full of pastry crumbs. No one has ever told him that he tries too hard. He doesn't stick to things long enough to consider trying - except for this. He will be stuck on this. On Pucey, 26, missing four weeks and counting, swallowed up by some darkness en route to his office. The stars will be the last to see him. "This is what I call apparent retrograde motion. Go on, say I'm the greatest apprentice you've had. I'm even incorporating the movements of the planets into my everyday life."
"You are the only apprentice I have ever had," Ulysses will say. "And don't be surprised if the first thing your numbers actually predict is your death. From star-induced stress. Like your little dog."
"Well, as long as I predict it first."
Why doesn't he just explode already? He only wants to dissolve into the stars.
----------------------
The night sky in London is black as sin and hiding infinite worlds.
Sirius is a faint glimmer somewhere in the murk and the dogs can feel it. They howl and growl on street corners and in alleyways, nipping at each other's thighs, barking at shadows, and digging claws into fur at an itch they can't quite scratch. And while the dogs pant and whine in the heat, Augustus sweats and squirms. During the dog days of summer, humans and hounds alike are known to get a little restless. It's the way the stars are aligned.
But when people ask, he doesn't say it's the stars that make him visit the fortune-teller. He says it's because he's nineteen, and he's drunk. After he says it, though, he shrugs his shoulders, as if shrugging them shifts some of the weight that bears down on them, and you can tell that there's more to it than that.
He's nineteen, and he's drunk, and he's thinking about dogs, you see, because the strays in Knockturn Alley, they aren't shy. Skinny things. This close to tearing the meat off of their own bones. Some like to lurk on the pavement in front of the Spiny Serpent, not because its patrons are any more generous than the rest - they're just more drunk. They are human doorsteps propping open doors to cool rooms and free meals. And when Augustus totters out of the pub somewhere between night and morning, there's one filthy mongrel sitting on the pavement. Half of her tail is missing but she wags it anyway.
Inside the pub, the waitress's back is turned. "Well, go on now, be quick about it," Augustus mumbles to the dog, who darts between his legs, swipes a turkey leg from the nearest table, then scampers back into the darkness.
He read in his muggle textbooks that the first animals to survive a trip to space were dogs. Belka and Strelka were two flea-bitten strays skulking in the shadows when the Soviets plucked them from the streets and pitched them into the blackness. And Augustus knows that they were only first because Laika boarded Sputnik 2 and died ten minutes later from the stress of it all, but as he wanders down Knockturn Alley like a big, black dog, he envies their place among the stars.
He is nineteen; he is drunk; he is also lost. He's starting to think he might need to contact his brother, somehow. Knockturn Alley is one long, crooked spine, but the backstreets branch off of it like ribs. He can't remember which one leads home, because it's been six years since he's needed to. The last time he was here he was eleven years old, and the slender bones in his mother's fingers clenched too hard to his hand. "Don't worry, August," she told him as she jangled the few sickles left in her coin purse. "I've written to the headmistress. Something must've happened to the owl carrying your letter. Come on, now, let's go down to Potage's and buy your cauldron."
It's inevitable that he picks the wrong alley, of course. And here's where the fortune-teller's shop sits, all leaning, rickety wood sandwiched between more substantial buildings of stone. The sign is dark purple dotted with stars; Augustus recognizes a cluster of them in the corner as the constellation Sagittarius. The name of the shop glows a white, flickering light in the black alley.
FORTUNE-TELLER
ULYSSES SEES YOUR PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE IN THE STARS
For every one true Seer in the wizarding world, there are a thousand false prophets peddling their predictions in the streets. Augustus knows this - but walks in, anyway. Because remember: he's nineteen. He's drunk. He's lost. It's not because he hopes beyond reason that there are answers in the stars. That he is not a cosmic fluke. That he is who he is because the universe wanted it so.
The shop smells of mallowsweet and sage, and when Augustus stumbles in, they're both surprised. Ulysses, though he does most of his business at night, does not expect a customer at 3:30am on a Tuesday. And Augustus, well - he does not expect to meet a centaur at 3:30am on a Tuesday.
"Hello," Ulysses says, looking up from his work. His voice is far-off and dreamy - like incense. Exactly what you'd expect from a fortune-teller who spends more time in the future than in the present. There's barely enough room in the fortune-telling shop for him. He stands at least seven feet tall, Augustus would guess, but he can't be sure, because he's hunched over a table - the surface of it is bewitched to reflect the night sky. A pair of glasses is perched over the bridge of his broad nose, and the oily hair on his head is nearly as long and as black as his tail.
"Hello. I thought centaurs didn't like humans," says Augustus in response - a rather unorthodox greeting, but he's suddenly nervous and has forgotten his manners. He steps closer to the stars on the table, which is a couple feet taller than the average wizard is accustomed to. Luckily there's a stool, so he can get a closer look.
"Most don't, not particularly."
"Do you?"
"I have a couple of favorites. Are you here for a reading?"
"I'm not...sure," Augustus says, glancing at the rates painted in fine, looping cursive on the wall. 1 Galleon, 1 hour. He isn't sure that he has a Galleon to spare. "You really should advertise the centaur bit a little more," he says instead and focuses on the sky laid out before him on the table. A satellite orbits past.
"Your sign is way too ******** subtle." He finds Sagittarius and traces its shape. Where his fingers trail across the surface, thin white lines materialize to connect the stars: the vague skeleton of a centaur appears, aiming his bow and arrow for the scorpion’s heart. Ulysses watches this closely.
"Ah, but I run a fortune-telling service, not a petting zoo."
"I'm just saying. How do you expect to get any customers if they don't know there's a real live centaur in here? "
"You did, didn't you?"
"Yeah, well."
Sagittarius evaporates from the table. Augustus connects the stars to form dicks instead.
"Something tells me that you're not here because you want to see a centaur," Ulysses says. Augustus shrugs, and the centaur continues. "But if you want a reading, I will need your cooperation. The stars are sometimes unclear. I may see an image that means more to you than it means to me."
Augustus suddenly does not have high expectations.
"Alright, then, let's hear it."
"In the stars I see you in a wood. You follow a trail until it splits in two and you're faced with a choice. Both forks end in darkness. Their ends are unknowable. Would you say that you're at a crossroads in your life? That what stands before you are two choices and you aren't sure what lies ahead?"
"Sure, I'm at a crossroads, who isn't?" he says, unconvinced. "But I know what lies ahead. You said it yourself. Darkness."
Because it all amounts to fumbling in the black when you don't have wand-waving, spell-casting Lumos shite to light the way. Augustus has just graduated, a year behind, from the muggle school down the road - this is one path. Life as a muggle, devoid of magic, a life that demands that he forget the first eleven years of his upbringing. The other leads to a life scampering on the fringes of the wizarding world, life as the skinny stray that begs for your food and only gets your pity.
"And who's responsible for this darkness? I see a family member, or perhaps an old friend. Someone whose acceptance you've yet to receive."
Augustus squirms a little in his seat, and thinks of his mother: the woman who came to the conclusion that her youngest child was a squib - something so vile and impure that had taken up residence in her body for a whole nine months, breathed through her and fed through her and was a part of her - and it was as if the first eleven years barely mattered. And his brother, who was so kind to him to make up for their mother's thinly veiled resentment, but so prone to pitying him...
"So you search for acceptance elsewhere."
From fortune-tellers who might find some comforting words in their crystal balls. From acquaintances, not friends, that he collects like stamps, or rare coins - but then sells before they appreciate any value. From his muggle classmates, who can't process why he doesn't have a telephone number, or dresses so funny, or opens a book for the first time and is surprised that the pictures don't wave back at him. "Are you an alien?" they ask him. "Are you from Mars?" Eventually he just settles for "No, I'm from Jupiter," because it makes people laugh.
"But you can't find it. You feel out of place. You feel like a - what do your people call it? A black dog?"
Augustus goes white.
"It's black sheep," he says, but it's muffled because he's got his hands covering his face. His heart thunks hard and fast against his ribs and he leans far back in his stool, away from Ulysses and the stars and all the god damn truth the centaur's siphoned out of them. He should've stayed out in the street with the strays where he belongs because this is quickly becoming too much. "I'm sorry, I don't actually have a Galleon."
He dumps out the contents of his pockets, which amounts to a sickle and a few knuts, and makes for the door because he can feel the snot collecting in his nose.
"No - wait - kid - listen," Ulysses calls out after him, harsh and sharp. His voice suddenly grounds itself, as if the aloof, all-seeing tone to his voice was just an affectation. Augustus can hear his hooves scrape against the wooden floor. "I'm making the whole damn thing up. It's clever guesses. Body language. Yours is shite. And, more importantly, you still owe me...fifteen sickles and twenty-four knuts. "
Augustus wipes his nose on his arm. Something about this makes him feel worse.
"You mean you can't even - you're not even an astrologist? I thought all centaurs were."
"Well, to be quite honest, I prefer astronomer. Astrologists ask for your zodiac sign so they can tell you you'll meet the love of your life tomorrow and you'll pay them a generous tip. I read the stars - but there are more important events on the horizon than the petty worries of witches and wizards. Unfortunately they don't make as much of a profit, so tell me your sign and I'll tell you to keep a look out for a lass or lad with brown eyes tomorrow." The centaur pauses. "You're going to be okay, kid."
"Did you see that in your stars?"
"Yeah. I also see you working off your debt."
----------------------
The Seers shroud the future in magic. They trap it in their crystal balls and pour it into their teacups. They trace it in their palms. But how can you find the future in things so small? The centaurs see the infinite possibilities in the limitless skies. August is trying to. He looks up from the gutter at the wide black expanse. There are answers here. There is a pattern. If only he can chart it all, scribble starmaps on old newspapers and scrawl equations in the margins, he can translate it. If he was born without magic in his bones, he'll have to pluck it from the bright strings of the universe.
Ulysses will teach him.
And one day, five years later, Ulysses will leave Augustus at the shop after a long night of exchanging customers' galleons for pretty lies. When he walks in late next morning, he will find his star table scattered with yellowing newspapers that repeat the same names over and over: Fawley. Finnegan. Greengrass. Shafiq. Pucey. August's back will curve like a crescent over his star charts and his eyes will be rimmed with red.
"Hey, kid. You try too hard," the centaur will tell him and toss a scone on top of his apprentice's work. August will rub his eyes and reach for it as Ulysses says: "What's done is done."
"This is not trying too hard," August will say, mouth full of pastry crumbs. No one has ever told him that he tries too hard. He doesn't stick to things long enough to consider trying - except for this. He will be stuck on this. On Pucey, 26, missing four weeks and counting, swallowed up by some darkness en route to his office. The stars will be the last to see him. "This is what I call apparent retrograde motion. Go on, say I'm the greatest apprentice you've had. I'm even incorporating the movements of the planets into my everyday life."
"You are the only apprentice I have ever had," Ulysses will say. "And don't be surprised if the first thing your numbers actually predict is your death. From star-induced stress. Like your little dog."
"Well, as long as I predict it first."
From latest roleplay. Another intro so long as ********.
Quote:
There was a rumor, among the guys, about what happens to a shahid.
Gonzales imagined they evaporated into a fine mist. But to hear PFC Reynolds tell it, when the explosives strapped to a shahid’s chest ignite, and his soul joins the caravan of martyrs, his body splinters into bits of bone, muscle, skin. The fragments of man scatter at such a high velocity that they worm their way through a bystander’s epidermis like lead slugs. Months after the bombing, if the victim is lucky enough to survive, small lumps emerge on the surface of his body: foreign bullets of flesh, pieces of the body the bomber left behind. They called it organic shrapnel.
Bullshit, right? But Gonzales couldn’t excise the thought from his head. It probably had something to do with the kid that crawled into his dreams, begging for a piece of himself back.
It was 3AM and the nightmare sweat still wet his skin. Mateo Gonzales prodded his neck with his fingers. It was there, he could feel it, as small and as round as a BB pellet. Carmen always looked at him like he was crazy every time he asked her to press her fingers to his throat, but this had to be real. He had to be a human grave, one of many, housing a tangible piece of martyr’s corpse. He leaned in closer to the mirror, close enough to distinguish dark iris from dark pupil in the buzzing light of the bathroom, and poked the brown flesh of his throat.
The bathroom looked jaundiced. It had to be the new bulbs — installed by Matt earlier that day when Carmen asked him, casting a sickly yellow on the laminate countertops. The light made him look sick. And his insides were all fluorescent, too. Gonzales was lit-up like a goddamn sign plugged into the wall of some dimly lit bar. His veins were fragile glass tubes pulsing with neon, and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. His brain was ******** buzzing.
The stubs he had for fingernails clawed at his throat until it was hot to the touch. Rubbing the buzzed black hair prickling on the back of his skull, he glanced through the open door at the dark bedroom. Carmen’s brunette ponytail peeked out from underneath the comforter. The dog snored at the foot of the bed. Both seemed faraway. Matt tiptoed to the dresser, where he emptied out his pockets every night before bed. His calloused fingers avoided the wallet, the smattering of spare change, a couple of breath mints — and grabbed the gerber.
He opened the blade and placed it delicately next to the sink, like a surgeon laying out scalpels before an operation. Next, he unscrewed the jar they kept on the bathroom counter, half-full with nails and bolts and bits of mangled metal. The docs let him keep the shrapnel they picked out of him, and a year and a half later, Matt was still adding to it — like it was a collection of ******** bottle caps. Carmen plucked out a sharp ribbon of steel from the back of his shoulder with her eyebrow tweezers. He once spat out a screw. It was a pile of all the pieces of war that he didn’t have to carry around in his body anymore, but he still carried this.
******** it. It had to come out. Like paring a bruise from an apple.
And when Spec. Mateo R. Gonzales committed to something, he followed through.
He made a small incision in the side of his neck. Precise. Medical. Quick. It didn’t hurt that much, but Matt had established a history of being unnecessarily cruel to his body — he found over the years that he could withstand a surprising amount of pain. He wiped the blood away with his fingertips and tried to squeeze the damn thing out like a cyst. Nothing. An all-too-familiar sense of desperation started to ratchet somewhere in his chest, and the palm enclosed on his pocketknife got sweaty. He switched hands, wiped a smear of blood along the ragged scar on his cheek. The next cut was longer this time, and deeper, and nowhere near as precise. A wince tugged the corner of his mouth downward as he bent over the bathroom counter and watched a few drops of blood stain the sink red. Then he resumed his goal — fireworks lit off behind his eyeballs as he dug his fingers into the wound. He’d tear the damn thing out of him.
With the next cut, Matt murmured an audible ********. This one smarts. He could tell he nicked something good. The bathroom smelled metallic, like gunmetal, like a firefight, like Sergeant Brody when they found him without a face in his tank. If he could just flay his neck, maybe he could find the damn thing, and he tried — Christ, he ******** tried, he had to try, his neck carved up like it was on a butcher’s block, but all flesh looked the same underneath skin. Blood leaked fast from his neck. It spread like dark red blooms across his old ratty t-shirt.
An encroaching blackness was snuffing out the lightbulbs behind his eyes. He tried to hold himself up on the counter, but all his feeble hand did was knock into the jar, which exploded on the floor in a hundred glittering pieces of glass and metal. Matt went down with it, two seconds later. The last thing he thought before hitting his head hard on the tub must have been Well, ******** it. I’ll hand it over to the kid myself when I see him in hell.
————————————————
“I cleaned up the — you know — the blood. You might need a new mat.”
His neck felt tight, sewed back together with a hundred little stitches criss crossing the surface and lurking underneath. His brain felt overcast and his stomach churned, but thank every poppy that flowered and was plucked from every opium field in all of Afghanistan — he wasn’t in too much pain. His trachea twinged, each time he inhaled, and he could sense his pulse throbbing hotly in the side of his neck, but morphine was a hell of a drug.
“A new Matt?”
Carmen’s voice. The air smelled chemical.
“No, a new mat, like — bathroom mat. Rug. It was soaked. I threw it away.”
His brother.
“Oh.”
“I walked the dog, brought some clothes for you and Matt. You might want to change.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.”
He opened his eyes to slits. Hospital bed. Machines whirring out of his eyesight. A flimsy paper hospital gown that did nothing to stay the cold. Carmen’s familiar ponytail, and his brother laying a bundle of clothes at the foot of the bed. And then he saw it: the face staring back at him from the hospital bed across the room. Matt jumpstarted.
The lazy, rhythmic up and down of his heart monitor suddenly veered into jagged peaks — like it was measuring an earthquake on the Richter scale rather than his heartbeat. Matt suddenly felt the pressing need to get the ******** out of here, and he tried. But when he lurched forward, it was like trying to move through water. The rest of his body couldn’t keep up with how fast his nerves relayed electric impulses to his brain. And there were too many goddamn tubes and wires snaking in and out of his body — he got tangled up in them.
“Oh, babe, no,” Carmen said. Her voice sounded far-off. “Do you know where you are?”
His answer to that question was a resounding ******** no. He thought he was in the hospital. Then he thought that in some cruel twist of fate, he’d been transported back to Iraq, back to before they found Lockhart’s boot after a firefight with bits of his foot still in it. Maybe he was in a dreamland; maybe he was ******** hallucinating. Either way, it couldn’t be real. That face was impossible. Lockhart was dead and buried in the dirt eight thousand miles from here.
“You’re in the hospital,” his fiancee said. She wore the sleeping shorts she’d gone to bed in last night and an old Grateful Dead t-shirt still covered in his blood. His head was reeling — stuck between here and there, real and imagined. But Carmen soothed a hand over his chest and his heartbeat ticked a few beats slower — a touch could ground him more than any sounds or sights could. “You hurt yourself. Do you remember?”
He remembered bits and pieces through the fog, the most important of which was: he didn’t find the goddamn thing he opened his neck up for in the first place.
“Yes, I remember, Christ,” he said and eased back onto the bed, rubbing his eyes. Through the cracks in between his fingers, he could see his brother watching him with concern — like he was watching someone drown in mid-air. This was ******** embarrassing. “Don’t look at me like that, Rob.”
“Like what?”
“He’s just worried about you, leave him alone,” Carmen interrupted. “We were all worried—”
“Like I’m ******** crazy,” Matt said. His eyes darted back at the ghost hallucination across the room. Well, maybe he was. “I’m not ******** crazy. It was an accident.”
“How was that —“
Matt was not particularly interested in discussing the nature of his accident.
“You didn’t call Mom, did you?” he interrupted. “Carmen?”
“Well, what was I supposed to do?” she asked, exasperated. One misfortune of being engaged to Carmen for eight years was that she had fully integrated into the Gonzales clan and had every member of his family, immediate and extended, on speed dial. Matt collapsed back on the bed dramatically, to which Carmen said: “Don’t move too much. You’ll rip your stitches. The doctors were in there for a good three hours sewing you up.”
Matt waved her off. “Don’t move too much.” Carmen might as well have told him not to breathe.
“You called my mom. Jesus Christ. Surprised she’s not here already.”
At this point he laughed, a little, and then performed his world-famous impression of the Gonzales matriarch: high-pitched rapid-fire Spanish interrupted by ugly sobs, ay dios mio, mijo, waxing poetic about all those messy feelings clamoring in her chest. Thing was, he usually saved his impressions for when his mother was crying at her telenovelas, or sobbing when his sister chopped all her hair off, or tearing up as her grandkid tried ice cream for the first time. This time all it got him was a sharp thwack to the shoulder.
“HEY. I’m wounded,” he said to his brother.
“Yeah? And whose fault is that, pendejo?”
But Rob seemed relieved, at least, that his brother didn’t lose his sense of humor along with all that blood sticking to the bathroom floor.
Rob left a few minutes later. Carmen left a few hours later, and only after Matt insisted. The dog needed to be let out. Carmen needed to get some food in her stomach. She agreed, unenthusiastically, planted a kiss on the top of his tender head, and murmured an “Ugh, I love you so much it hurts,” before whizzing out of the hospital ward. It wasn’t until twelve o’clock that he was finally rid of them — but even then, he wasn’t alone. There were a few other patients, zonked out in their beds, or murmuring quietly to their loved ones behind drawn curtains, and there was the matter of Lockhart.
Every time their eyes accidentally met, it was like Lockhart stabbed a gerber right into Matt’s gut. The other patient didn’t seem any different from any of the other dozen spirits that floated in and out of his consciousness — a haunting stare from across the room, an unpleasant memory hell-bent on wrenching Matt back into all that s**t he was trying to avoid — but then a nurse visited their ward pushing a cart loaded with lunch trays.
She smiled and placed one on Matt’s bedside table — some bleached white penne noodles, green beans straight out of a can, a dry and misshapen chicken breast, and a carton of milk — and then she did the same for the ghost he thought was Lockhart.
No one had ever acknowledged his ghosts before. It made Matt’s stomach twist. Maybe it was only someone who looked suspiciously like Lockhart. He stared hard at the ridge of the man’s jaw, the blond hair, the curve of his bottom lip. And as he traced every familiar facial feature, Matt’s thumped harder and harder in his chest. It was ******** Lockhart. It had to be, or he had to wake up from this dream, fast.
He barely waited for the nurse to move on to the next patient before the words came tumbling out.
“Is that really you, Lockhart, or are these meds doing their job too ******** well?”
Gonzales imagined they evaporated into a fine mist. But to hear PFC Reynolds tell it, when the explosives strapped to a shahid’s chest ignite, and his soul joins the caravan of martyrs, his body splinters into bits of bone, muscle, skin. The fragments of man scatter at such a high velocity that they worm their way through a bystander’s epidermis like lead slugs. Months after the bombing, if the victim is lucky enough to survive, small lumps emerge on the surface of his body: foreign bullets of flesh, pieces of the body the bomber left behind. They called it organic shrapnel.
Bullshit, right? But Gonzales couldn’t excise the thought from his head. It probably had something to do with the kid that crawled into his dreams, begging for a piece of himself back.
It was 3AM and the nightmare sweat still wet his skin. Mateo Gonzales prodded his neck with his fingers. It was there, he could feel it, as small and as round as a BB pellet. Carmen always looked at him like he was crazy every time he asked her to press her fingers to his throat, but this had to be real. He had to be a human grave, one of many, housing a tangible piece of martyr’s corpse. He leaned in closer to the mirror, close enough to distinguish dark iris from dark pupil in the buzzing light of the bathroom, and poked the brown flesh of his throat.
The bathroom looked jaundiced. It had to be the new bulbs — installed by Matt earlier that day when Carmen asked him, casting a sickly yellow on the laminate countertops. The light made him look sick. And his insides were all fluorescent, too. Gonzales was lit-up like a goddamn sign plugged into the wall of some dimly lit bar. His veins were fragile glass tubes pulsing with neon, and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. His brain was ******** buzzing.
The stubs he had for fingernails clawed at his throat until it was hot to the touch. Rubbing the buzzed black hair prickling on the back of his skull, he glanced through the open door at the dark bedroom. Carmen’s brunette ponytail peeked out from underneath the comforter. The dog snored at the foot of the bed. Both seemed faraway. Matt tiptoed to the dresser, where he emptied out his pockets every night before bed. His calloused fingers avoided the wallet, the smattering of spare change, a couple of breath mints — and grabbed the gerber.
He opened the blade and placed it delicately next to the sink, like a surgeon laying out scalpels before an operation. Next, he unscrewed the jar they kept on the bathroom counter, half-full with nails and bolts and bits of mangled metal. The docs let him keep the shrapnel they picked out of him, and a year and a half later, Matt was still adding to it — like it was a collection of ******** bottle caps. Carmen plucked out a sharp ribbon of steel from the back of his shoulder with her eyebrow tweezers. He once spat out a screw. It was a pile of all the pieces of war that he didn’t have to carry around in his body anymore, but he still carried this.
******** it. It had to come out. Like paring a bruise from an apple.
And when Spec. Mateo R. Gonzales committed to something, he followed through.
He made a small incision in the side of his neck. Precise. Medical. Quick. It didn’t hurt that much, but Matt had established a history of being unnecessarily cruel to his body — he found over the years that he could withstand a surprising amount of pain. He wiped the blood away with his fingertips and tried to squeeze the damn thing out like a cyst. Nothing. An all-too-familiar sense of desperation started to ratchet somewhere in his chest, and the palm enclosed on his pocketknife got sweaty. He switched hands, wiped a smear of blood along the ragged scar on his cheek. The next cut was longer this time, and deeper, and nowhere near as precise. A wince tugged the corner of his mouth downward as he bent over the bathroom counter and watched a few drops of blood stain the sink red. Then he resumed his goal — fireworks lit off behind his eyeballs as he dug his fingers into the wound. He’d tear the damn thing out of him.
With the next cut, Matt murmured an audible ********. This one smarts. He could tell he nicked something good. The bathroom smelled metallic, like gunmetal, like a firefight, like Sergeant Brody when they found him without a face in his tank. If he could just flay his neck, maybe he could find the damn thing, and he tried — Christ, he ******** tried, he had to try, his neck carved up like it was on a butcher’s block, but all flesh looked the same underneath skin. Blood leaked fast from his neck. It spread like dark red blooms across his old ratty t-shirt.
An encroaching blackness was snuffing out the lightbulbs behind his eyes. He tried to hold himself up on the counter, but all his feeble hand did was knock into the jar, which exploded on the floor in a hundred glittering pieces of glass and metal. Matt went down with it, two seconds later. The last thing he thought before hitting his head hard on the tub must have been Well, ******** it. I’ll hand it over to the kid myself when I see him in hell.
————————————————
“I cleaned up the — you know — the blood. You might need a new mat.”
His neck felt tight, sewed back together with a hundred little stitches criss crossing the surface and lurking underneath. His brain felt overcast and his stomach churned, but thank every poppy that flowered and was plucked from every opium field in all of Afghanistan — he wasn’t in too much pain. His trachea twinged, each time he inhaled, and he could sense his pulse throbbing hotly in the side of his neck, but morphine was a hell of a drug.
“A new Matt?”
Carmen’s voice. The air smelled chemical.
“No, a new mat, like — bathroom mat. Rug. It was soaked. I threw it away.”
His brother.
“Oh.”
“I walked the dog, brought some clothes for you and Matt. You might want to change.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.”
He opened his eyes to slits. Hospital bed. Machines whirring out of his eyesight. A flimsy paper hospital gown that did nothing to stay the cold. Carmen’s familiar ponytail, and his brother laying a bundle of clothes at the foot of the bed. And then he saw it: the face staring back at him from the hospital bed across the room. Matt jumpstarted.
The lazy, rhythmic up and down of his heart monitor suddenly veered into jagged peaks — like it was measuring an earthquake on the Richter scale rather than his heartbeat. Matt suddenly felt the pressing need to get the ******** out of here, and he tried. But when he lurched forward, it was like trying to move through water. The rest of his body couldn’t keep up with how fast his nerves relayed electric impulses to his brain. And there were too many goddamn tubes and wires snaking in and out of his body — he got tangled up in them.
“Oh, babe, no,” Carmen said. Her voice sounded far-off. “Do you know where you are?”
His answer to that question was a resounding ******** no. He thought he was in the hospital. Then he thought that in some cruel twist of fate, he’d been transported back to Iraq, back to before they found Lockhart’s boot after a firefight with bits of his foot still in it. Maybe he was in a dreamland; maybe he was ******** hallucinating. Either way, it couldn’t be real. That face was impossible. Lockhart was dead and buried in the dirt eight thousand miles from here.
“You’re in the hospital,” his fiancee said. She wore the sleeping shorts she’d gone to bed in last night and an old Grateful Dead t-shirt still covered in his blood. His head was reeling — stuck between here and there, real and imagined. But Carmen soothed a hand over his chest and his heartbeat ticked a few beats slower — a touch could ground him more than any sounds or sights could. “You hurt yourself. Do you remember?”
He remembered bits and pieces through the fog, the most important of which was: he didn’t find the goddamn thing he opened his neck up for in the first place.
“Yes, I remember, Christ,” he said and eased back onto the bed, rubbing his eyes. Through the cracks in between his fingers, he could see his brother watching him with concern — like he was watching someone drown in mid-air. This was ******** embarrassing. “Don’t look at me like that, Rob.”
“Like what?”
“He’s just worried about you, leave him alone,” Carmen interrupted. “We were all worried—”
“Like I’m ******** crazy,” Matt said. His eyes darted back at the ghost hallucination across the room. Well, maybe he was. “I’m not ******** crazy. It was an accident.”
“How was that —“
Matt was not particularly interested in discussing the nature of his accident.
“You didn’t call Mom, did you?” he interrupted. “Carmen?”
“Well, what was I supposed to do?” she asked, exasperated. One misfortune of being engaged to Carmen for eight years was that she had fully integrated into the Gonzales clan and had every member of his family, immediate and extended, on speed dial. Matt collapsed back on the bed dramatically, to which Carmen said: “Don’t move too much. You’ll rip your stitches. The doctors were in there for a good three hours sewing you up.”
Matt waved her off. “Don’t move too much.” Carmen might as well have told him not to breathe.
“You called my mom. Jesus Christ. Surprised she’s not here already.”
At this point he laughed, a little, and then performed his world-famous impression of the Gonzales matriarch: high-pitched rapid-fire Spanish interrupted by ugly sobs, ay dios mio, mijo, waxing poetic about all those messy feelings clamoring in her chest. Thing was, he usually saved his impressions for when his mother was crying at her telenovelas, or sobbing when his sister chopped all her hair off, or tearing up as her grandkid tried ice cream for the first time. This time all it got him was a sharp thwack to the shoulder.
“HEY. I’m wounded,” he said to his brother.
“Yeah? And whose fault is that, pendejo?”
But Rob seemed relieved, at least, that his brother didn’t lose his sense of humor along with all that blood sticking to the bathroom floor.
Rob left a few minutes later. Carmen left a few hours later, and only after Matt insisted. The dog needed to be let out. Carmen needed to get some food in her stomach. She agreed, unenthusiastically, planted a kiss on the top of his tender head, and murmured an “Ugh, I love you so much it hurts,” before whizzing out of the hospital ward. It wasn’t until twelve o’clock that he was finally rid of them — but even then, he wasn’t alone. There were a few other patients, zonked out in their beds, or murmuring quietly to their loved ones behind drawn curtains, and there was the matter of Lockhart.
Every time their eyes accidentally met, it was like Lockhart stabbed a gerber right into Matt’s gut. The other patient didn’t seem any different from any of the other dozen spirits that floated in and out of his consciousness — a haunting stare from across the room, an unpleasant memory hell-bent on wrenching Matt back into all that s**t he was trying to avoid — but then a nurse visited their ward pushing a cart loaded with lunch trays.
She smiled and placed one on Matt’s bedside table — some bleached white penne noodles, green beans straight out of a can, a dry and misshapen chicken breast, and a carton of milk — and then she did the same for the ghost he thought was Lockhart.
No one had ever acknowledged his ghosts before. It made Matt’s stomach twist. Maybe it was only someone who looked suspiciously like Lockhart. He stared hard at the ridge of the man’s jaw, the blond hair, the curve of his bottom lip. And as he traced every familiar facial feature, Matt’s thumped harder and harder in his chest. It was ******** Lockhart. It had to be, or he had to wake up from this dream, fast.
He barely waited for the nurse to move on to the next patient before the words came tumbling out.
“Is that really you, Lockhart, or are these meds doing their job too ******** well?”
