8 months left
I am going to die in about 8 months. I can feel it in my heart when I push up the hill, the thumping isn't quite right. I started saying it a week ago, it seems a funny thing to say. "I ... am going to die." How could I tell people? Really I just started one day, told the woman bagging my groceries, to see what would happen. She snorted at me. At that moment, it was the perfect reaction. Nobody dies. And from then on, I've started telling people like the plague. I tell everyone I run into. I tell babies and dogs. I tell bus drivers. I even started telling my friends. I like seeing their eyes leap away from me, their hands plunge into their pockets. And when they tell me whatever you tell someone who says that, if I never liked them, I spit in their fucking faces.
The other day, I met someone else who was going to die in 8 months. She was a goth girl, all this mascara on her face, super pale, big black UFO pants flopping around. I was in the diner with Licorice, waiting for the waitress to warm up my cherry pie, and I saw her paying her check and I knew. She had this sunken look, this vague distasteful aura. I knew we shared the same aura and that she knew my death was also impending, on account of my own aura. Licorice, I said, wait for the pie. I'll be a second.
I paid for her at the counter with a fifty. I'd recently collected on my own insurance money - the death is that sure of a sure thing. I walked her outside to her sagging oldsmobile with the alkaline trio sticker, and gave her my number. I'm going to the bar in a few hours, I said. You should come.
Now she was obviously 17, tops, but what do I care. I was gonna die in 8 months and so was she. All those convenient social regulations, all that empathy and concern, that all more or less disappears when you realize that the whole gig is off. No happy ending, just 8 months of anger and fear. You don't really have enough time to afford tactfulness, either. I'm sure that within the last month I'll be a raving fiend, putting it in anything that moves.
When I get back in, Licorice is staring at me, a piece of cherry pie steaming in front of him. He'd watched the whole affair through the window, I knew. But who cares. He's pretty oddball, a real moralist at times. but a solid person. I'd eliminated all the chaff from my life by then, spitting in their faces one way or the other, so it's mostly just me and Licorice now. He looked up at me, this damn fury and calm in his walleyes. I'd forgotten that he had his own sixteen year-old sister, my present girlfriend.
..
It rains down by the canal every couple weeks. All this clay shakes loose from the hills and the little creek becomes a gushing river of red. It forms a red crust on the rocks, coats everything, and smells like iron and silt, which I guess it is. I don't care - I go swimming anyways, but some people can't stand it. I like Alex because she doesn't care, she'll go down with me anytime. We come back stinking of the stuff, red dust in our belly hair, creating little creekbeds across our arms, and Licorice makes us hose off on the porch. I never understood why people have such reactions to stuff like that. Water is water. The silt is always there, just at the bottom of the canal most of the time.
The funny thing about that red stuff is, no matter how well Licorice hits us with the hose, some of the shit somehow stays stowed away in my pores or something. I sweat when I sleep - spider dreams - and so whenever I wake up the day after swimming and flip back the sheets, there's a vague outline, me, in deep red. all that stuff that was hiding under the skin. It looks like the shroud of turin.
The other day, I met someone else who was going to die in 8 months. She was a goth girl, all this mascara on her face, super pale, big black UFO pants flopping around. I was in the diner with Licorice, waiting for the waitress to warm up my cherry pie, and I saw her paying her check and I knew. She had this sunken look, this vague distasteful aura. I knew we shared the same aura and that she knew my death was also impending, on account of my own aura. Licorice, I said, wait for the pie. I'll be a second.
I paid for her at the counter with a fifty. I'd recently collected on my own insurance money - the death is that sure of a sure thing. I walked her outside to her sagging oldsmobile with the alkaline trio sticker, and gave her my number. I'm going to the bar in a few hours, I said. You should come.
Now she was obviously 17, tops, but what do I care. I was gonna die in 8 months and so was she. All those convenient social regulations, all that empathy and concern, that all more or less disappears when you realize that the whole gig is off. No happy ending, just 8 months of anger and fear. You don't really have enough time to afford tactfulness, either. I'm sure that within the last month I'll be a raving fiend, putting it in anything that moves.
When I get back in, Licorice is staring at me, a piece of cherry pie steaming in front of him. He'd watched the whole affair through the window, I knew. But who cares. He's pretty oddball, a real moralist at times. but a solid person. I'd eliminated all the chaff from my life by then, spitting in their faces one way or the other, so it's mostly just me and Licorice now. He looked up at me, this damn fury and calm in his walleyes. I'd forgotten that he had his own sixteen year-old sister, my present girlfriend.
..
It rains down by the canal every couple weeks. All this clay shakes loose from the hills and the little creek becomes a gushing river of red. It forms a red crust on the rocks, coats everything, and smells like iron and silt, which I guess it is. I don't care - I go swimming anyways, but some people can't stand it. I like Alex because she doesn't care, she'll go down with me anytime. We come back stinking of the stuff, red dust in our belly hair, creating little creekbeds across our arms, and Licorice makes us hose off on the porch. I never understood why people have such reactions to stuff like that. Water is water. The silt is always there, just at the bottom of the canal most of the time.
The funny thing about that red stuff is, no matter how well Licorice hits us with the hose, some of the shit somehow stays stowed away in my pores or something. I sweat when I sleep - spider dreams - and so whenever I wake up the day after swimming and flip back the sheets, there's a vague outline, me, in deep red. all that stuff that was hiding under the skin. It looks like the shroud of turin.