Excerpt from Void - Short stories, first draft in 2012. Edited in 2017
It’s hard to be sure how it started,
but I have come to the conclusion that people have stopped talking to me
altogether.
**** and I are sitting in The
Globe on Hollywood Road. He’s drinking raspberry beer and still has his band
T-shirt on from last night. He checks his iPhone every 2 minutes. I stare into
my glass, attempting a rough calculation on my blood alcohol. **** smiles to his
phone. I’m about to order another drink. He pushes it aside and asks me what
I'm thinking.
“Nothing,” I say.
I ask him, “What are you thinking?”
I look back into my almost-empty glass.
He sips his raspberry beer. “I don't know. I just want to make you happy.”
Here we go again.
“You look deep in thought,” he says,
curling a strand of my hair with two fingers.
“I'm not,” I tell him.
His phone vibrates, giving off a
muffled buzzing and banging against the solid oak table.
“You look deep in thought,” he says, with
certainty this time. He reaches to check his phone; texts from this girl out of
town, Facebook messages, missed calls.
“You do too,” I say, eyeing the fish painting hanging
on the wall to my right.
This is the same table I
get every time at The Globe, yet I’ve never noticed this gigantic fish until
now – it’s there, and it’s not. Its huge eyeballs stare back
blankly; I
try to remember every detail: blue scales, red bowtie, little
people dancing around it.
I turn back to ****, a content smile
hangs on his face as he tends to the world. My watch says 1 a.m. sharp, why am
I stuck here, at this hour, with this person, is beyond me. The Jamaican waitress
comes over to our table. Last order, she says. I smile and mouth “no thank you”.
He pockets his phone, rubs my hands with his and kisses each on the back.
“Let's get out of here,” he says. At least tonight, he hasn’t once quoted Kierkgaard,
but it’d have been much easier for everyone if I was blackout drunk at this
point.
