Story Notes:
I've decided I want to actively start the writing (and completing part) process. Life, procrastination, etc have been the vices. No more, this is something that has been on my computer for well over a year and it's something that I have more than wanted to put out. They've been hanging around in my head and won't quiet down. Its a slow process to allow me to work on this as well as the other ideas I have. I think the feedback from you all will definitely be the most encouraging part. Thanks as always to those who've read, reviewed, and inquired it was a long in coming motivation. And also Ive had the time to read the beautiful works from the wonderful women up here.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
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A few things- three really- supported a convincing indication of a life in utter crisis. First, Angela somehow managed to squeeze her entire life in a 325 square feet 13’x25’ motel room. Said life was packed in a gross amount of brown cardboard boxes- thanks to the gratuitous attentions of the owner of the Dirty Dick’s Crab House, who had taken too keenly to her repeat patronage.
The derelict, brown boxes all around her were bursting at the seams in each their respective orifices – be it corner, hidey hole, or piece of furniture that they occupied. They were filled with clothing, forgotten décor, tax returns, manuscripts and other official shit from at least three years back, all along with a sixty-five pound yellow lab mutt and her 11 year old kid.
Laying here beneath the towering, inorganic canopy, she was beginning to fear she’d be at her wits end come end of month if she had to do yet another month long stretch of this. Second, she hadn’t left the squalor in days- or to be politically correct, if so, hadn’t ventured very far.
Angela was depressed.
Nevertheless, thankfully she remained practical in all manners of reality, seeing that she did acknowledge, but refused to indulge in said depression. She would wake up in the morning, just as she was doing this very moment, looking across her twin bed to find Nikki in a chaos of lanky limbs who had sometime during the night come to curl up next to her mother.
The day, unfortunately, was beginning its vengeful cycle.
The onslaught of guilt would always follow. Guilt that she had uprooted her child from the life she’d known- a real home, a pathetically “provisional” family, and people. That she felt the bite of mostly. After they had left SoCal, it had forcibly been the two of them sloughing through the days trying to adjust to the colloquially speaking “podunk” backwater kind of living.
Angela could always feel the anxiety-ridden elephant stomping about in the room, forcing her to gulp in thin air. It was like holding an entire lifetime in a single breath, and with each exhalation, she was dying. Her mouth was parchment, and her body was coasting like leaves on the wind. She looked down at her hands that were not too much hers, so thin she could feel the bones rippling beneath the skin. She didn’t exist in here, how could she? Because even here, being with the only thing that should matter in the whole wide world- she wanted nothing but to dissipate and bleed flesh from sinew and disappear into the sheets wrapped about her like sand and silt.
She roused, gently removing herself from the twin bed and began to walk about without purpose or destination. She wore down the speckled tiled-floor, her fingers twitching at her sides as her short, thin nails made half moons into her brown skin of their own accord- in want for somewhere or something else. She counted the gashes on the shitty tile work, focused on the mole on her big toe, a forgotten scar, noting the unpleasant odors wafting from week old take out containers stewing away in the kitchenette sink, that, and the thicker air of desperation, more whole and filling her hunger up.
Angela caught sight of her face in the bathroom mirror, and eased the door open further to bask in the barely florescent lighting overhead. She couldn’t even recognize herself. The wide, dim and watering eyes, the hair teased to the point of rivaling the biggest transgressors of the ‘80s- which was quite humorous if you called it as you saw fit, but she was terrified. That was just a name for the demons rampaging through her mind, planting and scratching at sown seeds- as her doubts fed and thrived from within as she was dwindling down to sticks and stones.
And she found herself feeling even more the dim shade of herself as she forced her cracking lips into a half-hearted smile, because that hurt too. Pretending- because once you know it’s all over, you’re over it.
She mused for a few more minutes, wrapping her frail arms across her breasts in hope for a fleck of comfort. In truth, there was even little of that left to give because she was so tired. It was like picking at loose skin – the novelty wore off after the first layer and then all you could do was bleed like shit until it saw fit to be done.
She went back to bed, licking her wounds in tow. However, her mind and body could find no solace in the decision. Angela sniveled at the clammy morning air wafting from beneath the door slit- and through poorly insulated windows. And after some time her mind buzzed lightly from eventual silence, allowing the off-white covers to look and feel more appealing by the second as she imagined falling so deep into sleep and them that she might disappear between the cracks and folds. Her long, dark lashes and warm coffee eyes batted at the ceiling.
Her little girl had come to mirror the withdrawn toxicity of her mother- with more and more a prevalent silence wrapping about the girl.
“Baby,” she called out lightly. Her voice floated on the air like feather-light integrities. Nikki remained unmoved, her body as fixed as a bag of bricks and throat deep in REM.
She exhaled audibly, shoving at the immobile lump sprawled out next to her- half in hopes of proving her solidity and realness. Angela did the next best thing, rolling unto the girl, plying her awake with hugs and kisses as she held unto her for dear life. “Get up bed bug.”
And she’d always somehow find herself careening back to Earth as the one thing holding her to her desperate life came through to her like a beacon of light.
Her attempts were met with wild giggles as her daughter roused in a flail of skinny limbs, the momentary happiness determined and infectious.
“Eww,” Nikki breathed deeply. “That’s so gross, we might have those too. Really! I thought I saw one!”
“Come on you.” Angela reached beneath the heavy covers to pull Nikki up into her arms. “Ew, morning breath. Get up, get showered, get dressed. School tooo-day.”
She saw the protests coming before it left Nikki’s throat. Angela rose to her elbow and looked down her nose, eyebrow sky high. Her hand swooped over and loosened the sheets from over the lower half of Nikki’s face.
“Don’t want to hear it,” Angela resolved to be firm in her decision this time. This lounging around was getting out of control. Her daughter was smart enough to choose her battles. Case in point that the young girl’s last defenses were broken; Nikki shucked the covers away with attitude braised in her shoulders.
She watched with a small bout of satisfaction as the girl’s small frame loafed from the bed and disappeared into the bathroom.
…Mom…
“Are you listening, mom?”
Angela simply looked. “What was that?”
Nikki was dressed already, so far as shrugging into a thin sweater. “I just asked you like three times, Mom. Do I have to go today?” It scared her a little, Nikki was already dressed, hair damp from the shower that was getting a little too spray-ey and the corduroy sweater she bought about two falls ago- what was too roomy then fit perfectly now only being a physical reminder of how much time she was losing.
She started fidgeting with her clothes, nearby thread flyaway’s sticking out of their niches. “I mean, I could stay home. With you. And we could do- I don’t know, something.”
Which loosely translated to something like: ordering a few shows On Demand for a ridiculous amount of money while munching on last night’s Chinese takeout. Then laughably retreating to their respective corners with Nikki to her tablet doing God knows what an eleven year old did (did they still do Club Penguin shit?) while she half responded to something her daughter would vocalize once in a while trying not to visualize strangling her editor.
Definitely not.
She sauntered to the bathroom in turn, wetting her hair in the bathroom to retake some control and put sleep on a leash. The cold water was nothing but a sobering reminder of the life outside those doors. Unfortunately, sobering or not cold water, she really didn’t have the strength to hide the evidence of her insomnia, her declining health.
Right that was two. She was supposed to be on the third by now. Her editor faulted her for playing the long-winded writer.
Within fifteen minutes of drive and light conversation, she was at drop off turning into the makeshift cul-de-sac to the middle school. She watched listlessly as the kids poured off the cheese buses and teemed into the building- she imagined it comically bulging to its fill as they all rushed in. “Bye sweety.” She smoothed Nikki’s braids.
“Bye mom.” Nikki quickly gave her a peck on the face, accepting a strip of gum just for just in case.
The other, the third, she mused was she was really good at doing nothing. Perfected it. Indulged it, really. Feeding it so that it consumed her purpose, her hours, sometimes even days as she would spend hours upon hours circling the five-mile radius of Nikki’s school eating up Virginia Slims, Menthols, and black and mild as she had been reduced to a lack of preference. She didn’t even have to eat nowadays, she was on her special diet of tar and bitterness that just made it easier in coping- the knots that would tie up her stomach and make her retch quietly for two hours straight like clockwork around 2a.m. every morning. Of course she did that quietly, she’d learned to wear her badge of quiet suffering with pride- after all, she had her eleven year old to consider- and while she was at it not fuck up irreversibly while she went through “this.”
The divorce decree came in the mail, about three days before, which she’d been holding unto. Much like the sick dynamic of a dead pet that you had loved so much that you dug it up from the back yard and had stewing in a shoe box under the sofa seat- loving and loathing it all at once after its rot started to stink. You loved it, and hated it for being present but for not the right reasons.
She sucked in another tight breath, the clouds filling her and doing some semblance of relieving the load on her mind.
She might even get killed out here, she’d be lucky right, but out here? Shit, she’d be lucky if she got wind of a flasher- or a ticket- or some kind of head on collision. Not here in this podunk, shitwater town. She just sat there and waited, strumming her fingers on the leather of the steering wheel- parked on the shoulder, surrounded by maple and moss and a twilight that seemed to hang in curtains no matter the time of time or day. Sitting there listless, hungry, and desperate all at once- she actually fashioned how easy it would be to pull out into oncoming traffic if she heard a truck, moose, car or bike or boat, or Officer Friendly sailing around the bend.
Nikki would be out in a few hours…
That gave her exactly half a pack of smokes to go through, a pit stop at Dirty Dicks for surf and turf dinner that would be nuked later - that again she felt guilt for foregoing home cooked meals. Meet with the contractor about the roof for the third got-damn-time this week, and a call at 1:15 from her agent who didn’t seem to be doing the agent shit he was cutting ten percent from her checks for. All of which didn’t exactly leave a convenient time to pen in coroner servicing @ 11:45a.m. (as it read on the dash): spatula-ing innards from the road and deer shit plastering the yardage of the strip of drive approx 1.2 miles from Shore Drive.
She smiled morbidly at that tidbit, her innards being extracted from deer shit. Heh, it could be worse she supposed.
Chapter End Notes:
I hope you enjoyed... love and criticism (constructive) welcomed always.