Ninety-Five:

NINETY-FIVE:

The Gun

7:40 am, November 12th, 1995

A few hours before picking up her final passenger, Liz put a gun in her mouth with hands so sweaty the handle went slick. She gagged and forced vomit down. Throat aflame. Teeth clattered against the barrel of the Kel-Tec P11 9 mm pistol, a sound telling her brain, Wait a minute—I’m not dead.

Yet.

White noise. Liz tried to blink the noise away but every time her eyes closed, her vision worsened.

***

Outside, her father, Wes, tended to his garden. His trowel stabbed the earth and sliced a worm in two, matching halves arcing in silent agony amongst the weeds.

Her brother in the shed plowed at the punching bag strung from the rafters on a chain. Jed’s knuckles started to bleed.

Reggie, her mother, was in the living room of their house. A half-finished bundle of crochet sat at her feet. Needles imbedded in red yarn.

On the other side of James Bridge, ten-year-old Suzie Marten woke to the sound of her mother coming home after a dogwatch shift at the hospital.

***

I’m going to die. I’m going to be meat.

Liz’s head was a television set, the wiring all wrong and flashes of reason fighting against the dark like ghosts longing to be heard. If I could only just disappear, I could win.

No, don’t give in.

Don’t.

She’d been doing this her entire life, eyes closed and ears blocked. Walking through the clearings on winter mornings. Avoiding it all.

No, this wasn’t the first time Liz contemplated killing herself.

Four years ago: a knife. She wanted to kill It. The Beast. Even if it killed her in the process. The Beast both fed and fueled her loneliness. Still, Liz put the knife away, defeated. Later that night her mother used the same blade to chop up vegetables for their dinner.

Her second contemplation came two years later. Again, the lure of the knife—but the concept of pain terrified her. Death wasn’t orgasmic. It would be the ultimate snap, a pain so extreme it undid you. Liz decided she didn’t want to bleed into oblivion and returned the knife to its rightful place in the drawer.

Liz rarely visited the shed out back because she was put off by its humid sweatbox nature. There, tools hung from the walls, the ugly half-finished car. Scary stuff. This particular visit proved worth the discomfort.

She slipped her father’s gun off the rack and brought it back inside the house.

The sport of fingering that trigger. Nothing made you appreciate what you had like glaring down the barrel of a pistol. Releasing the trigger set off a release in her that was next to none, amplified, too, by the PCP in her veins. When you were high, you assimilated with death.

Pull it.

(pain)

Do it now.

(peace)

Now.

(pain!)

Today, Liz drew the weapon out of her mouth. Her jaw ached. She threw herself against the wall, dropping the gun. Her old wooden doll’s house next to her, its façade open to reveal all the dusty Barbies and Kens, their arms and legs pulled off and rearranged into new people. Little chairs and little lives within a little house that wasn’t real.

Coward.

She scrambled to the window and threw it open.

Two levels below, her father looked up from the garden.

***

Wes Frost took in his daughter’s pallid looks. Her messy, shoulder-length hair dangled in a lifeless mess. He noticed sweat dripping off her nose.

Sick eyes.

He’d seen that stare in cattle soon to be slaughtered.

She moved her lips. One word. It sounded like ‘today’, though he could have been wrong.

“You okay up there, Liz?”

Wes knew something was off. Therefore, it wasn’t surprising when no answer came, the awkwardness of the moment forcing him to speak again.

“Shaping up to be another horror of a day. Who knows, it might boil into a storm.” Wind blew dead leaves about his ankles. “You can’t tell.”

***

Liz closed her eyes and breathed clean oxygen into her body. Alive.

“Bye-bye, Dad.”

Closed the window.

She relit the joint and pulled smoke into her lungs. Sound drifted away, numbness settling in. There was a lunchbox with two vials of powdered PCP tucked away in her wardrobe.

Liz climbed into her work uniform: short-sleeved blue shirt, ironed collar and crested front pocket, knee-length navy shorts with the creases down the front. An oversized hat perched on her head.

“Today.”

I’m gonna do it. I’m beyond caring. Past help. I don’t know when but it’ll be today. My god, the relief.

I really can’t wait.

She left her room and walked down the steps to the kitchen. No feeling in her feet. Flickering shapes in her peripheral vision, evoking twitches twitch. Floating, floating, all motions dictated by this wonderful drug, everything flowing so nice and smooth. She transitioned from one place to another, one role to the next.

Room to room; daughter to driver.

As far as Liz knew, she was rostered onto Route 243 today. She would make her way to work and step onto her bus and accelerate when needed and brake when the time came, and this would go on and on and on for as long as it needed to.