Charles L. Crowley

Lost or Growing Increasingly Distant

 

 

Deep inside him, Pablo felt a twisting sensation—a writhing and warmth—like snakes wrapping around the sun, smiling, with eyes shut. He tucked an eighth of weed in his jacket pocket.

 

Pablo leaned against the brick front of the building at the corner and looked up at the neon sign humming above him, lit up early. It read Anthony’s Liquor & Lost Goods. His gut was throbbing and he put his hand against it.

 

His phone buzzed in his pocket, but he ignored it and he walked into the liquor store.

 

The storeowner was arranging candy on the counter, straightening the boxes, making sure the prices all faced forward.

 

Pablo pulled at the collar of his jacket, and he walked towards the cold drink section in the back. He grabbed the cheapest energy drink from the fridge.

 

His phone buzzed again, and he ignored it again.

 

“Two dollars,” said the storeowner. He was a large man with a robust southern accent.

 

Pablo counted out eight quarters.

 

“Getting rid of your change, huh?”

 

Pablo shrugged.

 

“Weighs you down.” The storeowner waited for a receipt to print.

 

“I guess.”

 

“You’ve got something else weighing you down, don’t you?”

 

Pablo reached for the receipt and walked out of the store.

 

He looked at his phone. There were two messages from his girlfriend, Carolina: “Come over…” and “Where are you?”

 

He popped the lid on his drink, took a sip, and then walked over to her apartment. 

 

 

 

They sat on opposite sides of her dinner table. Pablo held in his hands her pregnancy test.

 

“I’m not keeping it,” she said. “I’m going to school in the fall.”

 

He just sat there. 

 

“I wanted to let you know.”

 

He nodded.

 

He rubbed a tattoo of the Mother Mary on his forearm. He had no serious opinion on abortion and he wanted her to go to school—but a heaviness still settled in him as he thought about not having a child. As they sat together in silence, he tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a father. But this daydream was muddled and blurry, hard to fully construct, because of the empty spaces left behind by the father he’d lost to gunfire as a child. He grew frustrated and abandoned the image, retreating, instead, to thoughts of his abuelita, who raised him. 

 

He felt her ghost behind him. Her fingers coiling around his neck.

 

Carolina reached across the table for the test. He handed it to her and she threw it away.

 

“I wish you would say something,” she said.

 

“Got nothing to say.”

 

“You never do.” She got up and walked into the kitchen. She started to scrub the dishes in the sink. The suds rose high in the shallow basin. She systematically shut the water on and off between scrubbing and rinsing.

The steam from the hot water rose to her face, and she breathed it in through her mouth. Pablo listened for the sound of her breathing it out heavy again, but he heard only the tapping of her fingernails against the dishes.

 

He pulled the weed out of his jacket pocket and he rolled a joint at the table.

 

“Use the bathroom window if you’re gonna smoke here.”

 

He took his lighter and left his jacket at the table.

 

The suds were high around Carolina’s arms, but the pile of clean dishes beside her didn’t seem to grow at all.

 

 

 

He held the smoke down until he couldn’t hold it anymore. As he exhaled, he took note of the gray sky and fading daylight. Beyond the chipping white paint of the window frame were streetlights turned on early and the rooftops of other apartment buildings, all bathed by the incoming sounds of moving cars below. He flicked the last of his joint outside, and he walked back into the kitchen. Carolina was sitting at the table again. The porcelain sink and the laminate counter around it were both spotless and glistening.

 

Her apartment suddenly felt colder than before.

 

“I just think…maybe this is a sign,” she said.

 

“Yah, maybe.”

 

“I just don’t feel like I know you anymore.”

 

“Me neither.”

 

“You don’t eat unless you’re high. You don’t go out unless you’re high or drunk or both.”

 

He nodded, slightly pursing his lips, looking down at his shoes as he did so.

 

“I miss you.”

 

He looked up at her.

 

“But at the same time, I don’t know you well enough anymore to miss you. You need something more to live for.”

 

“I guess we could’ve had something.” He nodded at her.

 

“That’s not fair.”

 

“It’s not.” He picked up his jacket from the table.

 

He reached for the doorknob and as he wrapped his fingers around the cold, worn steel, he remembered how his abuelita would hold his hand and take him on walks when he was child. He tried hard to remember her as she was later in his life. How was she just before she died? She was tired and broken and unwilling to go to the hospital. She insisted her home was heaven enough. She prayed the rosary and watered her tiny potted garden on their cement porch. The grass in the front yard died long before she did. The chain-link fence surrounding everything had folded and fallen down as well…

 

He felt the warmth deep inside him again; this time it was more violent, more alive, kicking him from the inside. He pressed his hands to his stomach and curled against the wall outside. He pulled the collar of his jacket up, and he saw the phantom of his abuelita, in his mind, beckoning him to walk with her once more.

He stumbled forward, one hand feeling the air in front of him and the other pressed to his stomach. The phantom in his mind led him back to the liquor store. She led him back inside.

 

“Back again,” said the storeowner.

 

Pablo leaned against the counter and the phantom left him. He only felt the lingering presence of her fingers around his neck. 

 

“You come to get rid of the thing weighing you down, huh?”

 

Pablo nodded and he winced. The warm writhing pain kicked him harder from the inside. Is this how it feels to die? He gasped and clenched the counter with his trembling fingers.

 

The storeowner turned around and put on a record by Spoon. 

 

He looked back, and his face grew slender as he leaned forward to get a better look at Pablo. He bobbed his shoulders up and down and he reached over the counter to help Pablo lay back on the floor.

 

“Aright, I’m coming to the other side,” the storeowner said.

 

Pablo gasped as the pain grew inside him.

 

“Here we go… Ease up and lay back.”

 

He rested Pablo further back and against the aisle divider.

 

“Take short, strong breaths.”

 

Pablo breathed in and out and gritted his teeth.

 

“Here we go. You’re doing great. Focus on the music.”

 

He screamed as the man pressed his hands first against and then into Pablo’s stomach—pressing at the skin, sinking them deeper in. He spread his fingers and Pablo felt them wiggling against the inner machinations that he himself had never even touched.

 

“Get out! What are you doing?”

 

“Yes, getting it out of you. You don’t want it anymore.” The storeowner cupped his hands around the warmth inside Pablo. The heat twisted away and the storeowner struggled to get a firm grasp. Pablo shouted out again in protest. He tried to physically push the storeowner away, but he couldn’t. His body was weak and wholly captive to the pain. He felt like everything inside of him was leaking slowly out through this hole the storeowner had made.

 

“You’re losing yourself. This is true. But you were losing yourself  anyway, weren’t you?” the storeowner said. He cupped his hands again, inside of Pablo, this time fully encompassing the warmth, and he scooped it entirely out, holding it up in his hands, almost in tears, eyes squinting, smiling with his lips tight against his teeth.

 

The warmth kicked and screamed and Pablo felt the pain slowly subside again, giving way to numbness. The world went blurry like a memory, and the final inch of strength in Pablo failed him. He fell, it seemed, away from his body, deep into a hole, as the storeowner stood up and carried his warmth away.

 

 

 

Pablo woke to see the phantom of his abuelita holding his warmth in her arms and the storeowner, who looked womanlier now, leaning over the counter bobbing along to the Spoon record, which had restarted now.

 

He felt cold and he wanted to call Carolina. He wanted to tell her that he missed her too. And that he understood what she had to do…that he wanted to do it all with her. But instead he lay there curled on the floor with his knees tucked against his chest, trying to block what felt like the opening to a hole that led deep inside of him.

 

 

 

Charles L. Crowley lives in Pasadena, California. His work has previously appeared in the West Wind literary journal, The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, and is forthcoming in Unbroken Journal. When he's not reading or writing, he's watching Hesei era Godzilla films or playing shows with his band in dive bars and clubs.