Burnt Tongues

Back at Breckenridge Medical, she says to the doctors, “What the hell did you expect? The pot was over ten grand, and I’m in debt up to my friggin’ eyeballs.”

  The supermodel RN stomps her feet so hard she snaps a heel, storm-limping about the office, proclaiming, “It’s not like I was trying to kill her or anything.”

  Vitamins B and E sugar pills.

  Proactiv generic foot lotion.

  Oral disinfectant glue.

  (8:33 a.m.) Dr. Arliss: “What she does to herself is her business.”

  (8:33 a.m.) Dr. Rhinehold: “Cheating a friendly bet is one thing, but knowingly endangering someone’s life is another. You can’t pretend to help people, Fowler.”

  (8:34 a.m.) Dr. Evans: “We’re all really sorry, Miranda. We honestly didn’t know.”

  It’s not because these guys are so concerned about my weight problems that they feel responsible for this latest extreme. Each doctor is wondering which of their contemporaries was the father, if not himself: our own medical Mamma Mia! And because they’ll never know, the whole group naturally feels accountable.

  Nurse Heather Fowler parades towards the front doors, a middle finger held high over her shoulder, announcing to God and the whole world, “Fuck this place! You can keep the pig!” She limps and stomps away.

  I call, “Hey, Fowler!”

  She stops cold and pivots to face me for the last time, no longer pretty or in control—a sad, simple woman melting mascara from her simmering eyes and posed awkwardly on that broken heel.

  I do the worst thing a woman in my newfound position of power can:

  Elbow-elbow, wrist-wrist.

  Chin out, smile and wave.

  I wave to the bitch.

  Invisible Graffiti

  Adam Skorupskas

  In the basement of a vacant house on Chalmers on the east side of Detroit, lying on the floor next to a Bible, a teddy bear, and a crack pipe, she slept coma peaceful with an empty syringe dangling from the inside of her thigh.

  How she got in left me puzzled—when my flashlight spotted her, it was plain to see she had no arms. One stump was under her head; the other hung over her breast. She wore a yellow sundress, covered in tiny orange flowers and held up by spaghetti straps. Judging by her features, she had to be the offspring of a black and Asian pairing. Her nostrils trembled. The circle beam of my flashlight made it seem like she had a halo. Drying on the wall behind her was a mural of a zebra eating money off the ground, with holes in it that real rats crawled out of.

  Words slammed together in that gray matter between my mind and mouth. I took out my pad and pen. The first note said, Hi, my name is Sixto (pronounced Seezto) Lomax. Detroit city foreclosed home inspector. Please excuse my lack of speech. The bank forbids trespassers, so you must vacate the premises. Want to go to the hospital?

  The corrugated skin of her nub felt reptilian. She weighed about the same as an empty suitcase. With the flashlight in my mouth, I carried her up the creaky stairs and out the front door.

  Rain banging on the tin roof of the porch woke her. She squirmed out of my arms and landed with a dull thud. Her sight touched my ugly Mexican face. She rolled away. I held the notebook close to her face.

  She read the words and relaxed. Her gaze paused at my neck, where a scar shaped like a caterpillar went from one side to the other. The paintbrush stroke of her eyebrow raised inquisitively. “That’s what I was trying to do. And the hospital is the last place I want to go.”

  Convulsions seized her. She slumped over and vomited a transparent golden liquid, followed by dry heaves, then collapsed on her side and panted quietly. The capillaries on her cheeks burst, creating a mask of red freckles.

  Catching her wind, she said, “Fuck, still here.”

  My busted-up voice box could offer no reply.

  “You got a gun?” When she saw me nod, she continued, “Can you please shoot me in the head? I tried to kill myself last night, but you being handicapped yourself understand that sometimes we need a little assistance.”

  I scribbled, Maybe it’s just a really bad come down. You can get past it. Why don’t you roll with me for the day?

  A lowrider turned the corner, blaring “Ill Street Blues” by Kool G Rap.

  She closed her eyes and said, “You don’t understand. I can’t take it here one more second. Every moment I live is agony. Please kill me. Tell them it was self-defense.”

  The ink level of my pen steadily decreased. I have some hamburgers and root beer in the car. What is your name?

  “I can only eat when I’m high. And you seem like a nice guy. The kind that gets attached. So you shouldn’t talk or write to me . . . My name is Luchi.”

  I got weed.

  She took in a long breath, then slowly let it out. Luchi got to her knees, then to her feet. Dense raindrops fell. Getting the blue umbrella from my car soaked my clothes. She sighed when it shielded her head. We stepped through the overgrown walkway with our sides touching. The grass grew as high as first-story windows. It was filled with dandelions whose heads got ripped off by strong winds and floated in the air like a snowstorm in reverse.

  I opened her door and slid the seat back. The floor of my ’86 Corolla was littered with so much garbage, she could barely find footing. I jumped off the curb over a deep puddle, didn’t make it, and soaked my socks.

  Before I got my door closed, Luchi opened the glove compartment and rummaged through its contents with her toes, which moved with the dexterity of a chimp. “You got paper?”

  I held a freshly torn piece of notebook paper up. First, can you promise me at least one day?

  She grabbed the sheet with her teeth and spit it on the floor. I got the dime sack from the center console and dropped it down. She slipped off her flip-flops and origamied a perfecto Bob Marley–style baseball spliff with her toes. Better than I could have ever done with my cumbersome fingers.

  You ever think of doing that trick for money?

  “I don’t do shit for money.”

  I lit us up with an old Zippo that had “Fuck Communism” carved into the side, found in a house on Courville in East English Village.

  So, how should we celebrate?

  “Celebrate what?”

  You’re alive!

  She kung-fu gripped the lighter with her pinky toe and ignited the smoke I gave her.

  “’Cause there ain’t no nothing to celebrate. This ain’t another day. Just another moment in a long line of old bad moments, tied to some miserable beginning, too bad for anybody to really know.”

  The engine argued but eventually kicked into gear. I buckled her safety belt. She shivered a bit when its cool fabric touched her skin. The light turned green, green as her eyes. Smoke rings leaked from her lips.

  At a stop sign I unwrapped a burger and held it close to her mouth. She took two monster bites, and half of it was gone.

  She said, “I’m not a nice person. I’ll rob you if I get a chance. I can’t even trust myself.”

  The open notebook rested on my lap. Don’t worry. I’m broke. I have enough money to get drunk, and that’s it.

  She smiled. “Ain’t you got a girl waiting for you somewhere? You’re not a bad-looking guy.”

  I shook my head, ran a late yellow. I’m married to my work. The inspecting thing is just for health insurance. But in my spare time I do cartoons.

  Luchi laughed, and it sounded like an opera tune chopped and scratched on haunted turntables. “You in the funny papers?”

  A red light caught us. Two elderly black dudes played billiards in the window of Circa Saloon. The jukebox only played the blues.

  Maybe someday. Right now I can only get published in adult magazines.

  Rivers of tears streamed down her face from laughing. “That’s cool. Got to get in where you fit in. I used to be an artist, too.” Her voice cracked on each word. “Pretty much spent the first ten years of my life making fine etchings on the sidewalk in front of my momma’s house. And just about any animal graffiti you see is me, t
oo.”

  Writing and driving had me swerving. Want to help me come up with a satirical jab at society?

  A giant burgundy bubble of smoke popped.

  “I don’t mean to be funny. It just come out that way.”

  We passed through the 7 Mile and Conant intersection, a particularly ravenous part of town where the traffic lights weren’t even on. The Sunoco gas station was a regular chalk outline gallery.

  It’s easy. Just take the most tragic moments of your life, and make them as grim as you possibly can. Eventually the tragedy goes past the point of bleakness and morphs into comedy.

  A squirrel ran across a telephone wire, and a murder of crows flew in oval flight patterns.

  Things can be done quicker than you think. Scientists recently proved our perception of the world is nothing but a mysterious projection. Time and space don’t exist. Subatomic particles can charge each other regardless of distance. Soon there will be a machine that can look clearly into what we think is the past and future. Death might not even exist. What a time to be alive!

  I held the joint to her lips.

  “That’s just a bunch of fancy words. Don’t change the fact we in this dirty ass car on this dark rock spinning with no reason. You know the only thing that scares me about death is that it won’t be the end.”

  Exactly. What if we go to another realm? Maybe it’s better than this, but it could be a lot worse.

  We ended up at University Liquor on Third and Forest. An outline of a turtle covered the back of the building.

  It seemed like no one held a door open for her in a long time.

  She danced through the food aisle, a shoulder shimmy past the ramen noodles, a spinning jig by the cartoon characters on the cereal boxes. She twirled over to the magazine rack and pointed her nose at the porn magazines. “Which one of these has your work in it? Open it up for me.”

  I grabbed the last Gent and opened it to the funny page. Luchi rested her chin on my shoulder. The comic, a single panel drawing of a businessman crying for help, because the escalator stopped.

  Luchi laughed so hard her body bent over. I hoped the security tape wasn’t erased at the end of every shift, and that moment could exist outside the falseness of memory somewhere forever. She suggested we get a large amount of cheap white wine.

  A love note sprang to mind. You have really nice posture.

  “It helps not having arms to lean on.”

  In line, Luchi paused for a few pulses. She said, “Did you know my cells are brand-new from the day I was born? They suicide themselves. The ones that don’t cause cancer. And that when you look at Detroit from an airplane window at night, it looks like cancer. That’s what people are, you know? Just a disease. The only cure is when we can all give this up. That burning monk had the right idea.”

  The famous photograph of the monk sitting lotus style calmly burning alive hung behind the bulletproof glass, which guarded the hard stuff.

  After the purchase of the two finest jugs of wine, my wallet was empty.

  Looks like the next tank of gas is going to be retrieved from the siphon hose.

  Luchi had me open the bottle as soon as we got in the car. We passed boys playing basketball on milk crate hoops, girls playing double Dutch in driveways, young dudes drinking from paper bags on corners, and old men flipping dominoes on porches. Luchi took long sips from the bottle in her lap, from a straw she had to hold firmly between her teeth. Between drinks she’d chew it. “Night Moves” came on

  the radio.

  Want to come back to my place?

  “Where is that?”

  I wrote, Anywhere I want.

  “So you a homeless home inspector?”

  The bank owns 30,000 houses. I can get us in any one. But lately I’ve been staying in my mansion off the coast. Over on Lake Shore Road. The Points. You ever been there? I got a nice view of Canada from the bedroom window. Even has a dock. But I don’t have a boat.

  Luchi said, “Sure, I’m down.”

  I took Michigan, then hopped on Jefferson and almost got hit by the Baker bus. It always seemed like a hallucination, how the broken-down houses turned into estates with finely manicured landscaping.

  I parked behind Saint Paul’s Church. We sat on the black hood of the car and drank. We brainstormed. Luchi took long swigs and laughed at everything.

  She said, “I once saw these people fishing for bums from their balcony. They used beer cans as bait. This poor guy got himself all tangled in the string.”

  I lost track of things. With all the sketching, my paper was almost gone. My pen was nearly out of ink. I had to lick the end to get anything to come out of it.

  The wind from the lake howled at us. We moved toward it. The clouds passed. Stars made a rare appearance. We walked to the rocky edge. The lights of the Windsor skyline beckoned. I wanted to say, I could take you across this lake into Canada. Sneak you in the trunk. They have great weed. We could get under-the-table work. We could leave our old

  problems behind.

  We came up with a four-panel deal. The first showed a smiling man facing a firing squad. The second panel showed the general asking the man if he had any last requests. Panel three showed the man asking for a funny joke. Panel four showed the man clutching his stomach full of holes. He said, “Ha, ya got me.”

  At the mailbox on the end of the block, she said, “You sure you really a cartoonist? I didn’t think comedians could be so sad.”

  At the front door, written on a Chicken Shack napkin, When I was a kid, I thought heaven was a big mansion on the lake. I wish I knew back then I could just break in.

  Each house had the same combination: 3669. The inside of this one was clean of garbage and traces of human living. Dust covered the finely carved molding. I folded out my air mattress in the ballroom. We danced and drank the rest of the booze. She sang songs. We fell over. She landed on top and kissed me soft, then harder. Her breath smelled of vile liquor and offensive tobacco. An intoxicating aroma.

  Luchi said, “I want to believe in the mercy of the world.”

  A chill swirled around the large window we slept under. But with her wrapped in my arms and me wrapped in her legs, we felt warm enough. I tried to match my rasping breath with hers. In no time my lights went out.

  The moan of a tugboat whistle pulling a barge into harbor woke me. I opened my eyes, and I realized they had been closed for a long time. The bright light of a new morning blasted my face. My head seemed to be splitting. My skin, a frozen shell. The threads of my thrift store suit came undone. A note I didn’t recall writing was written on my hand. Please don’t leave. I love you.

  I rolled over and didn’t see Luchi. I got up and took a piss in the winterized toilet. I looked at the front yard from the second-story bedroom window. The mailman tossed paper, and the school bus scooped up children. I checked the rest of the rooms.

  On the back door in big bright green handwriting was the word Sorry.

  I flung the door open. My dirty shoes crunched the plush grass cut evenly as carpet. I tried calling out, but my destroyed voice box sounded like a dying animal. There was no fence. A dirt path led out to a long dock. Luchi’s yellow sundress was snagged on a pole at the edge, snapping in the breeze. Out on the street, cars drove by obliviously. My heart exploded. I ran, jumped. The endless tears of the lake rushed toward me. I landed foot first in the cold, cold water. The shock to my senses made me feel like a new person. Into the ferocious riptide, I would not return to the surface without her.

  Bike

  Bryan Howie

  At the beginning of summer, painting a dirt bike flame red suddenly became very important. My wife, Jen, said it was because flame red was the in color this year, and Tim had to have a red bike if he was going to be cool.

  “A few years and he won’t want to be cool,” I said.

  “That’s fine in a few years, but he’s ten,” she said. “For now, he needs a red bike.”

  Tim picked out the paint. Using my father’s
old sandblaster, I removed the old uncool color. First, I applied two coats of primer to make sure the paint stuck. Next, a base layer of white so the primer wouldn’t bleed through, before putting on the red. I used spray paint and brushed in long stripes in a darker shade by hand. Then a clear coat to seal it and make it shine.

  Tim couldn’t ride for a week, and from the way he talked you would have thought we had cut off food and water. If he couldn’t ride his bike, he couldn’t do anything. Even video games and TV were only distractions from his main purpose in life: riding his bike. But we knew that when the paint was dry, he wouldn’t care for biking again. Then it would just be another thing to occasionally distract him from video games and TV.

  The bike looked good. It wasn’t a professional job, a few drips and runs, but it didn’t look like a dad-garage job.

  My father used to do these things for me, too. He painted out of necessity. My bike would be beautiful at the beginning of each spring and colorless by fall. We had different paint back then, and I guess Tim didn’t like the mud and forest hills. A good tree, taken at the right speed, can strip the paint from your bike faster than ants strip the skin from a fried chicken leg.

  The morning Tim could ride his bike again, he rushed down the stairs before the sun was fully in the sky. Jen and I were sitting at the breakfast table. I was drinking my morning pot of coffee while Jen sipped a diet milk shake drink. She always dieted even though she was thin. Maybe that’s why she was thin, or maybe she felt paranoid of what she might eat later in the day.

  “Dad?” Tim asked. He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “The paint might rub off for a few days, so wear some dark shorts,” Jen said. “And make sure you wear your helmet.”

  “Helmets make me look gay,” Tim said.

  I nodded, but Jen told him not to say things like that because homosexuals deserved the same respect as everyone else. Tim wasn’t discouraged. He fidgeted through the mini-lecture, looking to the window and the day beyond while Jen talked about human rights and the rest. Jen taught history and art at the high school, so she was keen about human suffering.