Chapter One (e)
:REUNION
EMEL:
The vent was starting to sound brown. It breathed over my head, barely touching my hair as I watched the tipsy man search the drinks’ isle for a beer I told him was unavailable. I wondered if I had enough in me to walk over and suggest him something else.
When the man twirled around almost toppling over, his face looked bloated, as if he would throw up any second. The horror of cleaning another man’s drunken mess threw me out the counter’s formal confines. I reached for a random beer and shoved it in his hands.
“You found the Pale Ale!” I said with forced joy. He was drunk beyond management, would he care it wasn’t the beer he was looking for? It was odd that I detested the smell of alcohol, and the smell of vomit, or the breathe of a person who’d thrown up intermediately – odd, because the stench of decomposing civilians was my norm. The man’s chubby face lit up as he held the can of beer in his palms like the holy chalice.
“I found it?” By the time he asked, I’d somewhat managed to drag him to the counter.
“Yes sir!” I rejoiced, practically babying a man who was so mesmerized at the sight of a Narranganset can. I wasn’t sure if we were selling it individually, but customer service was our priority. “That’s a dollar and twenty-eight cents, sir.” I smiled wide, not expecting him to hand me his wallet. I looked back at the man as I tore out the receipt. We stared in awe of each other, only different dimensions of weighing emotions. “Just give me a dollar a man.” I said, trying to hand the wallet back to him. He only fiddled with the can, paying me no mind. I assumed no small talk would do me justice, so I slipped out a dollar and shoved the thin wallet into his shirt’s pocket, then gestured him to simply leave.
He left, dropping me back to the Earthly vibrations of sounds: the brown sounding vent above the wall next to me, the buzz from the unrepaired blue lights and the deeply hidden vibrations of my phone from the bottom of my bag. I knew it was Jackson calling for the eleventh time. Missouri was calling for me as I used to somewhere back in time. The state homed my strangest years. I’d been there in 2011 and since before when our frozen streams were let loose. Now it was beginning to reek of indifferent things, so much so that I’d found refuge in Indiana – but nothing was too new.
I refused to wear my jacket and hide from the store’s mini AC that roared just behind me. I needed air to pierce my skin as long as it meant I could forget the stuffy heat under a biohazard suit. The warehouse door flung open to reveal a frantic woman who dashed towards me with all her might: ginger hair, the palest shade of fair skin, draped in a large shawl that she struggled to hold on to as she finally stood still in front of me. Only then could I truly see her beyond the kaleidoscope burned into my eyes.
“How did you get inside the warehouse?” I was anything but frightened. It was a coy fact that my pendulum laced with poison and death swung by the hands of those I knew. We both stared at each other in utter surprise.
“Why are you asking me that? The backdoor was wide open!” She yelled at my face, trying to get the hair off her face and covering her body with the shawl. On a chilly night, the young girl wore tights and a crop top that she desperately tried to hide under the large piece of clothe. It looked like a carpet on her.
“The backdoor is locked, miss.” I was sure of that. I’d checked it five times in the previous hour.
“Well, I’m telling you it was open! The bathrooms are locked! Open them!” The bathrooms were locked for a reason. The women’s bathroom was clogged from an unfortunate man’s unbelievable turd, and the men’s stall needed functional renovation after a group of addicts relentlessly began camping there until they were driven off by the police. But it didn’t seem like the girl would take refusal for an answer.
“You will have to use the men’s bathroom, miss.” I told her, simultaneously ignoring the constant buzz from my phone. I wondered what could possibly be so urgent that a man like Jackson kept calling over and over – I wondered if I was afraid of what I saw back in Missouri, or afraid of dragging the rest of them into an unkempt pond of uneasy ideals.
“Just open them!” She screamed, nearly climbing over the counter. I assumed, as rude as it seemed, that she’d taken a shot somewhere near and needed a room to smoke off a manic episode, but the idea fell out of its mere basis when I walked her around the back of the convenient store with the bathroom keys in hand.
A pillar of a man stood just by the doors: his face was nearly hidden in the darkness, only the sand-blonde strands were barely visible from the wall’s dim light. Had I not known him from the silhouette, I would be yelling profanities from the sudden scare of a shadow towering me.
“Open the door already!” The girl cried again, but was shushed by the man who cleared his throat in a response, then shook his head. I wondered, again, for the thousandth time, if I was stepping in to enable another unfortunate event. A torn part of me believed I was response for whatever that girl was walking into, or had already drowned into. The girl quivered and stiffened next to me. When our eyes meet, almost out of habit, I could read the fear in her dilated pupils – if she had to live, she would have to escape that man. That man who I called my younger brother.
It wasn’t supposed to be guilt talking out of me, even so I suggested out of faint hope: “You can run if you want to, miss.” The red girl stared. I looked like a lunatic to her who offered foul play with her life. My brother moved from the shadows and it visibly shook her into a yelp as he approached us, standing under the small light’s vicinity. He had changed. He was no longer willing and fresh to the worldly wonders. He looked older than his age, all of his shine robbed and scrubbed off into a harsher, boney face that did not look amused even a tad.
I rubbed my temples in hopes to think properly and overcome the hours-long shift’s exhaustion for that brief moment: “What’s all this, Sorel?” I asked him as stout as I could. He did the best he could, for as long as I remembered, to intimidate me with his frame – with his thin, placid eyes and his animalistic demeanor – and he knew as well as I did that it had yet to work.
“She wants to use the restroom.” Sorel told me with a sore voice. Additional silence brings more words to his sly mouth: “I’ll give her the foreplay she’s been giving me, I promise.” He said, then ushered the girl to walk forward with an open palm. He loved to be obeyed, and the girl matched his will just fine.
“Do it somewhere else, I’m closing now.” I told him as I prepared to walk off with the key still in hand.
“I won’t be messy. I’ll be quick, then pick you up.” He pleaded, and the most I could do was throw the ring of keys on the ground.
“Pick it up and be done with it.” The girl broke in hiccups, stammering her words that never made it out of her tiny mouth. She managed a plea but I’d already lost interest in her when Sorel bent down to pick the keys, exposing his nape for a mere few seconds. A bundle of gauze had been somehow suspended in place with several failing band-aids as the gauze leaked into his jacket.
“I’ll be quick.” With this he unlocked the men’s bathroom and gestured the girl to go in first, and he followed in like a slithering mole. I paid no mind to whatever could’ve been happening inside the bathroom as I collected the leftover cash and clocked out as fast as I could. I knew my brother better than most who knew him in his life – in the light of an exaggerating truth, nobody really knew him besides me. It wasn’t like him to engage with women, and this one in particular seemed to have flared a grudge for him to hold. He preferred slaughtering chickens over being flimsy and playful.
I left the convenient store in complete darkness and without another sound from the stall as if nothing had happened in the first place. I waited for Jackson to pick as I dialed while walking, uncertain what to expect and what not to.
“Emel?” My name blurted out of him in surprise that I actually picked up. It wasn’t that I had better choices than to try and gather the mess that was beginning to spill, and I feared it would spill unconditionally. “What are you doing in Indiana?” Was his first greeting.
“I told you Jolly’s sick. I need to be with her.” I told him as I clung to the small part of its truth. Jolly was sick, and I needed to be with her – but I didn’t know where she’d run off to.
“Listen, I’ll take any excuse you have but I need you here Emel.” I’d never heard that depth of concern in his voice before. I wanted to think he was doing the most to coerce me back home, but it was baseless.
“I can’t come right now, Jolly needs me.”
“Emel, for the love of God,” We sighed together. Perhaps we were suffocating together too. “At least meet me, will you?”
“If you come to Indiana, I’ll tell you where I am.”
“I’ll come at noon – happy now?”
“I’m asking for an extension. You understand that don’t you?”
I accepted his disappointment that was gauged in silence. I also accepted the familiar sound of a door flinging open in the distance, and I began picking pace for the sake of possibly spending a last peaceful night, hoping I wouldn’t bump into Sorel until morning. His promise lingered in my head. He would pick me up per plan, but where would that go from there?
“Claire’s probably at your place now, I sent her to check on you.”
“So you knew – ?” He cut me off before I could even finish my frustration.
“To check on Jolly, respectfully.”
I hung up and ran with my phone still in hand.
My peace ruptured within a suit I wasn’t wearing as breathing becomes a battle. I wasn’t to wear it again. Even if it meant returning to Missouri.
