Something's Missing

Something’s Missing

By J. Donovan Steele

Chapter 1

Knoxville. Summer ’91.

I stand. The cigarette is done, and I yell at myself for having smoked it. I’ve been anti-smoking for as long as I have been a smoker. I hate smoking. I have no will power over its delicate ability to persuade. I am an addict. I’ve been addicted to many things in my life; cigarettes remain. She smiles as I come into the kitchen through the back door. I gently close it behind me, smiling at the ground in response.

“You’ve got about five minutes,” she says stirring at the steaming vat on the stovetop.

I’m indifferent. Moreover, I have to finish my work in the basement. Somewhere around the end of last year, I began working on making the unfinished basement finished. It has yet to be finished. I haven’t been slacking at it. Many factors have left me at wit’s end with the whole thing; it’s so close now. I push my cigarettes back into my shirt pocket.

“Okay,” I throw back, as I breach the wet aromatic fog and turn the corner to grab the cold knob of the basement door. Lift up, I think to myself while pulling it open. The cloud of stale paint and drywall slimes its way, molecule by molecule, into my off-white undershirt. The permeating perfume of the meal being prepared upstairs is immediately erased from my existence and I become encased in the white walls of the man-made cavern. I stare blankly at the drywall screws, dust, debris, fast-food entrails, and pop bottles that lay cocooning in decay as if there had been a garbage flood. The gut rot feeling of responsibility sinks in and I pick a pencil up from my workstation; that is to say the two sawhorses and piece of plywood that I turned into one a few months prior. I sit down on the bucket in front of the workstation and I begin to dream. I remember her eyes first. Then her kiss haunts me. I think of the myriad of times we failed to exist in the unique and magical moments that were always around us. I carry her over my shoulder into the back room at the bar. She laughs entirely too loud for a long time after. I remember this happiness, and though I am unable to cry, my fury swells and my face flushes in irreversible distress and longing.

“Food!” the scream echoes in cruelty and maliciousness; though none of these are in the tone in which she yelled.

My body tremors momentarily and I make my way back up the stairs having thrown the pencil, broken, across the shit-covered floor.

“…and they always reject you the first time around. It’s supposed to keep people who aren’t desperate out of it, but, ya know?” she slides her glass back and forth a quarter of an inch while speaking.

“That’s so fucked up,” I honestly reply.

“It’s only taken me four years to figure this out, and it’s only because of that nurse, ya know, the one in Columbus?”

I nod.

“It’s only because of her that I even know,” she continues while staring directly at me because I am staring off to my right, “It’s ridiculous… whatever. So, anyways, how’d NOT smoking go for you today?”

I watch her knowing smile grow before I retort, “Not bad. Definitely not good. Work makes it too hard. I can’t fucking be expected to deal with the people I deal with and not get my three minutes of sitting down and breathing fire.”

I had been working at the new offices of Pierce and Marsh, accident lawyers without knowledge of ethics or even thoughts of consequence, for about half a year as an intern. It was getting me nowhere. I always thought I had wanted to rot away in a meaningless job and slightly uptight bittersweet marriage. My focus was dimming in the awakening of angst, repression, and doubt. Regret, too, had shown through, but I tend to make light of these things as they are permanent and therefore pointless. Concentration was growing so weak that again I found myself on an island inside an ancient tomb that I slowly would unveil to be my own. The fading into such things left me at wit’s end with no hope of a break in the barrier, some sort of crack in the mental dam. Fuck this life, I was thinking, with razor wire.

“I failed, of course. It was somewhere between the racism from my boss about the pictures, and the eighty phone calls, that I could barely stand up without wanting to bite my tongue and spit blood at everyone,” she continues smiling and I smile along. The real truth was just too much for us to bear without two widening bloodshot smiling eyes to offer a small dose of compensation.

I was thinking of how much I really wanted a cigarette, but before I could move my plate into the sink fully, she stood in the doorway the cigarette already placed softly in her pursed voluptuous lips. Stability mended the heinous nonsense that was about to befall my already lost night. One has to have a point that they allow themselves to go to, whether it’s a memory, a picture of something peaceful or enlightened, a song to be heard at only these moments, in order to cope. You have to have this reflective space in order to stay stable. My stable space? A mountainous scene of a kitten floating down a streaming river of smooth and jagged rocks alike, her cries growing as she whisks around and around in an aimless spiritual journey that she is more than likely unaware of.

“God FUCKING Dammit!” she pours her drink out in an abrupt and haphazardly fashion at the ground beside the back steps of the porch, her eyes searing viciously at me as if I had thrown a baby under a car.

“I’m sorry. I fucking couldn’t help it. And I can’t help it now. Just bare with me,” I plead as I lay down in defeat, grabbing my head as I try to cease the visions, but they keep burning through my eyelids. I have to stay awake, I say to myself, can’t fight it, just deal.

“I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m going to bed. You stay out here and be all crazy,” she says flailing her arms about and rolling her eyes.

I hadn’t done sugar cubes in over two years, and it was fucking weak shit. I hadn’t even started hallucinating until I got home, which is absurd; it had been three hours. Now I was stuck in some lame ass trip with weird flashes of chaotic dreamscape fodder blasting through my anxious thick veins and helplessly pouting face, as I only so desperately wished to sleep. I keep seeing bloody teeth baboons, or a still shot of a bloody-mouthed baboon rather, and many other weird, not quite frightening, but beginning to piss me off to the point of being scared, madness raping my tired, still half drunk, mind.

“I’m SORRY!” I scream at the door as it shuts in two sounds; a bumping thud, and a glorious cracking thump that electrocutes my sensory preceptors and stops my heart.

I feel like I should feel like an asshole. I really don’t care, I just want this trip to be over. It’s weird when you start to think that you think that you care. It shatters nerves and blows gaskets anywhere your body has taken previous blows. The inevitable outcry for truth and the want for acceptance will way heavy on any man. The ones that stay shying away in their manipulations are the true assholes. The burdens are hard to endure. Growing up is hard to do. Other fish in the sea. If you can’t stand the heat, praise the lord. It’ll all ring true in time. Clichés are clichés for a reason. I challenge anyone to beat every cliché in their lifetime. It’ll never happen. And here I lay; sprawled out like nightmarish drug-addicted movie director play-doh. What have I become? Do I really care? By the end of the night, I’ll have sworn off every bad thing that I do because I’ll know god has spared me this time. And the next day I’ll even try to coexist with these beliefs. I will fail. And this will all happen again.