Trigger Warning: The content may not be suitable for children or those with a fragile psyche

Vomit

Most nights I drove to a place near the water which overlooked the highway and everything smelled like salt. It was usually late at night when the stars and the blinking lights of the city across the way mingled and became the same. I thought about dropping large rocks over the railing and watching as they struck the cars below, or maybe I did, and I forgot. Either way I am sorry

I had gotten sober, and nothing made sense. I no longer knew how to sit in dark rooms illuminated by flickering lamps, so most nights I came here to watch the cars as they drove. I always got back at around three or four in the morning. I was terrified of lying in bed, of the moments just before sleep.

I had a job and an apartment, and my brother talked to me. I had all the ingredients for a life. But I felt it untangling at its sides and turning back into that ghostly twine which was so easy to tear apart and discard.

 I started working at a Safeway because I saw a woman with a beautiful and pockmarked face working as a cashier while I bought packets of dried ramen, frozen pizzas, and microwave popcorn. She went to Utah with her boyfriend to live on a farm and become close to nature and experience life in its pure form and I never saw her again.

I worked at the meat counter where we packaged meat. I pulled the guts out of dead birds and sliced them or tore them up into tiny chunks to sell.

Everything smelled of death. I could never wash my hands enough. We had to mop all the blood up into those little grates in the ground. The head of the mop was a perpetual pink.

On lunch breaks I would go outside to the back of the store to smoke a cigarette and there was usually a woman there who was addicted to heroin, or one of those other drugs that turns your life into a journey with a singular goal. She would be searching through the dumpsters, frantically, as if in the innards of the dumpster was the answer to each prayer she had ever asked. She would turn to me as I arrived and ask if I could give her a few dollars and I would say that I couldn’t.

I wished she would go someplace else. She had so many lines running down her face, and her skin stood taught against the thin bone, and her eyes were searching, never satisfied with what they saw. She made me sad.

I never wanted to see her again.

On weekends I worked as a bouncer for a fast-food restaurant. I mostly told people not to smoke weed in line and tried to look like I understood anything. Everything was going well.

Then it stopped going well.

 A man cut in line. He had a green shirt on. He was sweating and his mouth was an empty circle of anger. I told him to wait his turn. He refused. He began to scream. He pushed me. I tried to move him back, to maneuver him to his car, to say reasonable and calm things, to make him understand where he had gone wrong.  He struck me. I pushed him over and his head cracked on the pavement and blood began to pour out and pool next to him and he stopped moving any longer.

The cops came and took my statement, and he was taken to the hospital where they opened him up and fixed all the harm I had caused.

A week later I got notified that I was the subject of a three-million-dollar lawsuit and that they were going after everything I had, that I would be paying off this debt for the rest of my life, but nothing ever came of it, and I quit working as a bouncer.

I started taking long lunch breaks. I would drive near a metal factory and watch all the endless smoke billow up from those cylinders. I would eat lunch and listen to the radio in my car and think about how much easier everything would be if my life was made of smoke.

The breaks turned longer until one day I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up at a bar and didn't go back to work at Safeway. At the bar I met a woman whose name was not Carmen because that was the name of my ex-wife and they had different names.

 During the time when Carmen and I lived in the same home, shared the same bed, and had a child together who was a few months old and his face was made entirely of light, I would pretend to go to work and drive to a place near the train tracks and drink vodka. I put a suit on before I left and I made up names of coworkers and things they said to me, and personalities for them, until it felt as if these people were real, and I became angry or sad when they said something hurtful. I spent my days watching those trains go by and trying to find ways to force the hours to move slower as I dreaded going home and knew everything would fall in on itself soon.

The woman whose name was not Carmen was tall and had tattoos covering her body. The tattoos had no cohesion, their meaning was lost to everyone but her.

We became close in some shared misery like two idiots or the first two people. I put my hand up her shirt and felt her warmth and kissed her and we went back to my place where our bodies intertwined.

We argued frequently and she would often leave and go to some bar, to pick up some man, to lay in his bed, to sleep with him. I would lay in bed thinking about her, lying in some man's bed, talking to him, sleeping with him. She knew the strength she had over me. She could use her body as an engine to the end of the earth.

I awoke at four in the morning to an exuberant bird singing the day into existence out of my bedroom window. When I turned over in bed, I found her lying next to me and her whole body was cold. She had turned on to her back while she slept and had vomited, and the vomit had gotten stuck inside her mouth and drowned her.

 I sat on the bed for a little while before getting up and going outside. Everything was just starting to wake up. It was winter so the sun burned through the icy fog and shattered everything into perfect clarity.

And this is how I found myself

wandering at five in the morning

considering doing something stupid and irreversible

to punish her for how much she hurt me

by choking on her vomit

and never waking up

END