100
After reading over her last piece in art therapy, the writer is instructed to head to Anna’s office.
The writer remembers the AHG vial, the intern’s seedy smile in the dark.
“Have I done something wrong?” the writer asks. “I know my art therapy progress has been rather slow, but I think I might be getting to a point where-”
Anna interrupts her as she always does, with eyes that held the writer’s gaze until she quieted down.
“No,” Anna says, soft, softer than usual, her smile barely noticeable. “You’re being discharged for completing your program. Congratulations, you get to go home. I’ll sign your papers now.”
The writer says, “but there’s so much I have left to do. So much I have left to experience and write.”
“Of course. We know that. That’s why we’re sending you home.”
The papers are signed. Anna gives her a hug, despite protocol. The writer is escorted down the hallway by the same intern who came with her on the way in. Along the way, they run into the cleaning robot.
The robot reaches out, as if to turn on a light switch, but brushes her cheek as she passes.
They check her skin for insects as a safety measure. But they find none on her. They escort her to the bay, where she’s docked her ship. They fuel her ship up, check it for insects as well, and then wish her a good life.
She gets into her ship, sinks into the leather pilot seat, touches every button, blinking softly in the black light. she thinks of heading somewhere besides earth. Maybe to Mars, which they’ve made habitable lately, populated by a group of Ex-American and Ex-Korean scientists who decided they wanted to focus on the issue of transporting the overpopulated Earth away from a sun heading toward inevitable death. We were still a rather primitive society, and politicians were more concerned with money than the progression of the human race.
Or she could speed off into the dark matter zone. There are fuel stations along the way, she could make it past the galaxy in this ship if she wanted to. She’d shoot off, elastic, rebounding from what was known to the edge, beyond the edge, deep space, cool space, empty and amnesiac. There, she could remake herself over and over again.
The writer went home to Earth.
At home, she walked up the heavy steps through the overgrown grass. She set down her bags in the entryway hall and made herself a mint julep. She sat on the cracked tiles of the kitchen floor. The sunlight slipped across the floor, sucked out the window, between her toes. She thought of the diamond ceiling of the spaceship, being crushed to bruising.
“What the fuck do I do now?”
She finished her mint julep, thought about going to sleep, and instead made another drink. She wandered the living room with drink in hand, running her finger along the dusty piano cover, the records, the glasses left to congeal on her writing desk. She sat down, as if to write, her fingers poised at the keys. But she thought better of it and went upstairs. Everything as she left it - her underwear and towels on the floor and her bed unmade, a copy of “A Scanner Darkly” on the nightstand.
She sat her drink on top of A Scanner Darkly and crawled into bed.
Before she slept, she made the mistake of leaving the window open.
101
A paramour with white knuckles climbed through the second story window, head screwed on backwards, eyes like linen cloth that reflected nothing. She bent over the writer, arched her back, grasped the writer’s chin and blew black tar into her nostrils so that she woke up gasping.
And whispered, cradling her head, “No matter what happens, I belong to her and her pain.”
“Fuck,” the writer whispered back, her voice soft and raw, kissing the paramour on the top of her head, brushing her curls away. “I thought I’d gotten rid of people like you.”
The paramour laughed.
“Baby, people like me never go away.”
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
