Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Rain bothered.


Rain bothered. Jack didn’t think rain served any other purpose nearly as well as it served to annoy. Rain rivered down the glass of his windshield, smearing the lights of the lampposts and the passing orange tail lights floating by his car. The radio blared, static and fuzz drowning Cobain’s pained crooning.


Deluge, Jack thought. This is a deluge. There hadn’t been rain like this since the last hurricane had preemptively boarded all the windows in town and called together most of the weather reporters for disappointment. Brake too hard and your car will slide kind of rain.

He reached into his pocket and snapped off another square of blister pack. He pushed the white disc from its cradle and palmed it into his mouth, wincing as he dry swallowed. 


He checked his watch, the LED panel greening in the nightlight of the city. Half past seven; if she hadn’t arrived by now, she wasn’t ever going to. He turned the key and purred the engine, flicking on the turn signal before waiting for a gap in traffic.


He prepared for a long wait.

When his passenger-side door pulled out, he felt his stomach force his heart up into his throat. She slid into shotgun, her hair dripping and her eyeshadow running like she’d been crying. Had she? 


“Everything alright?” Jack asked, raising his voice over the torrent that reached into the car through the open door.



She slammed it. “Were you about to leave?”



“I saw you coming in the rearview,” he said. “I thought I’d scare you.”



“You were about to leave,” she said, smiling thin, looking over at him with her eyes bleeding blue. “I’m not mad.”



“I was about to leave,” he said, looking in his left rear view to check for a gap. Nothing so fortunate. “I thought you’d gotten a ride from someone else.”



“Lucy kept me a little bit,” she said. “She’s worried about losing her job. I didn’t want to just, you know, walk out on her. Do you think there’s people living in the lake behind your house?”



“Not particularly,” he said, turning onto the street when a gap offered itself to him, “what a bizarre question.”



“I didn’t ask a question,” she said.



“Whoops.”



“It’s getting worse again?”



“No,” he said, looking up at the traffic light as it changed from green. “I’m fine.”



“It’s getting worse again?”



He sighed, accelerating through the yellow light until he braked, sliding to a stop just in time to avoid rear ending the trailer in front of him. “Yeah, it’s getting worse again,” he said, once the trailer continued forward and he’d managed to clutch the engine into starting again. “Did you ask that twice, or did I imagine that?”



“I asked twice,” she said, her eyes wide, “I don’t think you should be fucking driving.”



“You’re the one that scared me,” he said, feeling his grip tighten before he felt the pulsing in his heart. “You asked the question about the lake too, didn’t you?”



“I didn’t ask anything about any lake,” she said. “Okay? Just get me home. Alright?”



Nodding, he spun the volume dial until it reached a level sufficient enough to drown out any of her potential further complaints, and immediately regretted doing so. His focus shifted to driving carefully, aware that another near-collision might scare her away for good.



A dissonant guitar chord rang three times on the radio, and it sounded like a harmonica as it faded into the engine. Ten minutes passed in conversational silence. They reached the apartment complex where she lived, his car passing between a set of guard booths when he navigated to the parking lot.



He pulled into the space beside her mother’s car and turned off the engine, the radio cutting out mid-sentence, leaving them listening to the liquid bullets ticking against the roof of the car. “I’m going to stay home tomorrow,” she said.



He tried to not feel like he’d failed. “Okay. Is there anything you’d like me to do?”



“Talk to the girl in the lake behind your house,” she said, leaning across the gearshift to kiss him. He met her halfway, breaking away when the kiss died. “Goodnight Jack.”



“‘Night."



He thought he was a pig for staring at her the way he did when she walked across the front of the car and up the walk towards the front door of the apartment building. She didn’t look back when she stepped inside and a little part of his soul dropped out onto the floor of the car.



Jack picked it back up and considered swallowing it before he set it down in the ashtray under the radio. He ignored the drive back to his house, thinking that there might actually have been a chance that Charon really had told him to talk to the girl in the lake behind his house.



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