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rancidmeat09 · 2 years

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Death By Sundown

Ring, ring, ring, ring—my cracked fingers slap against the scuffed surface of my phone. I swipe against the screen but nothing happens. Where did that ringing come from? My walls are dark and the blinds of my windows strike blue from the morning light. I turned off all seven of my alarms in my sleep. Oh god, I’m late for work. The rows of frames on my wall for “employee of the month” aren’t going to matter once I walk into the building and get murdered by the bright-smiled receptionist girl for my fifth tardy this month. But they can’t kill me. I’m the smartest guy they’ve got, and I bring them the most revenue. I swipe the sleep out of my eyes and scramble to the bathroom and narrowly avoid the glass shards on the ground, and I remember that I took work off today so that I could spend the day with my girlfriend.

That’s right. I don’t have to sit in my sterile cubicle beneath those staling plastic lights and take hair-tearing phone calls all day. I get to see my wonderful, amazing, beautiful woman. I get to ask her the question that I’ve been preparing to ask for weeks. This is the day that my life changes for good.

I open my blinds expecting to be hit by the bright sunlight, but as it turns out it’s musty outside today and the fog covers the distance. No problem. My parking garage remains a block of shadow and it’s begging to be walked to. I take one or two hours to clean up, get dressed, gel my hair into place, and I head out.

“You’re going to die by sundown,” I think a cat says to me. Maybe the hangover hasn’t quite washed off just yet. I’ve got a car to reach, and a girlfriend to propose to. I don’t have time to waste. “You’re going to sleep with the fishes,” it says with a voice that sounds neither male nor female. I stop in my tracks, kicking up the dust bowl-kissed pebbles on the ground. A stray cat, white as staled drywall and dusty as the weeds around it stares up at me with inquisitive beer-colored eyes. Its tail swishes on the ground, mouth forming a perfectly rounded ‘3’ shape turned clockwise.

I take my phone out and record the cat. “Is this real?” I say.

“I’m your guardian angel, Robin. I’m as real as that little scar on your arm. I know stuff that no ordinary cat would know.” There’s a human voice coming out of this cat’s mouth and there's a Brooklyn twinge on the ‘er’ in ‘shoulder.’ The years-old scar on my wrist aches.

Is it even safe for me to drive if this is what I’m seeing? I pinch the skin of my knuckles. The pain sets in without any lag. I lick my lips. The slime feels typical. I’m sober. This is real. I say, “So how do I avoid dying?”

“As long as you listen to me, you’ll be fine. Which might be hard, because, well, you don’t listen to anyone, Robin.” A snicker lines the edge of its voice.

“Well I listened to you just fine,” I say. “Excuse me, but I’ve got a day to get through and a girlfriend to propose to, and I don’t know whether you’re real or just a figment of my imagination. You can come along if you’d like.” I get into my car and the cat slinks into the passenger seat so silently it’s nearly imperceptible. I watch the video I recorded. Indeed, the cat is speaking in the video. Do I send this to a friend? To my girlfriend? To Facebook? I can deal with that later.

“Pray tell, how am I going to die?” I ask.

“At the fault of a voice you trust too much,” the cat says.

“Should I not trust what you say, then?”

“I can’t tell you what and what not to do. I can only tell you what’ll happen,” the cat says, if it was possible to hold a shrug in one’s tone.

“So someone I know is going to kill me?”

“Basically.”

“Like who? My girlfriend?” I scoff. “She’s too soft for that.”

Muted sunlight hits my windshield as I reach the road.

“Something awful will happen on the highway,” the cat says.

“What am I supposed to do? Not take the highway to my proposal?” I say.

“Can’t tell you that.”

The highway is quiet and beige at noon. Smoke-colored clouds gather over the sky and I roll my windows up to snuff out the smell of oncoming rain. The cat is laying on the passenger seat, dirty paws tucked underneath its skinny body. There are only a few other cars in sight for most of the stretch and I’m able to keep up a comfortable pace of twenty miles over the speed limit. On a long stretch with ample space around me, I text the photographer to make his way to the restaurant.

“Your father always told you not to drive reckless like him, and you promised you wouldn’t,” the cat says.

“Yeah, well, everyone makes empty promises. When I have kids I’ll tell them not to speed. I’ll make sure they listen to me.”

“Sounds like an empty promise,” the cat muses.

“Don’t give me shit. I’m just trying to get to Daisy,” I say.

“Robin, your proposal won’t amount to anything if you end up dying at the end of the day,” the cat says. Particles of dirt crumble from its tufted back fur onto the cloth of my precious passenger seat.

“I took the day off from work just for this day. I’m not going to give up on this just ‘cause some stinky little kitten told me not to,” I say.

“Getting married ain’t going to fix your problems, Rob.”

“Shut up,” I swat at the cat to banish it to anywhere that isn’t in the seat next to me. The cat slips over my shoulder and a flash of red hits my periphery. I swerve into the next lane to avoid the braking red truck in front of me. My side mirror shows a black car crashing into red and screeches of crumpling metal and shattering glass work their way up to my eardrums and I snap my gaze back up to the black road and I hit the accelerator.

The road in front of me is an endless blank strip, and the disaster I left behind is a memory still playing. Was that a woman or a man driving that truck? Thrum my fingers on the wheel once. Pinkies, rings, middles, indexes, not thumbs. The breath catches into my lungs again and my chest shakes. That was real. I caused it. No, I didn’t cause that. What am I saying, that wasn’t my fault.

“Aren’t you going to do something? That crash is on you,” Cat says.

“No it wasn’t, it was on you, because if you weren’t here I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off the road,” I say, a tremble in my throat. I’ve never seen an accident that close up. “Someone is going to call an ambulance for them. They’ll be fine.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Cat says. Its goddamn tail is swishing. I almost died but that’s alright. I’ll be fine once I’m with Daisy, and we’ll spend the rest of the day together.

I pull into the diner parking lot. My photographer hasn’t texted back. I call him. “Hey, Jason, how close are you to the restaurant?”

The sounds of static shuffling come from the other end. “I can’t come, I’m sorry.”

“What?” I say. “But I told you about this weeks ago.”

“I never gave you a yes. My sister got into a highway accident. I need to help her out.”

“Listen, listen. Jason. Remember when we used to be best buds in college? And I’d lend you my notes on every exam? You passed half your classes because of me. Do this for me, man. Or do it for Daisy.”

“No.” He hangs up. God dammit. I’ll have to improvise without him.

The restaurant is a higher-end establishment modeled after old style diners—the inside is dim and sultry, gentle red lights shining purple on clean blue-and-white tiles. The rich savory smells of sandwiches and beef hash make my stomach rumble. The music is nostalgic, reminiscent of an older era, and strikes memories of laughter. It’s the type of place best suited for dinner, but hey, I plan on spending the whole day with her after she accepts, and I couldn’t think of a better place to propose than where I took her on our first date. A tail brushes against my leg. There’s a dirty white spot of a creature against the shiny floor.

“Hey, you can’t be in here,” I say down at Cat’s mangly little whiskers. With one motion of my foot I push Cat out the door and trap it outside. I sit at the large corner booth I reserved ahead of time and order two coffees—one for me, and the other for Daisy and her caffeine addiction. I twiddle my thumbs waiting. It’s five minutes past but that’s alright. I can tell that Daisy’s entered the restaurant when my chest starts to swell and I look towards the entrance and there she is, coming this way with a smile on her natural lips and wearing the pair of red heels that I bought for her two years ago. She sits. The braids of her hair are trembling from the tapping of her foot.

“Something wrong?” I ask.

“Kind of,” Daisy says. “There’s just been a lot on my mind lately.”

“There’s been a lot on my mind, too,” I say.

Daisy smiles at me. Is she thinking the same thing as me? Is she waiting for me to say the words? The waiter takes our orders. I’m comfortable ordering any item off this restaurant’s menu. I know they’re all good because none of them go below double digits in price. Daisy adds, “Can I get a water, please?”

My cup of coffee is empty while hers is full. “Not in a coffee mood today?” I ask.

“I told you a couple weeks ago that I’m trying to go on a caffeine cleanse,” she says.

“Oh. Must’ve forgot, sorry. More for me,” I say, pulling her cup to my side of the table. “You remember the first time I took you here? How you hated coffee but I got you to try it here and got you hooked?”

She laughs. “That was right after we watched Wolf of Wall Street, and you were obsessed with their accents for weeks.” I laugh with her. Then her face changes. She says, her brown eyes so serious, “Robin, what do you like about me?”

“Lots of things,” I say. “You’re the prettiest and funniest woman I’ve ever met. Your cooking is amazing. I love buying gifts for you.” She nods. I say, “What do you like about me?”

“I like that you’re never afraid to take initiative and to speak your mind,” Daisy says, still smiling. “Now, what do you dislike about me?”

There are no words that come to mind instantly. “I don’t know. To me you’re perfect.” She looks away. I say, “What do you dislike about me?”

Daisy excuses herself to the bathroom. The waiter comes to refill Daisy’s cup of water.

“Excuse me, could you do me a favor and keep an eye out for when she comes back? Take a video. I’m going to propose.” I hand my phone to the waiter.

A white tail pops up on the edge of my vision, and Cat is lingering just outside the window, looking at me with its amber-colored eyes.

“What do you want?” I mutter under my breath.

“I want you to leave, Robin. You’re going to die and this isn’t going to help.” Its voice sounds clear even through the layer of glass.

“No, that’s it. I’m not listening to some weird ghost cat thing that almost crashed my car,” I say. Then there’s the sound of leather shuffling across from me and Daisy’s sidling back into the booth.

“Who were you talking to?” she asks.

“Just this talking cat outside,” I gesture to the window, but Cat’s disappeared.

Daisy laughs as though I didn’t just share a piece of monumental information with her. “I need to tell you something.”

“I need to tell you something, too,” I say. The ring in my jacket pocket is begging to be taken out. I’m about to burst from my seat at any moment and collapse to one knee, ready to throw my hands into my pocket and offer everything I’ve got to her. I take a half-second glance at the wall and spot the waiter recording us with my phone. Everything’s going according to plan. There’s something in Daisy’s eyes, like a dam waiting to burst with something important, but I can’t wait any longer.

She says, “You go first.”

I crouch down—am I supposed to get on my left knee or my right knee? I kneel on my right and I throw my fingers into my pocket but my hands are clammy so I have to try two or three times to wrap them around the ring holder. I’ve thought about this moment for so long, thought about the big smile on her face when I’d finally drop and say it. I want to hear the gasp and to see her hands fly to her mouth.

“What are you doing?” Daisy asks.

“These last couple of years together have been amazing, Daisy. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” Finally, I get to pull the box out of my pocket.

Daisy’s hand goes to her mouth. She looks side to side, her braids swishing so lovely against the dull afternoon sunlight outside. She’s no longer smiling and I realize that she’d only been smiling with her lips and not her eyes. “Rob, please put that away.”

“What? Why?” I say.

Daisy’s voice turns quiet, and rounder than it’s ever been. “Let’s talk about this first.”

“What is there to talk about? I reserved this restaurant for you, this sacred place on our first date. You don’t want a proposal here, of all places?” I gesture around the restaurant with the ring box; it’s the only weapon I’ve got.

“Lower your voice.”

“You don’t want a public proposal? Is that it? I can take you somewhere else—”

“I don’t want you to propose at all!” Daisy says.

The lovely vintage license plates and the shiny silver dishes on the walls turn to plastic decorations and cheap aesthetics. Why is it so bright in here? Why are the tables so much closer to each other than I thought? Is this even a modern age restaurant or am I in a museum?

She says, “I can’t be with you anymore.” Her heels are red and they’ve got scuff marks on them. I didn’t buy those for her. Whose shoes are those? Doesn’t she hate red shoes? “I was genuinely in love with you. But the more I learn about you and your life, it makes me realize that our personalities aren’t compatible. It’s not just me. It’s a deeper problem that I can’t fix.”

“Daisy, who bought you those shoes?” I mutter.

“I don’t know.”

“Either I bought those for you or I didn’t.”

“What does it matter?” Daisy says. “Rob, the effort is one-sided. I’ve tried asking you to change but you never follow through. Like your drinking problem. You told me you would drop it, but I’ve seen the bottles in your kitchen trash can.”

What did Cat say? That I trust someone in my life too much? “Either I used my hard-earned money to buy those shoes for you or you got them from someone else,” I say.

“Are you really accusing me of cheating? Is that what you want to do?” Daisy says. I’ve never seen that purse of hers, either. What is that made of? Faux leather? I open the box and I show her the shining silver ring studded with sparkling stones. It’s more real than anything lined up against the walls of this god damn diner, and it’s more real than that phony bag she’s got.

“Babe, buying this ring was nothing, and I could buy you a hundred more if you wanted. Please don’t leave me and please don’t cheat on me with another man.”

“Robin, you see me more as a trophy than a person.”

“No, no, no, of course not.” I grip her hands and they’re so warm. Why am I so cold? “Please, Daisy. I nearly got into a wreck on the highway just trying to get here. I almost died!”

“Were you texting and driving again? Or… are you… drunk right now, Robin?”

“No! I swear it wasn’t my fault. It was this damn cat that followed me into my car. ” I look around to find the cat, to prove my point, but it’s nowhere to be found because I kicked it out of the restaurant. “Wait, I have a video of it. It was talking and everything.” I pat down my pocket and my phone isn’t in there and I remember that someone else is holding it and I look to the waiter who’s still fucking recording me with a sliver of a smile hidden on the corners of his mouth. “Get that shit out of my face!” I cry and I scramble over to him and snatch it out of his hand, and the phone hits him on the nose but I don’t apologize because I’m not sorry. “See, watch this video, it’s this stray cat that’s been sticking to me like glue—”

“This is exactly what I mean. You’re losing yourself. I’m leaving,” she says, and the sound of her voice is so sharp in my ear that it’s still replaying as I watch flashes of her movements, the way she takes the purse I’ve never seen before and puts something on the table with her slender fingers and the way she looks at me with contempt in her big brown eyes and walks out the door with an angry kick of her red-heeled ankles. The memory of the last breath she left gets interrupted by the whisper and conversation that picks up, and heads from other tables are turned my way, their blue and green and brown eyes littering the pristine pink walls and their god damn perfect shoes tapping against artificial tile floors. What the fuck are you all looking at? I might have said that out loud because everyone instantly looks away. There’s a check on the side of our table that I hadn’t noticed before, along with two twenty-dollar bills that I didn’t ask her to leave. I didn’t ask for her consolation money. I snatch her twenties into my wallet and exchange them for two twenties from mine. It’s got to come from me and not her.

Cat is waiting for me outside at the curb. “I told you not to go in there.”

“You didn’t tell me shit. You fucked me over!” I say. I make a swipe at it with the pointed tip of my shoe but it leaps away with grace.

“Don’t touch me with your mangly little paw, Robin. I warned you and you didn’t listen to me,” Cat says, circling around one dirty spot on the curb, around a line of ants that are crawling somewhere. No, Cat isn’t quite it. It’s got a Brooklyn accent that gets deeper and deeper with every sentence.

The jewels inside the ring refract millions of tiny glimmers as it turns against the sun—an unspeakable amount of geometry and boundless possibilities that our marriage could have taken—one kid or four kids or none at all, a family business or I move up the ladder to my sickening tech company and become CEO, or we drop it all and become professional pornstars and make millions off of that—but it’s not happening and it never will. Now I’ve got this ring worth thousands of dollars and no fiance and no girlfriend. Fuck! I throw the ring down into the grass. I should’ve told her, I know what I dislike about you, it’s that disgusting smirk you’ve always got on your face and how you’re never grateful for anything I do or buy for you, and your casserole is shit and you need to lose some weight. I should’ve said that.

“That wouldn’t have changed her mind,” Brooklyn the Cat says.

“You. This is all happening because of you,” I say.

“So you believe me now?” Brooklyn says.

“What the hell do I do with this ring?”

“You’ll die if you keep it.”

I’ve got to get rid of the ring. It’s rolled in front of the curb now, sitting in a puddle of mud. I turn to Brooklyn, to ask it a question, but it’s disappeared.

I could just leave this ring sitting in the mud. It’s all brown now, but the lights from the sun still refract in its fissures beneath the dirt. I could go home and drink myself to sleep, and tomorrow I walk into that cage of an office with the worst lobby coffee I’ve ever had in hand. Chuck rolls back from his cubicle and asks me how the proposal went with that stupid Rolex on his wrist. Either I tell him to fuck off, or I pretend like I didn’t hear him, or I laugh and say that the wedding’s happening in six months and that he’s invited. I’d have to make fake invites with photoshopped pictures of my engagement and send them out to as many people as possible so that I could hear them all congratulate me for my success and subsequently fabricate an excuse four months later to postpone the wedding until people forget about it entirely.

Or I could pick the ring up now and try to sell it. I’ll sell it and make back the money I deserve. Yeah, and I’ll use the money to keep me afloat until I find a new job somewhere else where I won’t want to kill myself at the cubicle every single day.

I drive to the nearest jewelry store. It’s the most beautiful ring in the entire world, and the man says he’ll only take it for two thousand dollars.

“If it wasn’t dirty I could take it for more,” he says.

“No, this is bullshit. I bought this for eight thousand.”

“I could recommend you to an appraiser friend of mine—you could sell it to him and get back the ring’s worth in full.”

“And how long would that take?”

“Anywhere from two to four weeks.”

I feel the swish of a tail against my pant leg. “Sundown, Rob. You’ve got by sundown until you’re sleeping with the fishes,” Brooklyn’s voice sounds from below.

So I’m getting ready to make the deal. The most beautiful, disgusting object in the world in my cracked hand, nearing the employee’s with an angled shiny bracelet on his wrist over a glass shelf filled with blurry rows upon rows of sparkling silver gems.

This diamond ring is the most valuable remnant of Daisy I’ve got.

I can’t let it go.

I’ll pawn it. I’ll pawn it and get some money out of it and that way, it’ll still be my property. I’ll get it back another day, when I’m not destined to die. I hightail it out of the jewelry store, and I drive down to a run-down pawn shop, but there’s a taco place in the same row, and we’re close to a high school. Tens of dirty teens’ cars take up every space in the parking lot. I park across the street in front of an identical-looking set of shops. The taco smell permeates into my system even across the street, full of revolting grease and salt; it’s so awful that my eyes tear up. Even crossing the road is hell as I get closer to the stench, and the sounds of teenagers who haven’t learned anything but think they know everything bubbles up a headache. The sound of yelling and fighting breaks out inside the taco place. The screams bring me back to when I got socked in the eye at a dumb joint like that and the memory of pain and humiliation and blood and sweat comes rushing back. Brakes screech to my right and there’s a red car that smells of smoke barreling towards me and I linger if only to cleanse my palette with the sweet scent of cigarettes instead of cheap meat and sweat, and black pavement flies up to meet my forehead and my back’s to the ground and I’m staring straight into the sky. It’s gray, but not the type of slate it’s been all day—it’s at a middle ground between blue and orange. My forehead feels awfully warm.

A lady is getting out of the car that just hit me. She helps me up, but she’s large and in her fifties or sixties so I ignore her and I scramble to the items that rolled away on the road. I make two or three swipes to pick up the treasured ring and my phone, which is undeniably nonfunctional as it’s gone black and its screen fragmented into a million shards of itself.

I say something at her to get her to leave me alone, and she looks at me with disgust and drives away. I head into the pawn shop. “How much for this gorgeous ring?” I say, slamming the thing down onto the wood counter.

The man who turns around looks at me incredulously. “What are you doing here, Robin?” He’s got round glasses, a white beard, and receding gray hair pulled back into a rat tail, and he’s fifty-seven years old and he's my father.

“You gonna take it or not?” I say.

“You talk to me for the first time in years, and you walk into my store and act like you own the place with your head looking like it’s busted open. What the hell is wrong with you? Were you drunk driving again?” Dad says. There’s a vein popping out of his sweaty forehead.

“Tell me you’ll take it for a thousand, at least.” I hold it up to him, to entice him with the bedazzling jewels on its epicenter. Something trickles down my neck.

“Oh, son. If you needed an engagement ring, you should’ve asked me. I’ve still got mine,” he says, and he moves to take the ring from me, and I blink and it’s already in his hand by the time I think to pull away.

“I didn’t want your help. I wanted to buy something with my own hard-earned money.”

“And even with your hard-earned money you still got rejected,” he says, throwing me a side glance like I’m a piece of roadkill. “I can’t buy the whole ring off you. The most I can do is take the diamonds out and give you a loan for the band itself. But first, I’m calling you an ambulance. We’ll figure out this ring bullshit later.”

“No, no, no, I want my money now!” I say, my hands flying towards his.

Dad pockets the ring. He shakes his head and looks at me with his big, sad brown eyes. “Rob, don’t do this. Not now. Just trust me.”

My head is shaking. I touch my temple and my fingers come back bright red. Brooklyn’s words echo in my mind. It said that I would die if I kept the ring, but it didn’t say I would die if I kept the jewels. It also said that I would die because of a person I trust too much. What would happen if I took his ambulance? Would I crash and burn on the highway the same way Jason’s sister did?

“Fine,” I breathe. “Just give me my money and the diamonds, and I’ll wait for the ambulance.”

A wave of something rolls over my father, and he seems satisfied with that answer, so he uses a tool to take out the diamonds, and hands them over alongside a pathetic hundred bucks for the band. He turns around to make a call with the outdated white telephone stuck to the worn orange walls. He’s wearing a tacky bear shirt that my mom made for his birthday. The sight of it makes me want to throw up. I back out of the store silently.

The bottom of the sun brushes against the horizon. The smell of tacos hurts worse than when I had walked in, infiltrating the back of my skull, stabbing at my brain stem. The grease, the sweat, the dust in the air, the distant smoke, it’s all hurting. I can’t walk straight. If I drive like this, I’ll die. So I make it to the nearest bus stop and I sit. I’ll pick my car up later, somehow. I don’t need Dad’s help. I’ve built my life myself from the ground up and I don’t need him to save me. I’ve tripped on worse, so I know that I can handle it until the bus hits the nearest hospital.

The smell of tacos hits me, and I whip around to see a stiff skinny guy standing some feet away. He’s not close enough to make conversation with, but not far enough to pretend like he’s not there. He has hollowed-out looking blue eyes, staring straight at me, his mouth slightly agape like he’s trying to say something but he isn’t. I mumble something at him and look back into the horizon. His stench is killing me.

The next time I look up, the sky’s a yellow-peach color, and an awful brakes-shrieking noise comes and I’m on the bus. It’s filled with dark people with dark looks on their faces. Their smells are going to put me into a coma—it’s like getting stuck in a pot full of anchovies. I’ve never been surrounded by so many car-less people dressed in such bleak gray clothes. Every bump on the bus sends a hurdle of violent vibrations into my cranium. My blood’s dripping onto my lap, but it’s not warm. Or maybe my whole body’s so warm that the blood feels normal.

An undefinable amount of time passes. My next thought occurs once the fog stench lifts considerably, and the bus is devoid of all those people, and I’ve long missed the stop to the hospital. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’ve gotta get off now. My footsteps grind against the scuffed metal flooring and echo off the empty ceiling and I stumble out onto the pavement. I’m in a neighborhood I’ve never seen before. There are jagged concrete walls blockading every corner of every street. Hollow wooden houses scatter among the wisps of trees, as if someone had dropped a giant bag of apples on the ground and decided to build homes wherever they landed. None of this is making any sense. I walk along the road. One foot in front of the other. Left, right, right, left. Something small and white peeks out behind a tree and I collapse against a concrete wall. Brooklyn looks up at me with golden shining eyes.

“Am I in hell?” I say.

“No, Rob, ya idiot. You’re among the poors.” I bend down and pick it up by the scruff of its neck, and it doesn’t fight back. My hand is dustier and dirtier than its fur.

“How do I get out of this alive?” I say.

“You can’t stick to that voice ya trust so much.”

I get a whiff of tacos. There’s that skinny guy from earlier, looking into me. His cheeks are gaunt and his blue eyes shine gray in the violent red light of the sky.

“Hey, call me an ambulance, please,” I say. The guy jumps in his own skin.

“What?” He says. I repeat myself. “What?” He says again. Can you not fucking hear me? Am I fucking mumbling now? His arm is shaking and bleeding. He’s holding a knife in his hand.

I shuffle to grab the hundred dollar bill I got from the pawn shop. I hold it out to him but he isn’t looking at it. He isn’t even looking at me. He’s looking through me.

“I saw those diamonds you were holding outside that store,” he mumbles. His throat sounds patched. “Give me those diamonds. I need ‘em.”

“What for?” I choke out. His brow bone is barely defined and his chin goes in and he’s hunched over and his feet are too big for his legs. He’s the ugliest guy I’ve ever seen. He can’t be a day over sixteen. His right eyelid is purple. Was he getting beat up in that fucking taco shop?

“I’m gonna show ‘em to my buds,” he says. “I’m gonna sell ‘em and use the money to buy myself a girlfriend.”

“They’re my diamonds and they’re for my girlfriend.”

“You can’t get yourself a girlfriend, mister, you’re the ugliest guy I’ve ever seen,” the kid mumbles. The neighborhood is drenched in red, except for the cold gray of his eyes. I’m looking into the eyes of a baby. His hollow face and his poor stench makes me want to retch all over the concrete wall. He says, “You don’t need those. I need them. I’ll use ‘em to get into college.”

“Just get a fucking job, you worthless sack,” I say.

“I’m not a worthless sack,” the kid says. “I’m the smartest guy I know.”

“You’re not. You think you know everything but you don’t,” I mumble. “These diamonds won’t buy you popularity with your buds, or any girls, no matter how sexy or into you she is—”

“I’m not listenin’ to you, dumb fuck,” the kid mutters, and he steps forward so clumsy and stupid, but my limbs won’t catch up with my brain commands and his seven dollar gas station pocket knife goes three inches into my side and I fall onto the concrete.

My three hundred dollar coat gets stripped off my body and with it goes my diamonds. His shoes disappear. My hand crawls to my pocket to call someone but my phone’s broken.

All I can see is the reflection from my blood on the concrete. The sky’s turning dark. The sun inches further and further down the horizon, until something new appears and the brightest thing in that puddle is the whitest blur of fluff I’ve ever seen, like a blinding lighthouse over a midnight sea.

I’m gonna kill you in hell. I should’ve never listened to you.

“You didn’t listen to me, Rob. You only listened to yourself.”

#short story

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