Don’t Talk, Just Listen
By
Anthony Ceschini
Don't talk, just listen.
I found an ugly twin of the place I'd left behind. Sooty brick buildings veiled the cleaner shopping plaza, the fire hall and church. The Broken Arrow was hopeless, a tooth rotted from the inside and left alone because it would hurt more to pull. Inside was early onset winter blues. I mistook the sad, quiet drinkers for broken stools. They seemed to pick up on my mistake. When I sat down in the furthest corner they began dissecting me, a sensation I'd learned to accept, savor. My trick was to give them Grade A prick for their cutting tools. Everyone remembers a silent, shifty-eyed creep. But the obnoxious loudmouth who drums with his knuckles, pivoting so that his rusty stool groans over the Steelers game, hardly warrants gossip, and he barely leaves on two working feet.
If that girl hadn't stepped up, my crowd would've turned savage.
“Sorry for the wait,” she said. “What'll it be for you?"
She looked you in the eyes, and had the balls to keep looking. She cut the oppressive stink of men with something soft and pomegranate. She was younger than the TV, had meat on her bones, and she didn't belong within a mile of this piss hole, let alone across the bar, from me. I barely muttered, “Screwdriver”, and it was there, as if the girl had been waiting. Instead of scurrying away, she leaned on the counter to watch my first sip. It was good. More than good. I said as much. She smirked, color filling her dimples, then vanished.
Walking through the cold, back to my car under cover of tangled foliage, I thought about steady work. Settling down. Putting on a face the locals could trust. The next day, rational, sober, I thought only about her. Every other day, in for a drink--or three. We shared small talk. We chided each other. She asked questions I didn't hesitate answering, and the answers charmed her. I wasn't like these other barflies. I was an exception. An outlier.
By the second week in Stewart I'd spent half the money rolled in my sock, and my limp was gone. I needed a place to sleep with running water. I needed a thorough washing.
I needed to shit or get off the pot.
We had bullshitted and bitched and moaned until the skies dumped four inches of snow to shut us up. I sat in The Broken Arrow's lot, radiator choking out heat, wipers tracing the bustling foot traffic. Bad music followed people outside like noxious vapor. I watched strangers I recognized drop their keys and fumble in the snow with bare hands. I watched a group of men hit on the same woman as if they had made bets. Each minute was another minute of pulling myself apart by the straggling threads, assuming the worst could get worse. She'd gotten sick, she'd called off, she'd been fired for catching the flu only on Friday nights.
She was there--bundled against the cold with her little coffee, hair trailing out the smoke-hazed doorway. What a coincidence that I'd be going in while she hurried home.
“Now I'm convinced you're stalking me,” she chaffed.
“No sir,” I said. “Just here for trivia night.”
“Trivia got cancelled. Someone puked on Pat's equipment.”
“Sounds like sabotage to me.”
“It's self-sabotage. Pat made the drinks.”
“Well. Damn. There goes my night. I was gonna come in and have you feed me the answers.”
"I'm here next week. Bring me caffeine and caramel and I'll feed you 'till you puke everywhere, and then I can leave early."
"Bribery, cheating scandals...all we need's money laundering and we can make the front page.
"Hey, you need a ride?"
No hesitation, no backtracking on a quick excuse. Just plain relief. “That'd be real sweet of you. I have no idea why I wore this thing. I knew it was gonna do this too.”
While I steered us over the lot and joined the main road, I asked where she lived. She gave the entire address. Again she thanked me, offering a stained ten.
“I don't need your hush money,” I said. “That's yours. You deserve those tips.” She couldn't decide whether to chew her lip or force a smirk, so she did both. It made me want to kiss her.
The headlights reflected back a sheet of untouched white. We left tracks behind, deep and fresh in the mirrors. She seemed distracted by them. Her chatter stalled until she was as quiet as me.
“The heck are we?” she asked. I knew it wouldn't take.
"Alpine. Isn't this Alpine?"
She let herself laugh. "That's the whole way across town, dude."
"Shit."
"Half the signs around here are gone so...can't blame you."
I nudged the brakes, and her chatter barreled ahead. She was making me feel better by telling on her dad, who'd been driving since the mid seventies and still got mixed up; but then again, he did have a backseat driver, his girlfriend, telling him which shortcuts to take so her neck didn't get jounced around too much.
Almost a mile later I felt those brown eyes, not quite slicing, but prodding. "Getting pretty bad out."
"Mm."
"Guarantee my drive's already covered."
I said nothing.
"You can drop me at the corner, if you don't want to deal with it."
I said nothing.
"So, you gonna turn around?"
"Further up." Crowds of trees faced one another on either side, moving closer as the road narrowed.
"Any further and we'll be leaving Stewart.
Dude, turn around. Seriously--"
"Please stop talking."
But her voice clawed and climbed. Words spilled out of order but precise in their meaning, and I lost my train of thought, lost my grip on the wheel. I brought out the hand inside my jacket and the blade popped against her throat, and the torrent of babble turned to blood. She opened the door, spilling onto fresh powder. I braked. Watched her in the rear view as she crawled around for a clean spot to lay, getting nowhere.
I carried her off the road like a bit of snow-capped debris. Inside the car, back where we'd started, her calm guided me. There was little time to sit and think and clean her hair. By tomorrow afternoon we could be two counties away, out of state, if I glided.
We were tearing at fifty, sixty-five in the shift of an eye, when the wheel spun. I gripped harder and jerked right. It didn't budge. And with the tires skidding, traction lost, it didn't matter. The last thing I saw was a tree beckoning, my hands lifting in a pointless, wasted gesture.
Then I woke up, staring at the passenger seat. It was ripped, covered in newspaper and wrappers. It was dry to the touch. I looked from the seat to my clean fingers, then the rearview mirror. No bloody face paint. No collapsed skull.
If I believed it was a dream, I was crazy. That idea, of being crazy, had a peculiar draw, a dignity--once you overstep sanity, what else can trip you? I swung my car around. A pick up roared past, and I watched it take the same battered road I had taken into Stewart that morning. We went our separate ways. I floored it, winding up a road in no better shape. I turned to follow a blind curve. The wheel turned left, the car veering straight towards another pick up driven by a kid who wore my certainty of death on his face. My splitting forehead made me go deaf, but even that was nothing compared to screaming myself awake, screaming so loud that I tasted copper.
There may be some dignity to being crazy. There is none whatsoever when you run through traffic, sideswiping cars, entertaining the kids waiting for their bus. There's even less when you're stopped by the wind and swept and wadded up like a paper doll with its arms torn off.
I woke up, alone--
"Oh my God."
--no thawed mud, no blood. A pick up roared past--
"Oh what the fuck God, no no, fuck no--"
--and I watched it take the same battered road I had taken into Stewart that morning.
I wasted hundreds of days in a single morning, crafting my escape, taking roads and alleys and footpaths out of town. They all circled back onto one another. I tried anyway, on foot, on wheels, once on a little girl's bike stolen right in front of her. As I worked the peddles I heard her dad booking it down the street. "Perv!" he bellowed. "Pedo!" His mouth dried when I braked and showed him the pocketknife. There was something about his face, helpless to emotion, that unfettered me. I'd done it to him. Never mind that him and his daughter would forget the worst moment of their lives. I remembered. And it helped me sleep.
After that I became a bit of a sociologist. Holler the first thing that comes to mind. Expose yourself to traffic. Steal a veteran's revolver, take pop shots at the church bell. Take the same gun, point it at your temple. Now let's see how many would-be heroes call the bluff.
Since nothing mattered but the boredom and nothing could change, except boredom, I thought I'd pick up drinking again.
Early onset winter blues. Sad broken drinkers, their raw eyes picking at me as I took my usual corner. No one, I noticed, held me down for longer than an instant. I was a true local now. I stared and never broke off. I wanted them to catch me. Let them give their first and final warning if they thought they could land a punch. I never got tired of stabbing palms.
"Now I'm convinced you're stalking me."
Her smell hit right against the breastbone, and I couldn't look up even as her silhouette splayed itself on the counter. Blood plopped into my Screwdriver. I dipped a finger, mixed the droplets around. When the glass was a foggy pink I checked on the girl. She was fine, not two hours into her shift and without a single hair out of place. But as she chatted away, about Pat, about her sleep schedule, about my complexion, the blood gushed down her apron, speckled her fingernails. The smell overtook the room. I turned away and heard pattering, I turned back around and her frown was balanced above a grinning slit in her throat.
The second time I killed her I used the stolen revolver. I spared her the slideshow of a blown life. She was gone, instantly. It was worse that way--it was too clean, too much like cutting the power. The third time, I shot her leg. She shrieked and fell and scurried. I kept pace behind her. She twisted, kicked at me, thrashed her arms. Bit my ear. I'd only just met this girl, but that evening she showed more than I suspect her closest friends had seen. Without knowing what I knew, she would never leave. We would never leave, both of us dogshit under fate's spinning tire.
I had an idea.
As if it were the eightieth take of a simple shot, she exited The Broken Arrow. She spotted me, repeated her lines. Minutes later we were driving along the usual path, with only two miles left before the wheel locked, before time rotated. I reached inside my pocket. I cocked the revolver and aimed where I'd shot her once.
“Don't talk, just listen. It's your turn to drive.”
She never talked. Only listened to the neon-trimmed signs pitch in drones along the freeway. She choked the wheel long after her fight with it was over. Thoughts plagued her, the things I'd do, the ways I hadn't touched her yet. It was exhausting to watch.
I rolled the window down. The intercity air ripped my breath apart. I took long numbing sips, closing my eyes, opening them slowly. I did this until I ached. "Look," I said finally, then tossed the gun like litter.
“There. That's it, like I said. That was for--"
Coffee exploded in my face. I screamed and bashed against the door. A rush of frozen wind braced me for impact then chucked me clear of the snowbank. My shoulder cracked, my wrist twisted, but the burning consumed these slight pains. Blindly I pressed a handful of snow into my eye sockets. When it melted I lay motionless on the road. I cried out of boredom waiting for the cops. I expected sirens, but these cruisers were soundless. Their lights strobed and coaxed and demanded I give way to the best sleep I've had this side of the womb.
I haven't slept much since telling them about the girl from Hilliard, the one in Wheeling, the Cumberland sisters. It's the fear that I'll wake up nailed to a hubcap stuck in quick sand. It's the reality of being not-quite roadkill, waiting my turn to slip under. Meanwhile, I write her letters I can't send. I ask how she's doing. I tell her she better have kept driving that night, otherwise the town will reel her back. In one draft I couldn't resist describing the different ways she died while trapped, and does she want it for real? Does she want to wait around until it's too late and she's too sick and brittle to fight?
I crumple the pages and clog the toilet with them. Next day I start from scratch.
Anthony Ceschini is a writer, a failed multitasker, an infrequent film editor, and a Ghostbusters 2 apologist. His work has been featured in Unlost: Found Poetry & Art and on the 50-Word Stories website.
By
Anthony Ceschini
Don't talk, just listen.
I found an ugly twin of the place I'd left behind. Sooty brick buildings veiled the cleaner shopping plaza, the fire hall and church. The Broken Arrow was hopeless, a tooth rotted from the inside and left alone because it would hurt more to pull. Inside was early onset winter blues. I mistook the sad, quiet drinkers for broken stools. They seemed to pick up on my mistake. When I sat down in the furthest corner they began dissecting me, a sensation I'd learned to accept, savor. My trick was to give them Grade A prick for their cutting tools. Everyone remembers a silent, shifty-eyed creep. But the obnoxious loudmouth who drums with his knuckles, pivoting so that his rusty stool groans over the Steelers game, hardly warrants gossip, and he barely leaves on two working feet.
If that girl hadn't stepped up, my crowd would've turned savage.
“Sorry for the wait,” she said. “What'll it be for you?"
She looked you in the eyes, and had the balls to keep looking. She cut the oppressive stink of men with something soft and pomegranate. She was younger than the TV, had meat on her bones, and she didn't belong within a mile of this piss hole, let alone across the bar, from me. I barely muttered, “Screwdriver”, and it was there, as if the girl had been waiting. Instead of scurrying away, she leaned on the counter to watch my first sip. It was good. More than good. I said as much. She smirked, color filling her dimples, then vanished.
Walking through the cold, back to my car under cover of tangled foliage, I thought about steady work. Settling down. Putting on a face the locals could trust. The next day, rational, sober, I thought only about her. Every other day, in for a drink--or three. We shared small talk. We chided each other. She asked questions I didn't hesitate answering, and the answers charmed her. I wasn't like these other barflies. I was an exception. An outlier.
By the second week in Stewart I'd spent half the money rolled in my sock, and my limp was gone. I needed a place to sleep with running water. I needed a thorough washing.
I needed to shit or get off the pot.
We had bullshitted and bitched and moaned until the skies dumped four inches of snow to shut us up. I sat in The Broken Arrow's lot, radiator choking out heat, wipers tracing the bustling foot traffic. Bad music followed people outside like noxious vapor. I watched strangers I recognized drop their keys and fumble in the snow with bare hands. I watched a group of men hit on the same woman as if they had made bets. Each minute was another minute of pulling myself apart by the straggling threads, assuming the worst could get worse. She'd gotten sick, she'd called off, she'd been fired for catching the flu only on Friday nights.
She was there--bundled against the cold with her little coffee, hair trailing out the smoke-hazed doorway. What a coincidence that I'd be going in while she hurried home.
“Now I'm convinced you're stalking me,” she chaffed.
“No sir,” I said. “Just here for trivia night.”
“Trivia got cancelled. Someone puked on Pat's equipment.”
“Sounds like sabotage to me.”
“It's self-sabotage. Pat made the drinks.”
“Well. Damn. There goes my night. I was gonna come in and have you feed me the answers.”
"I'm here next week. Bring me caffeine and caramel and I'll feed you 'till you puke everywhere, and then I can leave early."
"Bribery, cheating scandals...all we need's money laundering and we can make the front page.
"Hey, you need a ride?"
No hesitation, no backtracking on a quick excuse. Just plain relief. “That'd be real sweet of you. I have no idea why I wore this thing. I knew it was gonna do this too.”
While I steered us over the lot and joined the main road, I asked where she lived. She gave the entire address. Again she thanked me, offering a stained ten.
“I don't need your hush money,” I said. “That's yours. You deserve those tips.” She couldn't decide whether to chew her lip or force a smirk, so she did both. It made me want to kiss her.
The headlights reflected back a sheet of untouched white. We left tracks behind, deep and fresh in the mirrors. She seemed distracted by them. Her chatter stalled until she was as quiet as me.
“The heck are we?” she asked. I knew it wouldn't take.
"Alpine. Isn't this Alpine?"
She let herself laugh. "That's the whole way across town, dude."
"Shit."
"Half the signs around here are gone so...can't blame you."
I nudged the brakes, and her chatter barreled ahead. She was making me feel better by telling on her dad, who'd been driving since the mid seventies and still got mixed up; but then again, he did have a backseat driver, his girlfriend, telling him which shortcuts to take so her neck didn't get jounced around too much.
Almost a mile later I felt those brown eyes, not quite slicing, but prodding. "Getting pretty bad out."
"Mm."
"Guarantee my drive's already covered."
I said nothing.
"You can drop me at the corner, if you don't want to deal with it."
I said nothing.
"So, you gonna turn around?"
"Further up." Crowds of trees faced one another on either side, moving closer as the road narrowed.
"Any further and we'll be leaving Stewart.
Dude, turn around. Seriously--"
"Please stop talking."
But her voice clawed and climbed. Words spilled out of order but precise in their meaning, and I lost my train of thought, lost my grip on the wheel. I brought out the hand inside my jacket and the blade popped against her throat, and the torrent of babble turned to blood. She opened the door, spilling onto fresh powder. I braked. Watched her in the rear view as she crawled around for a clean spot to lay, getting nowhere.
I carried her off the road like a bit of snow-capped debris. Inside the car, back where we'd started, her calm guided me. There was little time to sit and think and clean her hair. By tomorrow afternoon we could be two counties away, out of state, if I glided.
We were tearing at fifty, sixty-five in the shift of an eye, when the wheel spun. I gripped harder and jerked right. It didn't budge. And with the tires skidding, traction lost, it didn't matter. The last thing I saw was a tree beckoning, my hands lifting in a pointless, wasted gesture.
Then I woke up, staring at the passenger seat. It was ripped, covered in newspaper and wrappers. It was dry to the touch. I looked from the seat to my clean fingers, then the rearview mirror. No bloody face paint. No collapsed skull.
If I believed it was a dream, I was crazy. That idea, of being crazy, had a peculiar draw, a dignity--once you overstep sanity, what else can trip you? I swung my car around. A pick up roared past, and I watched it take the same battered road I had taken into Stewart that morning. We went our separate ways. I floored it, winding up a road in no better shape. I turned to follow a blind curve. The wheel turned left, the car veering straight towards another pick up driven by a kid who wore my certainty of death on his face. My splitting forehead made me go deaf, but even that was nothing compared to screaming myself awake, screaming so loud that I tasted copper.
There may be some dignity to being crazy. There is none whatsoever when you run through traffic, sideswiping cars, entertaining the kids waiting for their bus. There's even less when you're stopped by the wind and swept and wadded up like a paper doll with its arms torn off.
I woke up, alone--
"Oh my God."
--no thawed mud, no blood. A pick up roared past--
"Oh what the fuck God, no no, fuck no--"
--and I watched it take the same battered road I had taken into Stewart that morning.
I wasted hundreds of days in a single morning, crafting my escape, taking roads and alleys and footpaths out of town. They all circled back onto one another. I tried anyway, on foot, on wheels, once on a little girl's bike stolen right in front of her. As I worked the peddles I heard her dad booking it down the street. "Perv!" he bellowed. "Pedo!" His mouth dried when I braked and showed him the pocketknife. There was something about his face, helpless to emotion, that unfettered me. I'd done it to him. Never mind that him and his daughter would forget the worst moment of their lives. I remembered. And it helped me sleep.
After that I became a bit of a sociologist. Holler the first thing that comes to mind. Expose yourself to traffic. Steal a veteran's revolver, take pop shots at the church bell. Take the same gun, point it at your temple. Now let's see how many would-be heroes call the bluff.
Since nothing mattered but the boredom and nothing could change, except boredom, I thought I'd pick up drinking again.
Early onset winter blues. Sad broken drinkers, their raw eyes picking at me as I took my usual corner. No one, I noticed, held me down for longer than an instant. I was a true local now. I stared and never broke off. I wanted them to catch me. Let them give their first and final warning if they thought they could land a punch. I never got tired of stabbing palms.
"Now I'm convinced you're stalking me."
Her smell hit right against the breastbone, and I couldn't look up even as her silhouette splayed itself on the counter. Blood plopped into my Screwdriver. I dipped a finger, mixed the droplets around. When the glass was a foggy pink I checked on the girl. She was fine, not two hours into her shift and without a single hair out of place. But as she chatted away, about Pat, about her sleep schedule, about my complexion, the blood gushed down her apron, speckled her fingernails. The smell overtook the room. I turned away and heard pattering, I turned back around and her frown was balanced above a grinning slit in her throat.
The second time I killed her I used the stolen revolver. I spared her the slideshow of a blown life. She was gone, instantly. It was worse that way--it was too clean, too much like cutting the power. The third time, I shot her leg. She shrieked and fell and scurried. I kept pace behind her. She twisted, kicked at me, thrashed her arms. Bit my ear. I'd only just met this girl, but that evening she showed more than I suspect her closest friends had seen. Without knowing what I knew, she would never leave. We would never leave, both of us dogshit under fate's spinning tire.
I had an idea.
As if it were the eightieth take of a simple shot, she exited The Broken Arrow. She spotted me, repeated her lines. Minutes later we were driving along the usual path, with only two miles left before the wheel locked, before time rotated. I reached inside my pocket. I cocked the revolver and aimed where I'd shot her once.
“Don't talk, just listen. It's your turn to drive.”
She never talked. Only listened to the neon-trimmed signs pitch in drones along the freeway. She choked the wheel long after her fight with it was over. Thoughts plagued her, the things I'd do, the ways I hadn't touched her yet. It was exhausting to watch.
I rolled the window down. The intercity air ripped my breath apart. I took long numbing sips, closing my eyes, opening them slowly. I did this until I ached. "Look," I said finally, then tossed the gun like litter.
“There. That's it, like I said. That was for--"
Coffee exploded in my face. I screamed and bashed against the door. A rush of frozen wind braced me for impact then chucked me clear of the snowbank. My shoulder cracked, my wrist twisted, but the burning consumed these slight pains. Blindly I pressed a handful of snow into my eye sockets. When it melted I lay motionless on the road. I cried out of boredom waiting for the cops. I expected sirens, but these cruisers were soundless. Their lights strobed and coaxed and demanded I give way to the best sleep I've had this side of the womb.
I haven't slept much since telling them about the girl from Hilliard, the one in Wheeling, the Cumberland sisters. It's the fear that I'll wake up nailed to a hubcap stuck in quick sand. It's the reality of being not-quite roadkill, waiting my turn to slip under. Meanwhile, I write her letters I can't send. I ask how she's doing. I tell her she better have kept driving that night, otherwise the town will reel her back. In one draft I couldn't resist describing the different ways she died while trapped, and does she want it for real? Does she want to wait around until it's too late and she's too sick and brittle to fight?
I crumple the pages and clog the toilet with them. Next day I start from scratch.
Anthony Ceschini is a writer, a failed multitasker, an infrequent film editor, and a Ghostbusters 2 apologist. His work has been featured in Unlost: Found Poetry & Art and on the 50-Word Stories website.
