He reached down, fingertip trembling, and touched its arm. Its hand lay open against the pillow, palm upward. Underneath the red, the flesh was white and cold. He touched the edge of the opening in its forearm. Already, the blue vein and the tendon had drawn back inside, almost hidden. The skin had started to close, the ends of the slit becoming a faint white line, that he couldn’t even feel, though he left a smeared fingerprint there. He pulled back his hand, then he turned away from the bed and stumbled out into the hallway with the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
They looked up and saw him as he walked across the bar. He didn’t push the empty chairs aside, but hit them with his legs, shoving his way past them.
His uncle Tommy scooted over, making room for him at the booth. He sat down hard, the back of his head striking the slick padding behind him.
They had all been laughing and talking just before, but they had gone quiet now. His father’s buddies fumbled with the bottles in front of them, not wanting to look at him.
His father dug out a handkerchief, a blue checked one. “Here—” A quiet voice, the softest he’d ever heard his father say anything. His father held out the handkerchief across the table. “Clean yourself up a little.”
He took the handkerchief. For a long time, he sat there and looked down at his hands and what was on them.
They were all laughing again, making noise to keep the dark pushed back. His father and his uncle and their buddies roared and shouted and pitched the empties out the windows. The car barreled along, cutting a straight line through the empty night. He laid his face into the wind. Out there, the dog ran at the edge of the darkness, its teeth bared, its eyes like bright heated coins. It ran over the stones and dry brush, keeping pace with the car, never falling behind, heading for the same destination.
The wind tore the tears from his eyes. The headlights swept across the road ahead, and he thought of the piece of paper folded in the book in his bedroom. The piece of paper meant nothing now, he could tear it into a million pieces. She’d know, too, the girl who played the flute and who’d given the piece of paper to him. She’d know when she saw him again, she’d know that things were different now, and they could never be the same again. They’d be different for her now, too. She’d know.
The tears striped his face, pushed by the wind. He wept in rage and shame at what had been stolen from him. Rage and shame that the woman down there, in the little room at the end of the street with all the lights, would be dead, would get to know over and over again what it was to die. That was what she’d stolen from him, from all of them.
He wept with rage and shame that now he was like them, he was one of them. He opened his mouth and let the wind hammer into his throat, to get out the stink and taste of his own sweat, which was just like theirs now.
The dog ran beside the car, laughing as he wept with rage and shame. Rage and shame at what he knew now, rage and shame that now he knew he’d never die.
I’m a novelist; I don’t write short stories. This is, in fact, my only one to date other than a short-short that Ellen Datlow commissioned for
