Authors: Matthew Crow
I think I’ve talked for long enough, tonight at least. By now the rooster outside is filling his lungs and a milky residue is beginning to swirl in the sky like the first
drops of cream in well-brewed coffee.
God I hate morning.
I hope you are no longer upset, Verity, and that your next letter will intone as much. I hope, too, that for your sake you’re in control of whatever situation you have gotten yourself
into, and for what it’s worth you’re forever in my thoughts.
If possible - and not too much to ask - please keep your fingers crossed for me tomorrow. As well as financial reasons (a pressing matter in themselves) the solitude of unemployment in an alien
town is beginning to take its toll. I sometimes forget where my thoughts stop and the real world starts. Only yesterday I walked into the town’s general store and instinctively went to open a
beer straight out of the fridge. It’s the company I miss. Nothing quite as grandiose as camaraderie. Even an occasional pleasantry with a day-to-day face should just about do it. And sadly it
seems that paid and regular employment is the only way I will achieve this small luxury, at least for now.
Thank heavens we have one another, is all I can say.
With love,
Jonah
Dear Jonah,
Four days ago I woke to total darkness.
I pounded for what seemed an eternity; though common sense suggested no answer was forthcoming. To my side I felt an object whose texture seemed familiar yet without the appropriate senses to
hand its specifics remained uncertain. It was about the size of a withered bunch of grapes and vaguely lifelike, with a coldness running through like a tiny prosthetic limb. As time lapsed the air
became thick and gelatinous within my grave (and how certain I was that I was witnessing my own burial), until finally a moment of calm took over. I remained immobile, cocooned and oddly safe.
Echoes of an outside world entirely separate from me played on like I was falling asleep to a movie I was desperate to see the end of. My memory of events is foggy at best. My one moment of clarity
came when I searched for your face in the darkness. It wasn’t there. Even if it was I’m not entirely sure I’d have known. I could see you a dozen times a day and, quite frankly
Jonah, pass you as though a stranger.
The surprise of my surroundings seemed to repeat itself a number of times - each time with the same thump of fear like a blow to the stomach - as to suggest that I was slipping in and out of
consciousness with an alarming regularity. When I awoke one final time I pressed my cramping feet against the solid mass above me and pushed with all my might. I felt the invisible texture - metal,
I had concluded, hollow, but coated in fabric - give an inch or two with each press. I felt the shape shift beneath my feet and heard something to my right move out of itself, like a bullet from a
silenced pistol. There shone a glimmer of light to my right-hand side that disappeared like a shy ghost. Another kick. Another tease of light. My desperation mounted until I was pressing upwards,
back arched, with every ounce of power my body had.
The trunk of the car flew open and an arid warmth surrounded me like fire. The tears from my eyes flowed freely but were extinguished on impact by the sting of heat and the sandblast of the
desert around me. I crawled out of the car, knock-kneed and gelatinous, before hitting the ground in a withered mass of limbs and gravity where I unfurled gradually to my body’s own timing,
like a crumpled receipt in a wastebasket.
I scanned the endless horizon; sterile and scorched in every direction, with barely a cactus to observe my ordeal, and then found myself crawling frantically back inside the trunk of the car, no
longer so sure of the possibilities or even the benefits of an outside life. The roof of the trunk I kept gaping at all times, like I was the commanding tongue in a dislocated jaw, eager not to let
a change in wind and an obliging mechanism yank me screaming back to the point at which I awoke.
Two large, solid furrows flanked my buttocks and a slight discharge had begun to seep from the roof. Brown, Jonah, like drying blood, and almost exactly the same colour as the scarf you once
sent me, which I treasure to this day. Wires hung frail and uncertain; stripped bare at the point of insertion from what must have been decades of shoddy workmanship. The overall impression was
that this car had been solely maintained for situations such as this; the quick and effective removal of hazardous waste, i.e. myself.
I suspect I would have remained in that car for the rest of my natural life, until sand and starvation petrified my corpse into some ancient ruin, had it not been for my
natural curiosity and an ever prevalent gag reflex. Were that the case my previous letter would surely have been my last; a fact that would have been high up on my list of regrets.
With little to occupy myself with save the swirling sand dance that stung my exposed ankles I felt that same object pressing against my leg. It reminded me of something though
still I couldn’t claim what. Leaning forward - tricky, given the excitement of the preceding events I was only just beginning to realise the severity of my physical condition, which was
unpleasant at best - I went to pick it up.
I screamed Jonah, God knows I screamed. First just the once. And then again with the force in which I threw myself against the back of the trunk causing
the roof to slam down onto my already tender head. The third time I screamed at the thought of being held captive next to something so awful. I kicked the roof open, easier this time, thank God,
and fell back onto the sand, this time my insides retching until a steady stream of bile, intersected with occasional fragments of tortured food, began to mix with the dust and form a sour smelling
gloop not entirely dissimilar to breakfast oats.
It was a hand. Human. This in itself was apt to induce shock. But the true horror was that I knew it to be Eve’s. My sudden ejection from the car had caused it to bounce upwards and hang
grotesquely across the bottom lip of the trunk like the final strand of linguine of a giant’s feast. It had been severed above the wrist, allowing perhaps three or four inches of that sweet,
slender arm to change so suddenly from its once glowing china white to a crueller hue – older, almost, and damaged, like a well thumbed novel left out in the sun. Her fingers were still
splayed, with each nail painted a sophisticated purple. Around the wrist the bracelet was wrapped - gold; cold and mocking - as much a warning to me as anything else.
I steeled myself over the next half hour. The only indication of any real timescale was the increasingly lingering prickle of heat at the back of my neck. I had been granted the dignity of my
clothes, a gentlemanly final touch that no doubt saved my life, and eventually managed to prize the bracelet from Eve’s severed limb.
Your apology was characteristic and appreciated Jonah, but in hindsight I fear slightly misplaced. Your original misgivings were perhaps more acute than my blinkered notion of
events. That said I ventured onto this path not as innocently as I would have led you to believe. Honesty, above all else, is what I prize between us, and I know you do too, yet for the past few
months I have been inhibiting this unspoken code, yet plan to rectify said misdemeanour if only you’ll grant me the chance. J was not simply a gentleman with a shifty eye and a questionable
entourage whom I met in the coffee shop, nor were my dealings with him strictly of the heart or flesh. There was calculation, on my part and his, and I fear that they are far from over. I had
planned to tell you this all along, though feared... well, I just feared, Jonah. You’re the only unmoving positive I seem to have ever had. The thought of losing you pressed heavily on me and
so I perhaps omitted certain details which I felt might displease you. And now feels as good a time as any to begin to fill you in on the previous two months which culminated in me being left for
dead in the trunk of a car with only my best friend’s severed hand for company.
But first things first.
I write to you now from a peeling back room in the type of motel where married men show poor young girls the real value of money, and where accented drug dealers begin empires that will go on to
terrorise communities for years to come.
“How you wanna pay, lady?” asked the man on reception. “We do hourly, nightly, or by the week.”
“By the week should suffice,” I said in my haughtiest tones.
I had, in my blind panic, managed to secure a change of clothes, yet still the grubby marks of the desert and the not-quite-cleaned traces of blood clung to my flesh. The thought of my scent is
enough to make me hide my face in shame even now; three showers and nigh on twenty hours of sleep later. The only reason for choosing this particular establishment was that other than requiring a
safe and distant place to recuperate, my appearance would have caused little stir. Even as I checked in (false name, indoor shades) a recently married couple began touching what I can only describe
as third base on the waxy sofa beneath the neon vacancy sign as their young child shot a pellet gun at the wall.
“Sign here, here, and here Miss Neave and you’ll be in room 147. Pool view.”
“Perfect.”
I used to adore these hotels as a girl. Real life plays out like cabaret in hotels like these up and down the country. The sort of life you don’t hear about, and the sort
of life you do. We were next door but one from the beauty queen and the talk show host the night before the story hit the papers, and I got my first period in our en suite at the Coconut Grove
Nebraska. I lost my virginity to a janitor in the laundry room of The Flamingo Park Lodge Wyoming. Those single-serving packets of fabric softener still send a shiver down my spine.
What else is there?
I have the bare essentials. A bed, a desk at either side, two lamps, one of which works, the other provides a mild electric shock and so not worth the effort for the flickering illumination it
emits. The heating kicks in at regular intervals which I can neither control nor tolerate, and so am left to pace the room in just my underwear as having to hand-wash my clothes is proving
particularly arduous and increasingly risky (there has been no indication as to a repeat delivery of tiny soap discs). Everything is here, I suppose. I daresay I could live the rest of my life in
this tiny room, so functional and sterile. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the lives most other people live. Only the square footage would mark it out as in any way eccentric.
However, there are downsides.
The strip lamp above the bathroom mirror acts as a cruel reminder of the fallibility of the human form. Each time I step out of the shower the floor-length stretch of reflective surface seems to
capture me at my least attractive, my many imperfections unavoidable. I look both huge and tiny all at once in that mirror with that light on, and as such have taken to showering in the dark.
The less said about the room service breakfast the better.
The bed itself is not entirely unsatisfactory, though the unmistakable human stench - the faint top-notes of sweat and sex that are replaced in classier establishments by chemical neutrality -
seems to seep through each and every fabric. It crawls from the dewy walls and up from the carpet so worn as to be almost redundant.
Worse still is that all I have been gifted are the twin atrocities of daytime television and a pocket bible to occupy myself with. Someone has stolen the New Testament. Ripped it clean out like
a coupon. Did I mention that? Whether an act of calculated rebellion or simply wanton destruction I do not know. All I can say is that having been forced to spend forty-eight hours and counting
with nothing but myself for company, it feels like a personal attempt on my sanity to deny me of such stimulus. I find myself loathing the perpetrator regardless of his or her intentions and ache
only for the thrill of Lazarus’ rise.
And so all I have is you. Your letters (another essential I was able to secure) and the thought that somewhere, something good exists in my life. For now that seems enough to get by on.
The sun was at its fiercest when I began my trek. Sand blistered my feet and I swear that each time I’d reach a landmark I had set myself - pass a stone I’d had my eye upon, or a
winking shard of glass - the expanse would stretch once more before my eyes like a cartoon corridor. Overhead two vultures swooped in and out of one another with an ugly wisdom. Even when so weak I
could taste death on my tongue like vinegar, the beauty of the desert was not lost on me. That enormity gets inside of you. Sizes and shapes stop mattering when you have nothing to compare them to.
When it is just you and the world. The scrape of my foot against a clump of rock became deafening, yet the pain that had wrapped around me seemed to stop mattering. It was as if my feet said,
‘we’re getting out of here, with or without you.’ And so I became almost dead, led by the same strength that must enable most women to give birth. Attempting to make tangible the
hideousness of the situation - to even think it could be quantified via such lowly mediums as tears or tantrums - seemed as ridiculous as it no doubt was.
So I walked.
And I walked.
My footprints disappeared behind me. The car resigned itself to volatile vaults of memory. The severed hand already on its slow return to nothingness, like the opposite of birth.
God I was thirsty.
It grew dark and then light and then dark again. The speed at which the cold arrived like a net cast out to sea seemed almost rude. But I didn’t stop.
On the second morning the landscape became more varied. Mounds appeared where before there had only been flat, and with each step the terrain became increasingly rugged, like the drawings of a
heartbeat under attack. A tyre lay decomposing, buried in the sand. I touched it and it felt precious. In the distance I saw two dogs. They were either fighting or mating, though I was unable to
tell which. As I drew closer a small cluster of buildings began to take shape: a gas station, a convenience store. I heard a wind chime jangle to the sweet soul of an invisible conductor. A
makeshift bar. Two old men - toothless and gaunt - sat silently on a porch. Outlines began to rise like steam from a city grate. I heard the rhythm of my breath change and felt myself become fuller
as their shapes began to calcify.