He recognizes the boy above her, all dark hair and broad shoulders. Danny. His head thrown back in ecstasy as Shira giggles and gasps.
I squeeze my eyes shut, clenching my hands into fists. Danny’s crucifix cuts into the palm as tears burn in my eyes. The medal above my heart is ice-cold. Rage and hate vie for control as my attention returns to that other Kyle.
He backs away from the trailer, rage trickling in to fill the sudden emptiness. But rage quickly succumbs to hate, and nothing will make that feeling go away…except fire.
There’s one of Danny’s cigarettes in his back pocket. He lights it with matches he found in the kitchen. The Throbbing Strawberry Motel, the lettering in garish pink.
“Do you love me?” Shira asks, seeming not to care who hears because no one’s supposed to be within a mile of the trailer.
“
Dios mio
, yes,” Danny says.
“Does it feel good?” She drags her nails down his shoulders.
Kyle can’t look away.
“Better than with Kyle?”
Danny rolls over and now it’s Shira on top, her long black hair swishing around her hips as she grinds away at the boy beneath her. Danny just smiles.
There are no words to describe the tar-black feelings clawing at Kyle’s heart. He presses the smoldering cigarette against his flesh. Only fire will bring an end to the ache deep inside him.
The images fast forward: Kyle siphoning gas from his dad’s truck, calling Danny and Shira, arranging the get-together out at Ghost Town. Those details, I remember. Only now I know the gas was never intended for a bonfire. It was always going to be a funeral pyre.
Danny and Shira. The two of them look so innocent. Danny kisses Kyle; Shira plays with his hair as they amble into Ghost Town, as if nothing’s happened. They’re the worst kind of sinners, pretending they’ve done nothing wrong.
Shira’s carrying a bag concealing a bottle of tequila, Danny’s got a pack of beers, and Kyle’s carrying a jerrican full of gasoline. He fingers the book of matches in his pocket, taking comfort in their presence.
The scenes skip toward midnight, to that drunken party. Beer and gasoline. Danny and Shira don’t notice the jerrican spilling its contents as it completes a circuit around the old barn in Kyle’s hands.
Kyle’s lips are numb from the tequila. The booze burning in his belly makes him brave.
“I saw you two fucking today,” he says.
Danny and Shira share a nervous look.
“Kyle, it didn’t mean anything.” Danny has the grace to look guilty.
“It didn’t mean anything?” Shira looks furious.
“Please, Shira.”
“No, Dan. Kyle has a right to know.” She turns to Kyle. “Your boyfriend here has a fight with you, says you don’t love him. I tell him I love him, like you never will, so what does he do? Whips off my clothes and starts making love to me.”
Danny tries to shut her up, but she won’t be hushed.
“That’s right. Making. Love. That’s what Dan called it. Now you tell me that doesn’t mean anything.” Shira’s battling to stand; she keeps teetering backward, about to fall over.
Kyle turns to Danny. “That true?”
“Kyle, it’ll never happen again.”
“Has it happened before?”
“Of course.” Shira cackles like a coyote as she falls to the floor.
“No, of course not. It was because of our fight, because you…” Danny chokes on his words.
“So it’s my fault you went and shagged our best friend? And I’m supposed to believe this is the first time?” Kyle is hurting, every moment driving a nail into flesh.
“You didn’t want to be with me.”
“I said I wasn’t ready to marry you.” Kyle’s hand closes on the matches in his pocket.
“Dan’s going to marry me.” Shira folded in a giggling heap of black lace, on a bed of gasoline-soaked splinters.
“Well, congratulations. You deserve each other.” Kyle pulls out the matches, strikes once, twice, lighting three at the same time.
“What are you doing?” Danny’s eyes goes wide as Kyle kicks over the jerrican. It dribbles dregs of gasoline.
It happens in slow motion. Kyle flicking the matches as Danny dives for his hand. Intoxication makes Danny slower than usual. Too slow. Kyle’s already standing a few feet from the door.
The gasoline ignites in an instant and Shira screams.
Kyle hauls the barn door shut just as Danny reaches it. His fists bash against the wood; he’s screaming for Kyle not to do it, begging him in breathless sobs.
Kyle secures a crossbeam so that the doors are locked to those on the inside. He staggers backward as the barn bursts into flames, as Danny’s and Shira’s screams rip through the night.
Rough hands haul Kyle away from the barn, shoving him to the ground. Kyle’s laughing and crying, gagging as a fist hits his solar plexus. He doesn’t recognize his assailants until he hears Gabriela shouting Daniel’s name. Angel drags her away from the door as the wood splinters and flames reach greedy fingers toward the sky. Obscura peeps blue above the horizon, the first sighting of the unwelcome visitor.
Kyle watches enraptured as the barn burns, as Angel cradles Gabriela, struggling to hold her as she thrashes, screaming Daniel’s name.
“What the hell happened, man?” Angel yells over his shoulder.
Kyle says nothing, gasping for breath, fingers buried in the dust as ash rains down around him.
“I’m calling 911.” Angel struggles to hold Gabriela as he fishes his phone out of his pocket. She’s still sobbing. As Angel makes the call, her dark gaze rests on Kyle.
“You’ll burn in hell for this,” she says.
I’m on my knees, pressing my face into the mud as the fire rages in my memory, as the wind and rain beat against my back. It takes me a moment to realize that the hiccupping sobs and mournful wails are coming from my own throat.
Footsteps squelch in the mud as someone approaches. Gentle hands pry me from the earth. She smells like Mya and sounds like Amy.
“It’s OK, Kyle. It’s over now.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Danny and Shira are dead
July 5.
Perhaps I’m supposed to feel different now that I know, now that I remember everything in excruciating detail. I don’t feel much of anything really.
I’m a murderer. There’s no going back, no magic planet bending the space-time continuum, letting me correct the mistakes of my past. The Now is all I have. Orange pajamas and chains.
“How do you feel?” Miss Aym asks, nudging the tape recorder a little closer to me. She’s wearing the same expression Amy the psychologist used to, part concern, part maternal affection under a veneer of professionalism. A lawyer, she’s all buttoned up in a pin-striped suit complete with a brooch pinned to her pocket. Looks like a squirrel, or maybe an otter, crusted with blue gems.
“How should I feel?” I ask.
“Different.” She taps her pen against a page in the open file spread across the table. We’re in a visitor’s room, sterile and unfriendly. Miss Aym’s been trying to prove that not only am I unfit to stand trial, but that the fire wasn’t even my fault on account of me being crazy. Three cheers for psychiatry.
“Why? Because now I remember?” For a moment, I forget my fractured ribs and breathe too deeply. My body aches all over from the recent beating. Nicholas the Badass and his crew of criminal miscreants have designated me the resident punching bag.
“They do this to you again?” Miss Aym gestures to my face.
I prod my swollen lip with the tip of my tongue and taste blood. “I deserved it.”
“Did you?”
“You think I don’t?”
She says nothing.
“I did it. I killed them.” Admitting it leaves me feeling empty inside like the bones of roadkill picked clean by coyotes. It’s the first time I’ve said it. The words hang in the ether, taunting me with their truth. No escaping now. The world could end, but it wouldn’t change what I did.
“Do you know why?”
“They betrayed me and I like making things burn.”
Miss Aym nods and makes a note in her file.
“And you’re going to serve time for that, in here with this bunch. Is that what you want, Kyle?”
“I’ve had worse,” I say, thanks to Dad.
The strawberry burn scars on my arm start to itch under my shirtsleeves. Cigarette burns, self-inflicted. I’m no longer some deep-fried melted monstrosity, for all the good being pretty will do me in here.
“You don’t belong here, Kyle. You should be in a psychiatric facility.”
“Drugged up and strapped down? At least here I’ll still get yard time.”
“You’re only eighteen. You don’t have to live the rest of your life behind bars.”
“The world’s better off without me.”
Miss Aym closes the file with a sigh. She gives me a long, hard stare, the kind Mya used to give me when I was pissing her off. “I’ll be back next week to discuss your options.”
“They never existed, did they?” I ask as she smooths her skirt, getting ready to leave.
“Who?” She flicks blonde hair from her dark eyes.
“My friend Mya and Amy, that psychologist.”
Miss Aym sighs. “No, Kyle, they didn’t. They’re manufactured, figments of your imagination. Coping mechanisms. Evidence of a damaged mind.”
I tug on the chains in vain. Wanting to escape is instinctual.
“So none of it was real?”
“Your mind was just trying to protect you from the harsh reality of your actions.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“What?” She arches perfectly manicured eyebrows.
“They were real. Obscura’s real too.”
“There’s no such planet, Kyle.”
“It wasn’t a dream. It was real. I felt it, saw it.” The bruises pull taut on my face as I frown. There’s no way it was all just some symptom of psychosis.
“In my opinion, you’re not fit to stand trial.” Miss Aym opens the file and scribbles a quick note before heading for the door.
“So what does that mean? No trial, no sentence? Meds and a padded cell?”
“I’ll do my best to help you.” She smiles and taps on the door for the guard. “Take care of yourself.”
* * *
Niyol’s still snoring in the bunk above me. Niyol, my cell mate, doing time for knocking off some liquor store with a bunch of
cholos.
He fancies himself a philosopher and traditionalist, says it’s in his blood, says he’s blessed by his Navajo ancestors. Wish his ancestors would bless him with a new nose so that I could get some sleep.
Moonlight slices diagonally through the tiny, barred window, illuminating the drawings tacked to the bunk. Tattered images from my comic book dream.
My hero, not so wrongly incarcerated after all. I tear the pages, shredding the story of Scarface, ending his false reality. He never had any chance of escaping. A naive hope for the impossible.
All this time, I thought I was creating fiction. Memories, distorted and warped, spill across the frames; I rip them into confetti chunks. Drawings destroyed, I turn to the next reminder of that other life.
The prom photo of the three of us. Danny, Shira, and me, all wearing smiles. I’ll never know how long they’d been screwing each other behind my back, how long Shira had hated me, wanting Danny for herself. And Danny? I’ll never know who he really loved or why he wanted both of us. I guess we weren’t really friends at all. Shira wasn’t the glue; she was the wedge driving us apart.
I’d like to remember the good times, Danny’s kisses and Shira’s fingers in my hair, but the sound of their screams reverberate inside my skull as I imagine the flesh peeling from their faces.
No amount of therapy or medication is going to change the fact of what I did. No amount of repentance, no matter how many times I say sorry and mean it; I’m still a murderer.
I want to tear the image, rend their faces, but just can’t. I shove it out of sight beneath my pillow instead.
Niyol snorts in his sleep, rolls over, creaking the springs and dislodging the remaining postcard from its moorings above me. A picture of Shiprock, the one Shira gave me a lifetime ago. Red sunset above red rock with a gold border. Red like blood or fire.
I’ll probably never get to see it again, to stand on the hogback and look out over the scrub toward Arizona, watching the storms roll in across the mesa.
The moonlight changes, a subtle shift from silver to blue as I turn the card over in my hand. The poetry and Shira’s handwriting taunt me.
The light spilling through the bars is glowing brighter now, casting an azure glow across the sheet. A thin stream of blood dribbles out of my nose.
Barefoot, I slip from bed and shuffle backward, peering up at the window until I have a clearer line of sight.
There’s a familiar face behind the bars: Obscura, blushing blue and grinning down at me. Obscura. If the planet is real…pain skewers my brain, blurring my vision. Snatches of conversation come back to haunt me. I should’ve listened to Professor Cruz. Or maybe this is it, the quantum event to end the entanglement.
I wait to feel different, but minutes shuffle past and nothing changes.
I try to blink Obscura away, but she remains tethered in the sky, a symbol of hope. If the blue rock is still up there, then maybe this reality isn’t fixed in stone, isn’t the only universe in which I exist…if I exist at all.
I try to recite the words of the poem, but they catch in my throat as the postcard shrivels in my hands. Paper margins consumed by blue flame, turning to ash, and pouring through my fingers. The bars across the window ripple, becoming liquid drips like melted candle wax. Obscura overwhelms my senses, drenching me in blue.
What was it Mya said? The agony of a bursting supernova inside my head makes mincemeat of my thoughts. That maybe I didn’t have to choose…that maybe I should let the right reality choose me.
The world beyond my window draws closer, a portal to another self. Flames lick at my fingertips, burning cold fire through my skin, igniting my veins.
I don’t know where this’ll take me. My flesh turns to dust. With a final breath…I shift.
~ About the Author ~