The Me You See
Authors: Shay Ray Stevens
the me
you see
Shay
Ray Stevens
This
is a work of fiction.
All of
the characters, organizations, and events
portrayed
in this novel are either
products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright
2014 by Shay Ray Stevens
All
rights reserved.
Cover
Design by Moore Creative Studios
Editing
by Todd Barselow
ISBN:
978-1502402455
This
book is protected under
the
copyright laws of the United States of America.
Any
reproduction or unauthorized use of
the
material within is prohibited
without
the expressed consent of the author.
To
those who have figured out who they are
apart
from what people say they should be.
the me
you see
-Stefia-
I lay sprawled out on the stage with two bullets in my
chest. Gurgling. Spitting. Gagging on blood. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t
breathe. I stared up at the lights and fixated on the question of why no one
had bothered to pull the curtain.
End of the show, folks.
But they didn’t pull the curtain. They couldn’t look away.
Carly held on for a minute. She had turned quickly when she
saw the gun and was hit right in the ear. The bullet came with a pop and
cracked its way through cartilage and bone and finally came to rest somewhere
in the fleshy part of her head. I don’t think she felt anything. There is
comfort in that.
Erick was also shot in the head but from a different angle.
It was nothing like in the movies. Death from a gunshot wound in real life is
nothing like a gunshot wound on the big screen. Being shot in real life is
somehow less dramatic. Bodies move differently. I guess it’s something you
can’t fake for the camera.
Tony ran and was hit in the back. He fell forward, his
chest slamming into the black wood of the stage floor while profanity sloshed
out of his mouth. He gulped for air and died mid-inhale. I thought about Tony’s
younger brother, a master video gamer, and wondered if he’d be able to shoot
the pixelated bad guys anymore without thinking about his oldest brother’s very
public demise.
A bullet caught Bobby’s arm which spun him around. He
pleaded and said, “Stop. You don’t mean to do this. You don’t want to…” The
second bullet went right through his face; centered between his nose and left
cheekbone. His cheekbones were so nice. It’s how he got that modeling job with
Dinecktos
.
They hadn’t even had to airbrush him. I remember he had been pretty proud of
that.
Aubrey hid behind the curtain and was shot three times. I
don’t know where she was hit but within seconds she had crumpled down and sat
with her pretty white lace costume in a puddle of her own blood.
Then me, Stefia. Two in the chest, one in the head. Down I
went, the last to go. There’s no time to think when you’re looking down the
barrel of a gun. That whole life flashing in front of your eyes thing? It’s a
total crock of shit. I’m telling you, there’s no time to think about what you
haven’t done or should have done or want to do. There’s no time for any of it.
I spit. I gurgled. I choked.
I died.
That’s how it happened.
Everyone thinks that death is dramatic but really it’s
quick. It’s so quick. It is done and over with and the people who are left
alive hold on to that last convulsing messy breath, and that’s what they
remember. That’s what sticks with them.
It’s what they see.
It’s like when you’ve got that dog that looks so
pathetically ill and you can’t decide whether or not to put it to sleep or let
it hang on for one more day. And you finally decide that it’s time to let the
dog go and you take it in for its overdose of anesthesia and you sob and sob
because he’s taken his last breath. And you hold onto the hurt of those last
minutes. How it was hard to breathe. How he was in so much pain. But really,
the death isn’t what hurts.
And maybe that’s what I want people to know. Because people
will worry and wonder and talk about it. It’s not the death that hurts. It’s
all the stuff that leads up to it.
Actual death is quick.
We all think we are so protected. So careful. We think we
take the right precautions to be safe. And yet the irony is that the things we
need to worry about, we don’t. We don’t concern ourselves with the random
things that blindside us on some stagnant Thursday in February. We don’t care
about things that we don’t believe add up to the big picture.
But it all adds up. The little pieces make up the big one.
And we are so unprotected.
He just happened to be there. He just happened to stand up
and draw his gun. Did he even think about it? Did his day start out the same as
any other and just happened to end with a gun in his hand?
Lubbock said what we see depends mainly on what we look
for. And really, life is all about what we see. It’s the visual. The
presentation. That’s how we take it in and figure out what’s what.
In the end, we are only the stories that people tell about
us.
This, then, is the story of me.
Or at least the me you see.
It’s quiet like death but smells like pancakes. I open my
eyes and blink.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
I think I hate this day.
I pull on yoga pants and the bright pink hoodie I’d hung on
my doorknob the night before and schlep down the stairs. No one says anything
when I enter the living room even though twelve people stand there. The room is
so quiet and their thoughts so loud I can almost read them across their
foreheads like a crawler on the bottom of a news screen.
Poor Naomi.
It’s so sad.
What a shame.
Dad sits at the kitchen table with Aunt Melanie. They don’t
make eye contact. They don’t talk. No one says anything.
No one ever says anything.
It turns out the pancake smell comes from freshly baked
caramel rolls that the neighbors brought over because at times like this,
people bake and bring it all to you because they don’t know what else to do.
We’re supposed to eat the caramel rolls and chew our way through the sadness
and frustration and wordless discomfort.
But no one touches the caramel rolls. No one says anything.
No one ever says anything.
To be fair, people often stay quiet simply because they
don’t know what to say. My sister Stefia never had that problem. I could depend
on her to break the silence, to interject something funny or witty or
intelligent. Stefia kept a multitude of words on the tip of her tongue, ready
to aim a much needed phrase at just the right spot. Invariably, her remark was
perfect and people always listened.
But then, that was Stefia. When she spoke, people gathered
at her feet. My sister could have read the ingredients from a bar of soap and
her audience would have proclaimed it to be the most magical thing they’d ever
heard.
Stefia had been poured from of a tall glass of perfection;
my mother’s alluring beauty and my father’s come-what-may disposition had been
flawlessly combined into one person and offered to the rest of us as a gift. I
always imagined that God had placed her in my mother’s womb with a note that
said, “A masterpiece. Enjoy.”
But then the shooting happened, and she fell as though the
walls of the Sistine Chapel itself had crumbled, leaving nothing but shattered
fragments on a squalid floor.
So now we cry. We look at caramel rolls. And we tiptoe
around a loss of words because the person who used to speak for all of us is no
longer here.
**
I know that Things Happen. Kids get run over by cars.
Houses catch on fire. Cars bust through ice and sink to the bottom of lakes.
People get shot.
It’s reality.
I know about reality. In reality, people leave and don’t
come back. I remember waking up four years ago when I was twelve and knowing in
my heart that my mom was not coming home. We had piled her mail in the middle
of the dining room table and one of the cats had jumped up while chasing a fly
and knocked the pile over. No one picked it up.
That’s how I knew she wasn’t coming back. Because no one
cared enough to pick up her mail.
Eventually mom’s toppled pile of letters and bills grew
into such a mess that we were actually kicking them around. People talk about
having a giant elephant in the room—which generally can only be felt, not
seen—but our giant elephant was physically manifested in a growing pile of
mail.
After two weeks of tripping around mom’s junk from the postal
service, I suspected nothing had been added to the mountain in a while. A week
later, I was positive no new envelopes addressed to her had been delivered to
the house. I was old enough to realize mom was somewhere and had requested an
address change. That was about the time dad yelled at us all to throw the pile
away. So Stefia and Gabriella and I all tossed piece after piece of mail into a
giant contractor’s garbage bag and lugged it out to the trash can at the end of
the driveway.
An elephant made up of an absent person’s mail is heavy and
hard to dump.
Dad sat all three of his girls down that night and said, “I
don’t know where your mom is. I don’t know why she left. All I know is she’s
gone.” Then he went out into the garage to work on his car, like he’d done
nothing more than tell us the internet was down or the coffee pot was broken.
Gabriella pounded her fists into the beanbag chair she was
on and cried. Then she flung obscenities that an eleven-year-old shouldn’t know
at the air dad had left when he walked out the front door. Stefia, almost
fourteen, sat on the couch and stared blankly out the window at the huge tree
in our front yard. I was twelve and figured the best thing I could do was leave
the house and run down the sidewalk as far as it would take me. Because I was
twelve, and I didn’t know how to change what had just happened.