Numero Uno

It's the last few minutes of today, and I have been challenged to 30+ Days of Poetry and Prose by a fellow gypsy writer. I will not be taking part in the poetry part, as I'm way too verbose to write that shit, but you, dear reader, can look forward to at least 500 daily words of hot, hard, original fiction straight from my fingertips. 

Day 1:

As the words fell from he mouth, he knew he had made a bad decision. They fell like brittle bricks onto the worn carpet, their edges crumbling to ruddy powder. But her dress was so low-cut, and she was so sexy when she cried. 

He could recount with unsettling detail every time he had seen her shed those glorious tears. The first time was in college while she was collapsed on a bathroom floor, reeking of tequila and her head in the toilet. “Why doesn’t he love me?” she moaned between heaves. “He’s an asshole, sugar,” her fat friend, Bethany, cooed. She glared at him before slamming the bathroom door in his face.

The last time--before this time, of course--was at the mouth of the Chicago Blue Line stop and he was across the street.  She was yelling into her phone, eyes darting wildly and seeing only rage. The tears had forced themselves from her then, squeezing themselves from her ducts only to be furiously torn away by the back of an unmerciful hand. He wished that she would walk into oncoming traffic, so distraught and distracted, only to have him rush into the street and knock her away from the 6:13 Milwaukee bus speeding toward her. (Instead of the road, the bus driver was busy looking in the rearview mirror at the thighs of a girl in a sundress.) 

His favorite time was when he went over to the apartment she and Brad shared to buy weed. Brad opened the door and she was on the couch watching the scene in The Notebook where the old versions of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams die in the hospital bed together. Their living room was dark and the television cast a blue glow onto her, and she got up and mumbled a hello with a face wet and swollen with tears, before wiping her nose on her sweatshirt sleeve and disappearing into the bathroom. He wondered if Brad had been holding her on the couch before he knocked at the door.

Now, Brad was a pile of ashes in a jar at the front of the room, and those leaky grey eyes stared at him, her mouth twisted in a tight frown.

“What?” she said.

She had heard him the first time. Why would she ask him to repeat it? He caught his reflection in the mirror about the table that held the memorial book; he looked like he just rolled out of bed. The cuffs of his rumpled shirt were unbuttoned and his facial hair toed the nearly transparent line between fashionably scruffy and down-and-out. Either way, it was unacceptable for a funeral.

They--he didn't know who--always said deaths come in threes, and they were right. He thought, perhaps foolishly, that fate was kind and the trio would mostly be the old, sick, or mean. He never expected them to be his friends. The first was Sophia in March, whose heart gave out after she spent 10 years refusing to keep food down. Then Javier, who mixed too many unremarkable chemicals for a tragically remarkable result.

Brad was hit by a car crossing an intersection on his bike. Witnesses say he flew into the air and landed on the hood of the car before getting up, dusting off his bike and walking away. His will was stronger than his guts, though, and he bled on the inside until he died.

"What?" she said again. He suddenly wished he were the crumpled tissue clutched in her hand.

He sighed. She was going to make him say it again. "I'm totally in love with you."

Fin.