Happy Rock
I withdraw my bank account and take the first train out of town. I hide out in a cheap room. A low place with rusty running water and bed bugs that will feast upon my flesh, but that's the least of my worries. I dead bolt the door and close the curtains. I convince myself that I'm free of conviction, as I load my pistol and set in on the bed. I sit by candle-light and think about how I left him back at Happy Rock. A secluded place in the woods where a rock overlooks the lake along the back side of town. It's a place we'd frequent for the sake of getting stoned; a happy place but not anymore. Had he not mentioned my time behind bars, his ball-breakin' malicious remarks about consequence and loneliness, I would not be barricading the door with the table and chairs that furnish this rat infested room. I knew he passed the instant I heard his head against the rock, his eyes gone blank. Maybe it was the drugs that made me panic, forgetting to push the body into the lake. I'm usually sharper, my senses more acute. It's too late now. I sit and wait for them to find me; to take me away, but I won't go peacefully. I listen to sirens echo throughout the vacant late night streets. I blow out the candle and sit silently in the dark.
UNDER THE TABLE
It was a friday night, and Beckett finished her off. He zipped up and ushered her out of his room, and she sank into the comfortable cushions of his couch. They weren't dating, but the feelings were mutual in a sense that there were no feelings. No emotional baggage to drag about. Her voluptuous assets kept him interested, and she stayed so long as he filled her pockets with her drugs of choice. Whatever allowed her a momentary state of ecstasy.
-Lookit dis bastard, Beckett laughed.
Having spent an hour passionately hugging the porcelain bowl, Joey was sitting adjacent to her, lounging in the recliner already coming down. They'd all been popping a variety of uppers as if the pills were a taste of the rainbow, but the fix was running its course. He seemed to be veering in and out of consciousness, cradling the bottle they'd been previously passing around. Vixie chain smoked cigarettes and watched Joey slowly fall into that state of catatonic despair to which she hoped she wasn't bound.
-Ya think he's alrite?
-He's fine, Beckett replied.
He walked over and gave Joey a swift kick to the shin. It barely startled him. His eyes only widened and briefly twitched around the room before he dozed back out. They both laughed, and she contemplated snatching the baby's bottle, but Beckett beat her to the punch.
They poured shot after shot, as if to duel, as loud down-tempo blared through the stereo speakers. They playfully mother-fucked each other awaiting a white flag, or any sign of surrender. Riled up by the persistent banter, their voices rose over the the music and filled the room with a cacophonous racket. Then it hit her.
She felt as if she forcefully threw herself against a self constructed wall of bricks. She was coming down and getting drunk harder than ever. Her heart raced a mile a minute: that blood pumping Olympian striving for unattainable hurdles. She started fidgeting, as if an ant colony were crawling along the marrow of her bones, and she doubled over as if to vomit, but collapsed to the carpet writhing and wailing.
Beckett leapt to his feet with exclamation as if out drinking a 110 lb pound girl deserved a pat on the back. He staggered about the room pumping his fists like a typecast asshole on a shitty reality show. He seemed to care less when Vixie's eyes rolled to the back of her head, her body slowly going limp on the living room floor.
Shawn Martin
Macrae is a nervous man. A paranoid and delightfully miserable man. He
is a writer. He lives in a small town somewhere in the middle of
nowhere, and when you feed him after midnight he becomes a ghostly
figment of his own imagination. That is when he writes the bleak and
often unsettling scenarios you can find haunting various online literary
venues.
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