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The new day sky dripped with the muddy orange of a fresh autumn, and Jesse slumped in his stupor halfway off the curb underneath the bus stop, illuminated now only dimly, the lamplight in wavering competition with the sun. He was a faux-roller of sorts, mostly overcompensated in his slicked hair and expensive taste; it was as if he’d welded images of some New York City rapper and the pictures his mother yearned his father would return to. In fact, though, he was neither of these things, not for a lack of trying.

His face read that of someone too excited in the fetishizing of his own sadness, his own pain, as much as he knew it wasn’t anything special; it never is, but he was damn sure not to let anyone think that. He drowned himself in the evaporated breaths of his father’s old flask, something he’d swiped from his sock drawer before leaving home, and the dreamlike state mustered from the supposed uniqueness of his very own suffering. It was like candy to him.

Fall was young still, before the leaves had all begun to change and long before he could hear it in the crunch… crunch… crunchof their carcasses under thick leather. But he could feel it, the quick and harmless bite of a toothless puppy, making him regret the negligence of grabbing his windbreaker before heading out, though, he hadn’t but the fuzziest recollection of that process. He had hurriedly left his apartment the night before, though late as it was no one could feel the rush, the pinch of time, quite like he could. His destination had been his own, as his suffering was, as his fear was, folding his every cell careful to mind the overlapping of creases, yet jammed into an envelope and mailed back home.

The liquor store off Center Avenue had sufficed, as much as he needed it too. Dingy old thing, now mocking him from across the street, worn out red paint ever chipping away as if teasing the average passerby of something more underneath. He’d remembered to keep filling the flask, to the tip top each and every time, careful not to let loose unto the gravel the ichor of his congealing sadness.

Not that he could blame Tyler for all of this, though secretly he kept that marginalization tucked behind his ear in case he’d begun to feel too much; these habits were all his own, and he felt guilty blaming solely the catalyst. Even still, only he himself could stand to reap those forlorn consequences.

The world still spun, faster, faster now until all that remained was the lamplight, dim to the naked eye yet blazing with the heat of pure sunshine. Closing his eyes made it worse, and he could still feel it barraging its way through the cracks of his eyelids. Silence, then, as if mechanized, the loudest buzzing he’d ever heard. Louder, and louder still it grew in his ears like he’d been trapped in the machine itself, a cog, nay, a loose ring from one of the workers who’d ran things that day… loosened from careless fingers and now thrust into a world he hadn’t been built for. He was disruption, chaos, and as much as he damaged the inner-workings of that great machine, he knew as well as a saddened hand that he was the only one who wouldn’t make it out in one piece.

Peeking through, carefully, he located the source of his trauma; a pair of fruit flies flew overhead entranced by the still-shining grace of the lamp post. Together they danced as if in preparation for battle, or some tribal ritual. Continuously now they buzzed, the larger of the two seeming to boom his battlecry, egging his inferior on in a bloodlust toward the plexiglass casing. Thud… thud… thud now like a kamikaze pilot dive bombing his target the smaller fly complied with the howling of his superior. Thud… thud… silence. Silence? Prolonged as it was until… thud once more on the cracked beige of the sidewalk. 

It was then that Jesse imagined if the rest of the flies would write an obituary as delicately as Tyler’s mother had written his. Careful not to speak too boldly, for her son’s sake; he had never been one to really cause a fuss. But as in all things, they’d been products, a loose ring spat out of some ethereal mechanation, a fly coaxed into a forward thrash, a man with a gun in his hand and nowhere to go, a parenthesis to document the life of someone who’d been loved, perhaps not quite as richly as he should have been. And with a swig he’d taken off, standing upright as proud as he could have been, and by the time he’d straightened his back any thought of the fly, or Tyler, had completely disappeared. Jesse stepped off the sidewalk, aiming across the street, with a crunch, comforted by the fact that he didn’t believe in ghosts.

About the Author

Ryan Repholz is a Junior English and Education major. He enjoys reading and writing literature of all kinds.