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windshield spiderwebbing
He’d held it together while in captivity, but feeling the pavement jarring his heels, breathing the candied smell of vape pensand the waft of grease and potato from the In-N-Out a block over, he sensed the pieces of his capture shifting inside him, sharp bits with jagged edges.
man slumped forward, face in his bowl of soup
He neared the lobby now, images and sensations churning, the barrier between past and present as thin as a film of ice laid atop a well-shaken martini. Screwing his thoughts together, he entered through the glass front doors, Joaquin greeting him from behind the security desk.
“Hello, Mr. Smoak.”
other boys’ feet pounding him awake
Evan tried to focus on Joaquin’s words, lost them, identified what he was saying by tone and cadence:“Small talk small talk small talk.”Joaquin gave him a grin, reaching to summon the elevator.“Small talk?”
Evan nodded, guessed at the meaning, forced an answer up through the constricted channel of his throat.“Small talk.”
fat-barreled grenade launcher
On numb legs he moved to the elevator door. A flurry of movement from the sofa facing the tall windows looking out at Wilshire Boulevard. And then Lorilee Smithson, 3F, beelining for him.
He turned away as he entered the elevator, but she boarded with him, chirping into his shoulder.“Small talk small talk small talk small talk.”
He said, “Uh-huh.”
“Small talk small talk.”She was looking at him now, her Botox-enhanced face shifting into its best approximation of kindly concern. The moment demanded that he meet her gaze. He stared at her, straining to focus.
She rested a manicured hand on his shoulder—
palm against his cheek
—and leaned in, her face spackled with foundation. Her perfume was sickly-sweet, heavy with orchid. A rare crease marked the space between her eyebrows. He forced himself back to the present to take in her words. “Looks likesomeone’sgot a bad case of the crummies.”
He initiated the muscles on his cheeks, pulled his mouth intosomething resembling a pleasant resting shape.“Small,”he said,“talk.”His eyes stabbed past her luxuriant blowout at the elevator numbers. A ding for the third floor, Lorilee’s floor, and then he armed the doors as if to hasten their parting and ushered her out.
She stared back at him, blinking, until the car stitched itself shut once more, wiping her from view.
He blew out a breath, sagged against the wall, buttressing himself with a hip jammed into the thick metal rail.
symphony of paranoia
Now stepping out of the elevator.
gripping a Makarov pistol
Now walking down the hallway.
bright orange stripe around the muzzle
Now opening his door.
his flesh and fiber no longer obeying him
Now stripping off his clothes, boots, socks, boxer briefs, shoving the bundle into the fireplace, stoking up two cedar logs, incinerating all evidence of the outside world that had stained him.
sweat cooling at his hairline
Now into the shower, hot enough to raise welts, scrubbing at his arms, legs, chest with peppermint soap that made his skin burn clean.
drooling blood onto the asphalt
