The last intact
panel of glass had blistered and so stood upright magnifying the scene outside
of the phone booth in which Russell Scales was standing.  His veins burned all up and down his arms,
clinging like vines to tree trunks.  His
temples were fixed in flex because his teeth were clenched to stop himself from
grinding them to powder.  His jaw jerked,
lips reverberated—shockwave spreading and collapsing.  His left eyelid recoiled behind his eyeball
so that for a moment it seemed to float in the air.  And then an immediate return to his default
clutch.  Sweat hardened on his face in
leprous salt craters.  He pulled the
phone from the hook and pushed some coins into the slot. 

His jaw jerked.

It pulled the
cramp in his neck.

A storm sat on the
horizon behind him in a crimson sky scratched through with charcoal lines like
some terrible mistake—unable to be erased, blotted out, or forgotten.

He mumbled into
the receiver, into the silence.

Scales was tired
of it; ultimately exhausted by his survival. 
Cyclones pogoed into the line of fire toward the back of the rubescent
dome.  The atmosphere was alive with
lightning.  “You told me not to bother.  I have to tell you, to get this off my mind,”
he said.  Debris clattered against the
metal frame of the phone booth.  “But I
know I’m not getting through.”  A coyote
with an open wound in its flank strained through the rootless panorama.  He counted its steps; noted the silence of
the gory beast’s struggle to persist. 
Looking at the cord he had been absentmindedly twisting he saw it was
severed and for the first time felt the handset moving untethered against his
ear.  He spun round and round in the
booth; sweating, hyperventilating.  The ruddy
sky became a lung heaving for air and finding little.  Dead satellites pushed out by its surface
fell once more into their unknown orbits independent of all control but
physics.  He saw the wind before he felt
it blowing through the booth, wheezing in his ears.  His little brother again.  Gasps muffled through the thin attic
wall.  Scales staring at the corroded
brass lock slid shut to keep his brother from escaping.  Just a game, he reminded himself.  Just a game. 
“I didn’t know he could die.  I
swear, Mom, I swear I didn’t know.”

Scales jaw jerked.  He bashed the handset into the
faceplate.  The coyote was swallowed into
the wasteland.

He came up short
when he reached for the door.  Confused,
he pushed his hand out again grinding his forearm along the shard crowned
frame.  His affect plateaued, “Memory was
a name.  Name was a game.”  Walked across the crushed gravel lot, “Game
was the same.  Same gets the blame. The
blame game.”  Boots kicked up dust flying
faster than Judas’ dying prayer.  He put
a hand on his motorcycle, “Name of the highway,” he put his ass on the seat.  “Name of the highway is…”  He kicked the starter.  Nothing. 
“Highway is…”

“Unknown.  Shut up and ride,” Scales heard.

He looked down,
braced and watched the road fly beneath the knucklehead.  He rode toward the horizon, away from the
storm.  A cobweb of nerves short
circuited around his elbow and he released the handlebar but still the cycle
rode straight.  The engine roared.

“At least one of
us is in control,” he heard.

“I need to take a
car next chance I get,” Scales said.  The
cycle accelerated and a recriminating thunder pealed atop the highway.

A jagged line of ruby glass cut a shark’s grin at the end of the lot beside the highway.  It glowed with the headlamps of a car coming up the highway.  The blood fell to the ground and splattered.  Four men stepped out of the car beside the phone booth.  The driver put up his hand to motion them to stand still.  The driver went to the booth and ran his finger over the busted faceplate and then along the glass where Scale’s blood stood.  He ran his finger through the blood and put it on his tongue.  His jaw unhinged with a loud rusty metal clang and chomped shut just after he had pulled his finger away.  He nodded to the others at the car.

© William L. Domme