as you were (iv)

part four

Nov 18, 2024

A flight attendant pokes my shoulder.

I come to.

I shake off the traz haze, flashing a sheepish I’m sorry smile as I scramble my stuff together. I trudge through the airport without much incident, relishing the prick of fresh air as I hail a cab.

I don’t remember getting into the cab. I know time has passed; we’re not at the airport anymore. I don’t remember saying a word to the driver, either. How does he know where to go? Why does my asshole hurt?

There are black mounds of goop along the highway, with few trees in sight. Was it always this sparse? Treeless? I can see the mountains, though; I’ve missed the mountains.

I think about Dr. Horn’s lifeguard presiding over mass drowning. I hear parents screaming—see them shielding the sun from their eyes with fat hand visors, helpless, curious, watching him sit full lotus in his tower, floating ass out of chair— untethered, unbothered, unknowing. There’s a hoard of angry dads in floral shirts and boating shorts scaling the tower, ready to tear his face off, ready to—

The driver says something I don’t understand. I chuckle and agree and turn towards the window so he’ll leave me alone.

The sun is setting. I’m checking the streetlights for dead pups, flickering in and out of sleep as old haunts and greasy spoons blur into a whipped fuzz behind the finger-smeared glass.

My mouth is cotton; my eyes dusted with kiwi fuzz. I can’t stop blinking; they want to close. My hands are balled into fists, my nails digging crescents into palm meat. Maybe Dr. Horn was right…maybe the levy is bound to break. Maybe I’m weak like the rest of them and should prepare to be infantilized when her house—our house—assails my eyes.

The purring intensifies as we near the coast. The driver turns up the radio. There are trees now—trees with black patches of hoppers lounging in their canopies. I knew they were big, but not like this. How come no one told me they were so big? So big and so ugly?

I close my eyes tight, focusing on the shrapnel ratatat of pebbles in the tire wells.

The cab begins to slow. I swallow hard as I feel us rounding the bend.

“This it?” asks the driver.

I open my eyes.

We’re stopped at the lip of her driveway. I spot-check my body like a crash victim. FEET?! THEY STILL HERE?? Yes…yes…okay, they’re here…CAN I MOVE THEM?! I fan out my toes, wriggling them against my shoe’s rigid toe-vamp—phew! WHAT ABOUT THE LEGS THOUGH? Hmmm, let’s see…I scissor them side to side and bounce them around. Check! Okay, okay… what’s next? Butt? BUTT?! CAN I FEEL THE SEAT ON MY CHEEKS? I wriggle like a duck in water…good, good… it’s all there; I’m all here. Dr. Horn had me expecting a catastrophic implosion if I so much as glanced at this house—this evil house, but here I am, unimploded, with all my limbs, breathing normally, staring at a very normal, very vanilla house, feeling nothing in particular. Nothing at all, really. Nothing—

“Sir?” the driver says in a loud staccato to indicate I’m beginning to irk him. “This it?”

I nod, pay him, and open the door. He walks back to the trunk as I stand, trying to remember how a car door works, distracted by my face fat wriggling Nixon-like in the hopper purrs, struck by how the vibrations burrow into my chest—how they make it hard to breathe, but somehow, in a good way.

The lawn and branches are crawling with hoppers, but not as many as I hoped—as I hoped? Was I hoping for destruction? I remember the bespectacled bug nerds floating in the airport TVs saying the hoard was still emerging, finding their appetite; this was only the beginning.

The driver hands me my luggage. I nod and telescope its handle.

The taxi peels out down the lane, leaving a great dissatisfaction in my gut. I’m satisfied Dr. Horn was wrong but disappointed I wasn’t struck down—upset I wasn’t beaten into submission by memory lane, broken, forced to curl fetus-like and suck my thumb right there on the cab’s fart-battered vinyl, howling loud—louder than the purring hoppers so mom would hear and rush to the cab and shoulder me upstairs to bathe in the very tub where she shat me into life.

But it’s not like that.

It’s one foot in front of the other. It’s hopper wings crunching underfoot—just the good ol’ here we go… as I make my way to her door.

continue…