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Fracture

Fracture

By Christian WrightPublished 4 years ago 15 min read
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You’ve been here before, your friend holding an innocent captive behind the rusted barrel of a silver Glock. It’s his father’s. Faint rings of white powder crust around his nostrils like crystalized sugar, and his shoulders sag. It takes all his energy to lift his right arm, the pistol grabbing gravity like a bell weight. But he stands firm, the clerk mesmerized by those glazed eyes.

He switches hands and bumps your shoulder. “I told you he would cry, Hopscotch.” He laughs. “See.”

Hopscotch is your nickname. They gave it to you the first day, after fists beat you to the ground. The way your arms protruded and your legs were in an upside-down V made it look like the children’s game. Trevor said it was honorable, but you don’t feel it. It’s drowned out by the streams of water running the clerk’s face.

He’s Arab…or something like that. Maybe Indian. The sun-dried brown skin says so. He has yet to speak. He sinks back against display cases of cigarettes and tobacco cans, gaze fixed on the threat. He reached under the counter earlier. There’s a silent alarm sign outside. You don’t know if he tripped it, but the door won’t budge.

“Hey…Jimmy…man,” you say. “Maybe we should let him go. Just get outta here.”

He scoffs. “Come on, man. Don’t you wanna be in?” He licks his lips and wipes the sweat out of his eyes. “Jeremy was clear, man. We go back without em, he’ll hang us dry.”

Jeremy: darkest dealer in Detroit. Some call him Fuller, the name of the street he operated from in high school, out of an abandoned shack with F*** OFF written on the side. He parks his carcass in a rundown gray wood slum east of downtown. A suburban block littered with lowly souls enduring the torture of pre-afterlife. Drugs go quick in those parts, the bodies flooding in and out of that crapshoot apartment like an assembly line. How he keeps things discreet no one knows, but some suspect it’s the abortion clinic just down the street. The pro-lifers seem to draw attention with their protesting like a bear waltzing through a Dollar Tree.

Trevor got you and Jimmy stuck with Fuller. Said he had connections, could get you anywhere you wanted to go. You were wary at first, though. Trevor is really good for nothing except wiping his own pearly white cheeks, though he probably even needs a guidebook for that. But for a teenage kid whose single mother battles stage three cancer and can’t see her own reflection in the mirror, much less her only son, the idea of going somewhere was salivating to you.

Fuller sized you up that first day. Wasn’t sure a puny, Caucasian runt from San Francisco could run with the big dogs. After you survived the barrage of fists (his first test), he’d pinned you to the floor and shoved his shiny revolver between your split lips. This is what life is, kid, he’d said. The doorway to death. All it takes is a little…

He pulled the trigger. Your heart cracked.

He fell off you, laughing hard and holding his sides. When done, he helped you up and patted your back. You got guts, kid, unlike the rest of my worms.

He sent you to the drug store a block down claiming the owner had failed to pay up. You weren’t sure exactly what that meant, but you agreed anyway. He promised you entry into his clique as a bag man. Said he had one on every corner of the city. They collected the fees and were the best of the best, so you had to be…if you wanted him to get the word out to all his larger clients, wealthy brokers who dealt under the table to protect their billion-dollar name tags. They were always inquiring about young protégés like you.

He only let Jimmy come along because you asked. Thought he was a danger to the operation, but let it slide. Jimmy had asked too many questions and seemed like the sort who would back down from confrontation, but Fuller didn’t know him like you do. It was his idea to get the Glock, his idea to walk inside and point it right at the clerk’s face. You were the coward, but you weren’t going to tell Fuller that. Not a chance in hell.

“Man, this is ridiculous. This guy hasn’t done–”

“You chickenin out on me?”

You shake your head. “I’m just saying, Jimmy–”

He points the gun at your forehead, periodically glancing at the clerk to make sure he stays put. “Get over the counter and pop the register.” His breath is fast. “Don’t you dare ruin this for us!”

You comply, reluctantly. You put your right foot on a box of candy bars and push up. They crackle under your shoe and go flat like flounders. You can picture the pieces squishing against each other, shattered. But when you look down, they still maintain a bit of their puff, only fractured, like your arm when you fell off your ten-speed in seventh grade.

You land beside the clerk. He is watching you, wide-eyed. The dark stain on his blue uniform is growing. You want to tell him it’s okay, that everything will be fine, but you can’t. Not with Jimmy. With him, you can never be certain. Your mother never liked him. Told you he was bad vibes. But since she was always wrapped up in that mystical crap, you paid her no mind. You should’ve listened, but you couldn’t let him go.

You’ve known Jimmy since pre-K. He was the wily sort then but never got into much trouble. It was the years that changed him, brought out his worst. His father beat his mother bad. Jimmy would come to school sharing stories with you of how he’d thrown her into the cabinets or slammed her head into the table or smashed her jaw with his wooden slugger. You always asked him why she never got out of it, and he said they were coupled, whatever that meant. He just stared at the cherry trees flanking the playground when you asked him to explain. The fights always got worse. And when his father lost his job at the insurance company…

You and Jimmy were sophomores then. It was late. You heard the knock at the door, but not until it became banging. Your mother was yelling, rambling on about the ruckus in the neighborhood and how the black family next door (she called them Negros, but you never liked that word) could never keep it down. But when you opened the door, it was Jimmy. His face was covered in tears, shining as if it had been waxed. He was sobbing, heavy gasps that forced him to lean against the doorframe for balance.

He fell into your arms and you pulled him to the couch. He lay there heaving, water darkening the fabric, while your mother ran over, frantic and yelling Is he hurt? Where’s he hurt? You saw the first-aid kit in her hands.

You turned him over. It took effort, but he gradually rolled, still shaking. What happened? you said.

He sucked in deep. It sounded like the slobbery panting of an overworked hound.

She’s dead, he said. He shot her.

Your stomach sank as he told the story. She was in the kitchen, cooking the meal. Jimmy was with her. His father walked in complaining about the government and cutoffs and how the insurance industry was sliding downhill. She asked him if it was a bad day, and he told her to clamp her tongue (those were the words Jimmy used, but you could tell from the way he stared at the wall behind you that his father had said much worse). She told him not to talk that way around Jimmy, to which he said Shut up! and mashed her cheek into the blazing stovetop. The pot and pan atop the two burners exploded into the wall, some boiling water splashing on to his hand, but he didn’t budge. Jimmy said that his father held her there for unending seconds and that her screams were like dry ice against a sheet of metal. Her wineglass burst.

Jimmy had stopped him, jumped onto his back and began clawing at his eyes. She sank off the stove, sobbing. A red-black mark on her face leaked drips of white, like rare steak. She watched as his father collapsed on him and spun. He clutched Jimmy’s throat and squeezed. You should’ve stayed out of this, bucko. But he knew he never could have, not while she screamed like the captives of hell.

She smashed the searing pot into his father’s head. He fell back and smacked against the tile, a pink stain where his skull had cracked. She stood over him yelling for him to leave and die.

That was when he pulled out the gun. The Glock. It was in his jacket. Jimmy told you he had never seen it before. They’d never allowed weapons in the house. His mother had even told his father to remove his katana collection. She always said, With tools of death, there can be no life. But those were the early days. The good days. Now she stared down the barrel, silent. Her eyes were wide.

Fra–

The pops were ear-shattering, digging into his mind like hot coals. Jimmy was still catching his breath and tried to scream, but only a dull croak came out. He watched her head split in two. Then her chest ripped open, jets of blood propelling her into the granite countertop. She folded back and then drifted forward before splatting onto the tan-flecked brown squares.

I beat his face in, he cried. I beat it in until he dropped the gun. Then I chased him out. He paused as a tremor took him. He tried to fight again, but I popped one at his feet.

You sank back.

She was covered in red, he said. But I couldn’t kill him. He kept repeating it until it became cauterized to the back of your mind. You grabbed him and held him in your arms, absorbing everything, until he went quiet, went dry.

Wailing red-white-and-blue lights whip into the parking lot. You notice someone is talking before it registers as a megaphone.

“Jimmy–”

“Just pop the damn register! Don’t listen to a thing they say.”

“Please,” says the clerk. His accent confirms Indian. “Take what you want and go. You can leave out the back. I’ll–”

“Shut up!” Jimmy moves closer to him. “Just shut up, old man!”

You swallow. It feels like nails. “Jimmy, what would your grandmother say, man?”

He looks at you, flustered. “Don’t. Don’t do it, Hopscotch.” He points the gun back to you. “Don’t you dare bring her into this.”

She took him in afterward. She told you she watched him stare out the window every night. You could see the pink skin around his eyelids every time you stopped by.

He just deteriorated more and more, until he quit school. You would only see him in the afternoons by the bus stop where he waited for you, chain smoking a pack of Marlboros and following the girls with bloodshot orbs. He would ask you to come hang out with some new friends, and you would agree every time, though your mother always encouraged you otherwise. They weren’t bad people, just others like him. They would get in fights with higher-ups, adults, anyone who wanted to control them, and you always assumed he enjoyed it because it reminded him of that night, when he’d almost killed his father.

But he would never fight his grandmother. She was the only person he obeyed. She would find the cigarettes in his room and toss them in the trash telling him to kick this habit fast or she would send him to an orphanage, and he just stared and said okay. You figured that was because she was like you, there when she was needed most. And you never thought it would stop…until Trevor came along.

At twenty-one, he is a leader in Fuller’s franchise, in charge of marketing, but when you met him he was still a nineteen-year-old delivery boy with breath like sourdough. He was like a shadow with his dark skin, like one of your mother’s bad omens, but he was persuasive. His yellowed teeth would creep out through scarlet gums in a wiry grin, slinky coils rolling down a staircase, and he would talk about how he’d been in this joint “havin da good times” (this seemed to be his catchphrase) with some woman he’d paid two hundred bucks for. It was always the same woman and always the same story.

I ain’t da most formal man, but I’s got my stuff, he would always say.

He was the one who introduced Jimmy to Licorice, Fuller’s own brand of crack which had a more potent bite than others, the reason for its popularity. Had him sniffing it twice a day, and then he suckered you in. When you asked Trevor what the secret was, he just stared at you blank-faced. Jimmy made sure to keep it all well hidden from his grandmother. She never found it. But you knew just from the way he lit up every time a dose travelled his nasal cavity that he would never have listened to her even if she had. He’d found his way out, the glue to put it all back together.

As you look at the spots beneath his nose, you tremble. He has shifted to the clerk again and watches him in a hazy daze. This was Trevor’s favorite part. He called it “seeing needles.” You’ve seen it before yourself, the way all light refracts into a collage of hues and coats everything like a force field. It made you light, made you float, made you invincible.

A glint of white brings you to. It’s a .48 revolver lying beside the register. Its cream-colored handle is padded for grip and the hammer is back. You realize how close you both were to being shot. Jimmy can’t see it from where he stands.

“Don’t call me Hopscotch, man.”

He looks at you. “What do you mean?”

“That’s their name. Not mine.”

He shakes his head and holds it in his hands. “Fine. Whatever. Just shut up, Henry, and open the register.”

He looks back to find the clerk running for the backdoor.

“Hey!” he screams. You see him raise the gun and line the sights. The megaphone blares again. You can see the anticipating silhouettes in your periphery, holding their weapons ready. But his eyes are locked.

“Let him go, Jimmy!”

He’s still shaking his head. “He already got away once. Never again.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

The tear coming down his cheek was repressed, unsolved for years. You see the salty sparkle and can feel the anguish. Your mother told you about this, about feeling souls. She said it always helped her to know people, understand people, but she was always wrong. You want her to be wrong. But you feel him, as you felt him that day, as you felt her when they placed her in that small white room and told her that death was gnawing at her heels.

“It was wrong, Jimmy. He was wrong. We all know that. But don’t–”

“Shut up, Henry!” He clicks the hammer back.

The megaphone blares louder, a siren you think is aimed to disorient him, but no voices…except the one in your head. The whisper. The doorway to death. Jimmy has been there all along, all alone. This is what life is, kid. But you don’t want it this way.

“Don’t do it, Jimmy!”

He doesn’t listen. You watch the finger pull back.

“NO!”

The crack is blistering in your ears. The tingle that runs up your limbs…nails on a blackboard. Jimmy is staggering left and right like a flower. He drops the Glock and you see it clatter on the floor, but there is no sound. The clerk has fallen to your right, but he is pushing back up, somehow unscathed. The bullet must have ricocheted off something, must have fled.

But then you see the gun in your hand. It is heavy and light. They are coupled. The tears streaming down your face are hot to the touch, yet you are freezing, absorbed.

It is good to feel, she would tell you, but as you see Jimmy fall to the floor clutching his chest, you aren’t sure, of anything. Except there is red. Red, Henry. He is covered in it. She was covered in it, when she ripped the I.V. from her skin and let the life spurt from her vein. And she wouldn’t listen when you told her to lie down, wouldn’t listen when you said she was killing herself, just smiled at you and said she was already dead.

You drop it to the counter and start to shake.

The first officer runs through the door, but you don’t hear him through the ringing, someone tapping glass. He’s asking you something, but you don’t acknowledge him. Jimmy is looking at you, a trail of blood leaking his lips, his mouth moving. You think he is saying thank you but you don’t know. And this is what you see when the other two come in and circle the counter. You don’t feel when one grabs your wrists and places them in cuffs, you don’t see the other one approach the clerk, and you don’t know…you just don’t know.

Until he grins. It’s the grin she had, the grin that said nothing and everything, just mystical crap and concern over boys she never liked, the grin she gave whenever she knew she was right but you didn’t. It’s the grin he used to have when you would play outside at school and chase those blue jays that hopped along the benches. It’s the grin he used to have when he would punch your arm and tell you it was okay and you should man up. It’s the grin he had while the world went black...and blue…just snapped…

It’s the grin he’s always had.

humanity
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