The Space Between

Prologue

Everything is dark in the space between. All of it, except for the slivers of light that reflect off the honeysuckles here and there in the spots where the crowded trees allow the moon to filter through. But the things that live here, the ones that occupy that place on the precipice of sleep,where the conditioned air of the bedroom bleeds into the breeze of dreams, don’t need light. In the inky blackness of semiconciousness, sight is unnecessary. Because, she thinks, they can smell you all the same.

1.

Monday

Bad days always smelled like pancakes. Maybe it was a remnant from childhood, when his mom would cook breakfast before school on the days she had no intention of coming home that night, a sort of preemptive peace offering, but even now, years after Sissy had kicked the bucket, even when the aromatic staleness of empty bottles threatened to overpower the senses, that smell was always, ALWAYS present when he woke up to what would be a bad day. And this morning had smelled like pancakes, and now he was a drunk.

Not in the way that the wino who spent his nights outside the corner store of Park and 1st Street in his kind of slippery, unsteady way was, but in the kind of way that made him dangerously inconsolable, and no one was more keenly aware of that than Adam Rouser himself, though he didn’t care, not truly. His soul had been ground to a fine, powdery dust, and Adam had resolved, as he always did in the peaks and valleys of his life, to rejoin the drifting particles with the glue at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. And so he spent most nights staring into the amber-potioned shooters at the end of The Bad Apple’s glossy polyurethane bar top, slamming down the empty glasses after he was sure the answers to life didn’t still cling to the inside. The rest of his nightly outings were wasted away in the rowdy stupor of impending alcohol poisoning. Jazmine would have loathed it.

Jazzy never was one to be tempted by the siren call of Lady Liquor or the bliss of hazy drunkenness (“checking out,” as Jaz called it distastefully) but Adam had found the effect comforting, having adopted it early the way his sister Chel had done with the harder stuff. They were the Black Sheep Society, the two of them, the three of them once, before Jaz had left him. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? Things just never lasted, not even the buzzes, not ever the highs.

When Adam finally surfaced from his bleary apartment in time to see sunlight, a bleak and drab gray downtown two bedroom that had long since become infested with ants and roaches that found feasts among days old pizza crust crumbs and vomit that found a way to avoid the peach porcelain of the toilet bowl, Chel was waiting for him on the brick steps in front, propped up on the iron banister like a folded, wet newspaper. He expected her to ask in her molasses-slow fashion for money or a ride, but Chel made no demands. While Adam avoided her gaze and looked down to his tattoo parlor whose neon sign just peeked into view around the corner, Chel’s attention seemed to stay on his face, her glazed, vacuous green eyes trained on his as if she could leech off his soul through them.

The urge to spit out a harsh What? at her welled up in his throat, but he let the feeling trickle away unsatisfied. Jazzy had noted more than once his uncanny ability to push down his feelings when it came to his sister, a skill reserved for her and her alone for whatever reason because it sure as hell wasn’t a skill he pulled on for anyone else in his life. Chel had once been something else, and perhaps it was that memory that made Adam gentler with her than he ought to be, but she was just a shadow of that now. An empty shell of a woman, the peanut of her youth shucked out with her innocence long ago.

She had been engaged once, to some coke-fiend from Benedict, where she’d run off to midway through her sophomore year of high school (“very sophomoric of her” Jazzy had once said, laughing at her own pun as she often did, only to feel bad about the dig later and apologize as if it would have offended him in the least) but it lasted about a week before he’d gotten picked up for soliciting a minor and locked up for a laundry list of charges that included possession and parole violations too many to count individually. Chel found out the day after his arraignment that she was pregnant, had a miscarriage a month later, and had since fallen so far down the rabbit hole of heavy drug usage that any day now she might pop right out the other side. If there was a God, he damn sure didn’t smile down on her and so she responded with her head held low and her middle finger held as high as her bony, needle bruised arms would allow when she had enough sense about her to remember she was actually still alive.

As difficult as it was to stir up any love for the woman, thinning ashy blond hair held in a fraying bun half-cocked to the side, artist-formerly-known-as-Prince t-shirt riddled with holes hanging off her body like loose skin, Adam couldn’t help but feel it anyway. Maybe he could see so much of himself in those things—surely his own unruly blond curls looked as unkempt and dirty from days of forgotten showers and sweat, and his jeans just as tattered and filthy as her shirt. She couldn’t be trusted to survive on her own, and with no family and certainly no friends left to take her in, little brother took big sister in when she’d shown up shown up blazed off her gourd in the dead of night a month and a half ago, demanding to be put up until she slept off the coke.

She’d been his roommate ever since, holed up in what had once been called a home office. The office Jazzy had used as an art studio, just two months ago. Just one and three-quarter months before she dropped the weighty-worded “we have to talk” spiel about how he needed help, he needed an intervention, he needed God, capital “G”, and she didn’t need him anymore. Adam still reeled from the cold-water shock of it all. He had never considered that she’d one day leave him. He’d always thought that her self-esteem was just low enough to stay forever.

Now Jazzy was gone and Adam had finally yanked himself out of bar and bed long enough to attempt the trek to the parlor, only to be met with the silent blank stare of his sister on the stoop of the apartment they shared. He was the superior of the Rouser siblings, he was sober (though hungover), he was on his way to his parlor, to his job, to the niche he had painstakingly carved despite his own setbacks, so why did he feel the dull pain of judgement behind her glassy eyes? What right did she have?

He descended the steps, shoving past her, but her eyes never wavered from his face. He could feel them boring into the back of his head as he walked (not ran, though he now desperately wanted to) to the corner, towards Black Sheep Tattoos. The feeling of never outrunning that vacant judging stare filled him with a dread he feared he’d never shake.