heya_baru

Bleeding Hands Veil Our Eyes From The Cosmos

She had to get out of the house, out of the block, out of Los Lunas; there was too much of Sestos; his guns and drugs and stacks of half-read books propped up against the wall, crowding everything, haunting her, waiting to bury her, a final dignity they denied him.

They just left him there. In the sand.

She had changed her shirt, sprayed with blood, after they got back; it was nearly four in the morning then, but she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bring herself to even try. God knows what would come hunting her in dreams. The psyche is the ultimate devourer, Hero thought, the uber-self that masticates and regurgitates everything in the graveyard of memory. Sestos’s corpse would be the last in a long line of men that her psyche would dig up and hang over her, like the dangling lure of some deep-sea predator fish.

She had no destination. She just left the house and started to walk. Anywhere. The tears on her cheeks had dried three times over. Once she ran out of sidewalk she would let the desert take her, drown her in sand and blanket her in sage, and in fifty years the bloated borders of the suburbs would grow to cover her in concrete, forever.

The suburbs, it turned out, would not relinquish her so easily—after what must have been three hours she found herself back on her street; Los Lunas had folded space around her, turning the knife to air the moment it glanced her wrist.

Leander was still splayed across the ratty sofa, the same one Sestos and had picked up from Craigslist when they were both nineteen. A beer sat limply in his hand.

“What do we do?” An edge crept into Hero’s voice that she did not immediately recognize. Now that she was back, haunted by Sestos in every corner of the house, the pendulum was swinging back.

“Don’t know.”

If Hero looked for more than a moment, she would have noticed the sweat-drenched shirt, the knuckles turning white as he strangled the beer bottle. Her nervous energy came to a head as she whipped a trash bag out of the kitchen cabinet and started throwing Sestos’s books into it. “We should just get out of here. Leave. Start over. Fuck the desert, let’s do Maine. Or Maybe Oregon.”

Leander did not respond. Hero almost said no one will come looking for him, we were the only friends he had but the words burned her throat and turned to tears on the way out. She threw the bag across the room and collapsed to the stinking carpet, pulling out handfuls of hair as a decade of grief imploded in on her. Her parents putting her in a institution when she was fifteen. Meeting Leander the moment she left, desperate for anyone that made her feel like a human again. Letting him drag her to New Mexico once they graduated. Letting Sestos turn into dealer so they could pay rent. Every tragedy a closing door, the world becoming smaller with each passing year. She could hear the final exit swinging shut after twenty-one years, interring her in the unlit sepulchre of the present.

She expected Leander to drunkenly pull himself to his feet and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, that’s what he always did when she was like this. The hand never arrived.

Leander stood up and walked to the bathroom. Sestos’s gun still sat by the sink, next to the mouthwash and shaving cream. Leander picked it up, pressed the barrel under his chin, and pulled the trigger.