The road is dark and the porches of the empty houses I pass are dark and the flame of the lighter I use to light the cigarette between my teeth is dark, too. Click click click go the high heels, hard plastic on hard blacktop on hard earth. No headlights cross the horizon because I’m convinced there are no more cars. I imagine a conversation I might have with a passing motorist.
What’s a pretty girl like you doing out here all alone, they would ask.
What’s a handsome fella like you with a shard of glass imbedded in your neck doing out here all alone, I would reply.
I spend the endless miles I walk refining these conversations. These men have faces I recognize. Sometimes they are my husbands or my boyfriends or the grocery store clerk I used to think about when I masturbated or an old high school teacher who gave me weed in exchange for blowjobs. I create out of nothing witty retorts and pithy one liners and I concatenate complex sentences pertaining to nothing in particular just to hear my own voice. My dialogue ebbs and flows and crashes upon rocks of acuity. My speech is dynamic, but his is always as static as the stale air that chokes me.
What’s a pretty girl like you doing out here all alone?
I picture the glass in his neck, how it moves up and down when he talks in rhythmic time with the muscles in his jaw. The wound is never bleeding because he no longer has blood in his naked body. Exsanguinated and nude I picture the man, one skeletal hand gripping the hard plastic of the steering wheel, the other in a pantomime of habit reaching for the phallic remains of an organ that has ceased to exist. Sometimes I give him an alluring come hither smile and sometimes I remove the glass from his neck and gouge and slash at his empty eyes, but the result is always the same, unchanged because no matter what I do I can’t affect the specter of memory.
Click click click go the high heels and I’m drawn back to the darkness and the solitude that I’ve become so accustomed to. Temporally I am alone, but in my thoughts I have infinite company. Through the obfuscation of a dense thicket of trees I glimpse the murmurs of a faint light and I am drawn towards it not because I believe it will lead to solace, but because I know it will lead to absolution.
Crunch crunch crunch go the high heels as I transition from the hard road to the soft forest understory. I hold my breath and make a wish as I walk through the tunnel of trees. The pin prick of light bends and splits and in an asexual flourish becomes two pin pricks of light and in horror and exasperation the realization hits me. I am not floating towards splendid eternity, but towards something far more sinister.
I want to tell my feet to stop, but my body is no longer my own. Crunch crunch crunch transitions to the sound of an idling engine so seamlessly that I hardly notice. What I do notice, however, is the toothless smile of a man I at once recognize and I see a younger version of myself in the passenger’s seat and I want to tell her to get out and run, that this won’t end in the score for glass that you think, that it will end in loneliness and regret and the loss of bodily autonomy and death, but instead he turns to me and I know exactly what he’s going to say because I’ve heard it so many times in my waking nightmares and the fear takes hold of me and I run and I run, kicking off my high heels that land with a crunch in the darkness, sprinting towards an unknown destination into the enveloping black, not knowing whether it’s towards safety or doom, sprinting towards what I’m hopeful is the mercy of quick death, but as an impossible dawn breaks against the murk and the haze I begin to slow my pace and catch my breath until I turn around and there they all are, just as I knew they would be because I could feel them gaining on me in silent pursuit, every boy and every man I’ve ever known, every boy and every man from my internal monologues, every boy and every man whom I’ve wronged and who has wronged me, and there stands toothless man from so long ago, the man whose name I never learned, front and center like a maestro from hell, jagged shard of broken glass pulsating from his jugular in messy spurts of blood and ichor and in a unified cacophony they say to me:
What’s a pretty girl like you doing out here all alone?