We found him first.
His arms were spread like a drifting thrush, east to where the sun rises over the horizon. As Icaruss before him, he had flown too close, his sleeves tearing and melting from his blackened arms, face twisting into expressions immalleable.
Humans were not meant to fly.
[II. DANA McROBERTS]
First thing I noticed was the blood.
I thought it was tomato sauce, at first. Stan’s fault. Stan brings the shipments in from the factory in Omaha—the new Prego, Ragu. He’s the tomato sauce man. But he’s a godawful driver—crashed up against the cart corral once and it all shifted, shattering and spilling big globs of red down onto the pavement like they murdered a whole bunch of Italians and left ‘em draining.
This blood was different. It was dark and thick, like an oil spill.
Worse when you realize it’s coming from something splattered against the pavement—and you realize that something is a boy. Or what used to be a boy—an Arab boy. Trendy jeans and expensive shoes and a little glinty earring in one of his lobes. He was all smashed up, like he jumped from the top of the building and landed face down, arms all broken and curled.
His hair kind of shifted when the wind blew—real dark and glossy, in little waves that curled at the ends. Some parts of it were streaked with white. Like he’d been sweating something terrible.
If you look in the Hy-Vee Employee Manual there’s jack squat about finding dead bodies in the parking lot. Figured it would come when I went corporate, maybe. But that’s a long way away.
Figured I’d start with the police.
Took ‘em about fifteen minutes. It was just me and the kid, sitting there, together. The birds were swirling above our heads, squawking something awful. It felt weird, so I started talking to him—real normal stuff, things about Earth he might miss a little. I’m probably calling the shots early, but when I go to Heaven, I want to get little updates about my family, like the little ticker-tape at the bottom of the news channel. Ernie lost his first tooth. Lisa got her transplant. Carly’s learning to drive.
I don’t know where Arabs go, but I didn’t think a kid that young could go to Hell. You never know, though. Maybe he did something bad.
I stopped talking to him when the policeman pulled into the parking lot. He was by himself, with one of them walkie-talkies at his hip.
His knees popped when he knelt next to the boy, frowning. “We need to find his parents,” he said, after awhile.
I hadn’t thought of that. You could fit all of the Arabs in town round a table at the Olive Garden—I figured, we could just go through the phone book, pick out the foreign names, and call ‘em up. That’s not the way of the police, though, far as I know.
His radio began to crackle like static on the TV. Someone else’s voice began to speak, saying, “Some halfwit drove his car into Oak Lake.”
The police officer sighed. “You respond. I’ll be there when I can.”
He stood up, shaking his head.
It made me think a little—someone in the parking lot, someone in the lake, and a whole lot of birds swarming around our heads. Lot of strange things were happening that day.
[III. THE ATHEIST]
Somewhere between the surface of Oak Lake and the fishhooks at the bottom, I found God.
The car was halfway submerged, stuck up on its end where the level hit four feet, water lapping up the sides and spilling into the open windows. It was a Honda. A really old, crappy Honda with rust down the sides and a big dent in the passenger door.
The kid was in the front seat. When I put the tank to my lips and went under, the sunlight warbled through the water, turning it green. His hair floated behind him like little pieces of seaweed.
The headrest had snapped. It had folded in on itself, holding his neck at a position that tipped his head up so that his lips grazed above the surface of the water. Somehow, things had gone in his favor.
He should have died. He should have died within eight minutes, trapped in his car near the bottom of some square manmade lake.
But sometimes, things happen for a reason.
I broke in the window with a hammer tied in the loop around my waist. The pieces shattered and fell, slowly, uncertainly—when they collapsed in the mud, I reached my arm in through the door and pulled the latch open.
His body was limp when I pulled it out. You could still feel the hollow workings of his chest, struggling through murk for air. When I dragged him to shore, Jeremy and the guys took one look at him and shook their heads as water spilled out from his mouth like some sort of pitcher.
“Doesn’t look good, Mark.”
I took off my gloves and pressed two fingers against the side of his throat. The pulse was still there. It was wet, and his skin was cold, but he had a pulse. Submerged for more than three hours, and he had a pulse. I looked at him reverently, like some sort of holy relic.
It was almost impossible.
They wheeled him off in a gurney into the back of an ambulance. I followed behind in the EMT van, lights whirring, sirens blaring. And in dirt smears coating the back door of the ambulance in front of me, I swore I could see Jesus Christ.
[IV. THE INTERN]
I was new.
I got there the day before, actually. You’d think they’d know that things get kind of in a crunch when accidents start happening—get me crash boards, get me a transfusion, get me a coffee.
There were two traffic accidents, the Oak Lake kid, and a heart attack. They shoved me into the corner with the kid and a pair of scissors and say, “Keep him alive.”
He was unconscious, lashed down to a gurney with tubes in his mouth. His lips were blue, skin corpse-grey.
And I was thinking, Just how the Hell do I do that?
[V. THE NURSE]
Okay, I get it. Curiosity killed the cat.
I just had to see the Oak Lake kid. It had been a morning of ear infections and broken bones— nothing really good, like someone driving their car into a lake. Who does that? Really screwed up people, that’s who. And I’ve got to tell you—I’m a reality TV junkie. Rock of Love, The Amazing Race, Fear Factor. I love screwed up people. It’s what gets me going in the morning when I don’t want to put needles in sobbing childrens’ skin.
I had a half hour for lunch so I figured I would just take a peek. So I walked up to the door with the papers for Stark, Benjamin Thomas in the little slot. He was still pretty bad—not ICU bad, but bad enough to have wires running all over his body and from his ears and mouth. I couldn't tell if he was sleeping or not—his eyes kept fluttering open, up to the TV screen. I think Oprah was on. I could hear her voice, but the set was tipped away from me.
I squinted my eyes a little. His eyelids came apart and stayed like that for a few seconds, then fell back into place.
He was all pale and skinny, with a mass of rope bracelets around his left wrist that one of the interns, in a coffee haze, had forgotten to cut off. His hair was a disaster, with dried flecks of who-knew-what from the lake embedded in clumps of blonde. I had a brush in my purse. People would probably be coming to visit him soon: parents, girlfriend, that sort of thing. It always makes mothers hysterical to see their baby boys broken and dirty.
I looked to see if anyone was coming down the hallway. They weren't.
I opened the door and stepped in. The room smelled overpoweringly of disinfectant and lake water—the kind that makes your eyes water a little. His eyes didn’t open when I walked past him into the bathroom and turned on the tap.
I drenched a paper towel with water and sat in the chair at his bedside, touching his arm gently to make sure I didn’t startle him. The water made his hair dark and thick.
I guess it’s strange that I got all maternal over some kid that I didn’t know. But I felt happy sitting there, pulling rotten pieces of cattails from his head—like I had more purpose in life than shoving thermometers in fevered mouths. The comb had wide teeth and pulled apart his hair into miniature rows of blonde, which slicked over like some kind of fifties prep-school boy and sat back, watching him breathe through chapped lips.
Oprah had just welcomed a man with a brain tumor onto the show when Stark’s eyes opened. He frowned and began to pull at the tube in his mouth, at the IV in his hand.
Let’s put this bluntly: I freaked. I lunged forward and pulled his hand away from his mouth, tried to keep them pressed against the mattress. I felt something warm and wet against my palm.
I pulled away to find a splash of red dripping down my wrist.
He had yanked out his IV, leaving a stream of blood pooling out from the back of his hand. The bed squeaked a little as he leaned back, breathing through his nose. I walked backward to watch him as I washed my hands in the sink.
We glared at each other. This kid had some nerve for being pissy after having been rescued from near death—someone by the vending machines had said he'd been underwater for three hours. Can people even do that? Probably not.
He was probably enough of an ass to keep himself afloat.
He began to rub at his throat. Stupid kid. I wrenched his hands away. "Nice try."
He shook his head. Water ran down along his jaw, dripping off onto his hospital gown like the tears he couldn't cry. I was pretty sure he was a robot—a robot that didn’t rust. With the hand that was still bleeding, he reached up into the pocket of my scrubs and pulled out a pen.
He began to scribble on his arm as I went to the cupboard for a Band-Aid and some crème. As long as it kept him occupied, it was all right with me.
I spread Neosporin over the back of his hand with a Q-Tip and flattened the bandage against his skin. He was writing with his other hand on the dry part of his forearm.
Where am I?
“Saint E’s. Lincoln.”
I moved to the other side of the bed dragging his IV around the back. I scrubbed it with disinfectant and held it over his hand. He looked at me. “I’ve got to put it in somewhere, man.”
He held up a finger. So I’m not dead?
“Nah. Sorry.”
A lot of people cry when I shove things into their veins. But none looked so miserable as Benjamin Thomas Stark.
[VI. THE NOBODY]
Want to hear something weird?
So, I was in study hall, and then the Toad Woman, administrator and mistress of darkness, comes in all sad, head low, like, “I’m supposed to act all teary but I really don’t give a shit”. She doesn’t give a shit about anything, really. It’s kind of in her job description.
I kind of sat back in my chair, arms crossed, and she’s all, “I’ve got some very sad news.”
So we all just kind of sit there, and it’s really boring, but I look at Dana, like maybe this’ll be cool, you know? And she says, “We regret to inform you that Karim Malik, a junior, was found dead this morning in the Hy-Vee parking lot on North 27th.”
I’m sitting there, like, You fucking kidding me? But she wasn’t. She was totally serious. “Benjamin Stark, a junior, attempted suicide over the weekend.”
Yeah, so I kind of knew Karim—how many Iranians you got in Nebraska? —but this Stark dude…I didn’t know him. Like, I probably saw him, but I didn’t know him, and before he committed suicide or whatever, I wouldn’t have cared.
“Grief counselors are available in the media center for those who wish to talk about their feelings.”
Damn. I didn’t want to talk about my feelings. I wanted to know who did ‘em in. But that’s something that’s confidential. The good stuff’s always confidential.
But in the back of my head, I was kind of thinking, if I died, would anyone notice?
And on account of how my life’s pretty much shit, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to Karim. I don’t know the Stark dude, period.
Maybe if I died in a parking lot, someone would care.
[VII. TIFFANY ROCHESTER]
I am going to marry Benjamin Thomas Stark.
I see him every morning by his locker, standing there with his books balanced on his hip, other hand twisting the lock—his combination is 34-15-14. I know it. I got it from Melissa who keeps her death metal CDs in there because her parents would kill her if they knew about them.
Anyway.
We were supposed to be a trumpet duet. Did I mention he is a godlike trumpet player? He is. He can play a gazillion octaves and has the most beautiful tone. I decided I would marry him back in fifth grade when we were taking lessons together. Watching him play a solo was like watching something heavenly—even in fifth grade, I realized that this was a gorgeous, talented, smart, beautiful, funny, amazing, gorgeous guy.
Anyway.
When I heard the announcement in Biology, I was going to cry, but then I realized that there was only one thing I could do. And that was to comfort him in his time of need. Because clearly, people who try to commit suicide are needy. My husband cannot be needy. He must be perfect, like normal, pre-death Benjamin Thomas Stark—like the god I know he is. Visiting him in the hospital, with chocolates and flowers and a cute teddy bear, whilst he reclined, eyes tired and halfway closed. He would groan in a sick-person way and I would sit next to him, crying a little bit (but not too much), and brushing his hair away from his forehead.
So I left. I’ve never skipped school before but I skipped school that day—I simply walked out, got into my car, and drove to the hospital.
The woman at the front desk was nice-looking. I smiled. “Can I please see Mr. Benjamin Thomas Stark?”
She typed his heavenly name into the computer and frowned. “And who are you?”
“Mrs. Benjamin Thomas Stark.”
“Nice try.”
I actually did cry. I cried out the name of my lover, and hoped that he would hear me.
__
I thought I'd do something odd and completely out of my comfort zone--and as such, I'm not exactly sure how effective it is. Any critique regarding style, or flow, or feeling would be amazing.
Oh, and regarding my complete and utter inability to finish stories: I already finished this one, so we'll see.
) This girl felt very real, and her own thoughts and feelings sort of drew the focus away from Benjamin and Karim and toward her. I'm not sure if I like that or not. Nevertheless, it worked.
It seems like 'little pieces' would mean that some of his hair had been cut off, or something of the like. You might try: His hair floated behind him like thin strands of seaweed. 
Gender:
Points: 6090
Reviews: 1258