Art Along the Aether I – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
The flare of the flash bashed her cheek, sought the angel’s angle and struck purgatory, crashing over her overwrought blush. The cigarette he dropped in his coffee cup twelve minutes ago rose high in the onyx, dancing along his lower lip upon an absent sip. His finger had fat knuckles; that finger, the only finger laid out as gift to the paparazzi, a cheap green-skin ring slung low on the fuck you flicker, a prybar only could remove it if he hadn’t seen in it a perfect metaphor for their love. She pulled her sweater sleeve over the wrong side of her tracks, on her forearm, between her toes. Thirty days healed and a golden coin that, should she run it through her fingers like a worry stone, might turn her palms as green as his carpal tunnel.
Never underestimate the circus pulse of two dozen Home Run breakfast plates shoveled into hungry maws, a two a.m. Taco Bell, but with class. He’s on the table now, shirt off and plaid shorts to follow. No; not that guy, the other guy. He’s in a band, and he’s ticking boxes for the interview, under the bright lines in Los Angeles when he says his peace to it over a Zoom call. He shouts to laughs and brows furrowed, two waitresses resigned to nod toward the phone that won’t call the cops because in all honesty, it was a show and they could use the tips.
She won’t eat her eggs, just sculpts them into that cloud she saw, the pink one when the junk was out and the sick was out and they told her she had the keys to her future and she only needed to drive under the speed limit. But the world moved so fast. And that fucker keeps snapping pictures, like they were anything but local celebrities whom you’d know if you knew, and this asshole clearly knew. Flash and a snap sound synthesized by a liar phone.
“Fuck outta here,” he said to his photographer. “No press.”
Laughter and chipmunk chatters. Three girls with bedtimes hanging on three guys who couldn’t wait for them to seek strange new beds. Scum. She squirms in her seat and he clutches her forearm because it was ink-numb and it was the only place he could touch her in public and she didn’t flinch. One time he got a love letter from a cop, call-collect from a concerned citizen with a hunch that he beat her because she flinched and he had a tattoo on his neck and his hair was greasy. The part that wasn’t shaved; if they looked close enough to see the tattoo on the side of his head, they would’ve suggested murder and necromancy.
She looked down and stopped squirming. He got up and found the press corp. Full plates and vape pens and his fist pounding the space in between. Jumps, three. Two freeze, including the cameraman. He leaned in and matched faces and a tincture of cotton candy weed passed between the confluence of their breaths.
“Don’t ever come to one of our shows, you piece of shit.” He pulled a dirty napkin and wiped the shooter’s face with syrup, sausage grease and pancake crumbs. He walked back and a hushed what an asshole followed him, and he wondered if they truly thought that, or had read the tattoo on his head and was giving it recital.
Shine, diamonds; crystal cascades traverse the globe of the sodium lights and their Doc Martens push it down, compact it in industrial footprints less the patterns, only stars and bars. He held her through the jerks and the bracing for the rough hand he didn’t have for her. The love for her, the passion for her touch and the sad gleam in her eye that squeezed his ducts to tears that oiled his heart to slide.
“Do you think we’ll make it?” She drew her sight to his stiff jaw and he had no words but he gave them in absentia.
“Fuck that guy,” he said. “We’re gonna blow after tomorrow night. Everybody gotta go through shit to get big, Sarah, it’s all built on shit. You take peoples’ garbage and you build a fucking mountain with it.”
She smiled in silhouette. “We gonna play a show on a garbage patch?”
“Very top.”
Sarah, aware of the sounds of the sirens and of the oceans of city fires squeezed his hand, found in it a maelstrom to guard against a night that would see the sadness of distant death. He matched pressure and his intent was twin, for only they knew what it was like on the floor of the trap house where they met, sharing a can of paint huffed, depleted, left only to a trickle scrawl, and they joined forces between highs and lows to paint pictures of puppies with posies dressed as farmers upon a Krylon harvest.
Sarah pulled a Plexiglas pick from her coat pocket. She made it from an abandoned panel on the side of the road. She sanded and shaved and ran a lighter over it to melt the surface, and it was the greatest pick she’d ever used. Her bass was parts incorporated into an LLC, a miracle in logistics. Its pickups came from a smashed guitar, from the show the fall before when Zack Brody from Pickle threw his axe at the wooden wall of the stage, but it didn’t sink in. She bought the wreck for an album cover sketch and a concert poster.
He had a name that sounded like Ollie so he claimed it and bought the website. He was the lucky one, the singer, the one unassisted melody in the practice room. He would be the one to get the girls except the one girl he could never get was the only one that got him. The two of them together could make any sound a song and any triumph a wrong and they used this odd effect to gather the rejects to the empty warehouses and the landfills and tunnels anywhere that held electrical outlets for their emotional outlets, their artistic outlets.
Neon fire slithered over glass tubes, gas within raining punches on gas without and splattering color on the backs of Ollie’s eyes. Sarah wore shades like a goddess trapped on earth with peepers that annihilate the moon in their spare time. The polished steel doorframe’s slick encapsulated the slow drift of the red braking lights of a brand-new Chevy Tahoe that Ollie only knew about because the driver’s got an asshole for a mouth and he shat his praises. They move slush and try the door.
Ten years off the clock, and a man was murdered by the beer coolers. And the evidence tech had the sheer audacity to chalk right over an errant box of stuffing that the decedent grabbed on the way down. Each year added a new dollar to the six packs and a new inch of cockroach bedding behind the shelf of three-year-old peaches, priced to escape justice for another solid slice of decade.
Ollie ushered Sarah in with a warm hand at the small of her back. He long ago reached the epiphanic state in which one realized that the smell of coffee was as dark as the pools of it evaporating away in an engaged pot. Blunt wraps, pungent, on the rack, sundry accoutrements of slackers on medicine that calls itself that. Marlb Reds and Newports in a foot race to the counter, nails in a coffin debut on a chalkboard for the good-health gurus that cough and wave their hand at a nicotene drift.
He, the fat he who was the genius that named his corner of heaven simply ‘Mini Mart,’ was bored, a man on a seat on a mission to beat the clock while making bank and paying off his second mortgage. He flipped the page on a magazine he didn’t have to pay for but would make him leap to tell a kid it wasn’t a library should they take a peek. His shirt was urban sportswear, which meant it put on airs and was easy to counterfeit. He eyed Sarah and Ollie in blinks between headlines. He knew them. They knew him. The police knew them both from the same reports.
“Y’all can’t just stand around in here,” he said. “and keep your hands out of your pockets. And you can’t hide from the cops like last time… ground’s got six inches of powder on ya.”
Ollie’s lips sneered as his fingers coiled around the handle of the soda box, one for the register and two for the ragged tear in a bomber jacket too big for his frame and a perfect fit for his predilections. Two sodas nestled in matted cotton; two magic acts in plain sight of the biggest cocksucker on the block to hold a business license.
Ollie glanced at Sarah as if to read her haul through the number of times she smiled at the prick, at the arc of her back as she bent over and drew his eyes like a water pail, a fifty-five-mile-an-hour thirst trap. Ollie hit him with a stare, made him shake off his street-girl fantasy, and brought the haul, the first beat of the peekaboo, to the counter.
“These are warm,” Ollie tapped the tip of a twenty-ounce ginger ale gingerly with a crooked finger. “You need to fix that cooler. How much do I get off for warm-ass soda?”
All truths laid out, it was a ruse, a jukebox playing pop but hiding blistering punk rock wrapped up in two silver aluminum cans. Ollie would’ve drank a rustwater smoothie; his thirst having taken over his body, drained by the salt of the sausages and the rental equipment between his piss-pouch and Denny’s coffee. But a man put on defense plays shittier offense.
“There’s nothing wrong with the cooler. Soda and chips is five bucks.” Hand out, a target tattoo on his meaty palm. Ollie pried a roll of dimes and set it on the counter, letting it roll under his own palm.
“That ain’t five bucks.”
“I can count it out,” Ollie said. “Slowly. Read the dates on each dime. Take a picture and look em up, see if any are worth real money. I could polish em.”
The proprietor, visibly annoyed and assumed even more bored, grabbed the roll and punched the register with a finesse that only a man in love with his cashbox could apply, the kind of love that popped it open beyond mechanical reason. Ollie smiled and took just enough of a bow to hold fast his criminal enterprise. Sarah twirled around, giving the Minimart sentinel a wraparound view of an ass that had landed them friendly dealers on more than one cold, desolate night. She smirked as she reached for Ollie’s hand as they reached for the door and freedom from a crap camera that wouldn’t pick them up if they were the only ones it ever saw. Why everybody stole from the place. That, and the well-established fact that el capitan offered cigarettes and beer for blowjobs and the dirt on his hands wasn’t from cleaning the place.
The sedan floating across the snow squealed to a jagged stop, nearly laid them out. How those two assholes got a lease couldn’t be explained by either science, history, or sociology. The earth was round, the Battle of Hastings was 1066, and two dopers without any verifiable source of income secured a lease on a 2010 Accura. It should’ve got the lender wise when they paid the bill in curled up twenties, but word in the rumor mill was that Donnie Bacos Auto laundered cash on permanent press. They swaggered their thirty-five hundred pounds of ill-gotten gains through into the groove that had stopped them and nearly clipped Ollie again before skidding to a second halt.
“Holy shit, it’s Ollie,” Deke said from the driver’s seat. “I almost hit Ollie. Hey, get in. We’re doing mailboxes.”
Ollie checked with Sarah with a shrug and she returned, and no objections put the question to the growing snow and the swirls of a bitter wind tunnel that had them feeling like God was testing their aerodynamics. Ollie opened the back seat to weed, cigarettes, and peppermint Schnapps, reminding him of his father’s shed in the fourth grade when he and his friends continued their education beyond the rudiments of grammar.
Ollie slid over for Sarah, who coughed in the face of the bouquet. Ollie couldn’t tell if the cough was organic or a guttural display of mock sanctimony over a life they’d outgrown.
“You guys got a dollar-fifty?” Harry, the passenger, said.
Ollie shook his head, then realized they couldn’t see him. “Nah,” he said.
“You got five, then?”
“I got a Coke.”
Harry turned around. “You got coke?”
“A Coke,” Ollie pulled out one of his pilfered cans. “A can of Coke.”
Harry scoffed and turned back around. “Can’t do nothing with that,” he said. “Hey, can I have the can when you’re done?”
“Sure.”
“I seen your pops today, Sugar,” Sarah’s name on stage. “He damn near looked like he wanted to take a shit in the percolator. I was scared; I actually spelled his name right on the cup. He still want to crush Ollie’s nuts like he said?”
“No, he said I’m dead to him. I don’t know why he was pissed at you.”
“Maybe he just had to shit?” Deke said.
“We have a bathroom.”
“Maybe it was full.”
“Maybe your mother was in there giving handjobs and he couldn’t get it up,” Harry said.
“How you gonna say that in front of Sugar?”
“I hope he can’t get it up,” Sugar said. “Serve him right. I already got a piece of shit brother. I don’t need two.”
“You can’t get a brother from handjobs,” Harry said.
Deke pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the dash. “Maybe he just heard about your shitty coffee and he was desperate and couldn’t go anywhere else.”
“What are you guys doing to mailboxes? Where’s the bat?” Ollie asked.
“Nah, Ox,” Ollie’s stage name. “We’re selecting winners for the Drug Pushers’ Clearinghouse. Seven lucky mailboxes get a dimebag of the best weed they’ve ever smoked.”
“You’re giving away weed?” Sarah asked. “You guys just have it like that, huh.”
Harry rolled down the window, giving the wind a chance to slap both Ollie and Sarah in the face. “You can’t make it in the business world if you don’t advertise,” he said. “This will be on the news.”
“They’re not going to say how good it was.”
“Nope. But they’ll show it.” Harry reached into the glovebox and pulled out a baggie. “Check this shit out.”
He cupped a bud in his hand and slid it back. The fruit of the poisonous stalk, sticky as cotton coated in spray glue, THC like the lining of a geode, translucent white; more crystal than crop. It reminded Ollie of the snowflakes tumbling down outside, which, if they had an urge to get toasted, would surely congregate on the bud he palmed. He shouldn’t have hold of it. He turned to see Sarah looking at it like it was a movie monster, only thing missing was the stage lighting shining up her features. She couldn’t take it, and so Ollie couldn’t take it, so he handed it back.
Harry nudged Deke. “Pull over,” he said. “That one. The one looks like a windmill. That’s Holland. They gotta be smokers.”
They slid over to the side sans finesse and the mailbox door creaked as Harry played postman and benevolent dealer in one fluid motion. Ollie hoped the owner wouldn’t come out in their robe ready to play baseball, or even worse, skeet.
“We’re gonna go to the warehouse. Y’all in?”
Deke’s invitation was a chip of concrete chiseled in calligraphic flair. The warehouse. The ground floor back wall origin of the myth of Ollie’s sobriety, before the legend made the man and Ollie first resisted the apple. The bull-headed All American assault dealers operating out of the tips of their steel-toe boots, pushing their hard sell on Ollie’s ribs. Sarah’s ribs were thinner than his and their bruises bloomed to win the state fair domestic violence poster. But the back wall of the ground floor of the warehouse could never flip the thesaurus and end up “domestic.”
The car picked up speed and Deke hung his arm out the window and the snowfall, not content to be kept out of good company, floated in and nestled in Ollie’s jet black disheveled hair.
“Can you drop us off at the radio station instead?” The station, a twelve-by-twenty-four mass of mixers, sliders, faders, and grip-mangled husks of twenty-four ounce paper coffee cups. Sean was there sharing dank, existential memes on Facebook, and the owner, Fred, probably also sharing dank, existential memes in synchronicity with the application of prospective advertiser names onto a rolling white board that served as a room divider. A safe haven.
Sarah tugged on Ollie’s arm. He looked over and her eyes were hungry for something that couldn’t be mixed and sucked up in a needle.
“We go,” she said. “To the warehouse. I want to. Please.”
Ollie rubbed the back of his hand across her cheek to feel the damp of her cheekbone but found only a dry and flush landscape she’d not painted for him since the Christmas past when their last high found them streaking Memorial Park.
Ollie turned to face the road ahead, between Deke adjusting his mirror to give him cleavage access and Harry rolling a joint and pointing out mailboxes that he was sure would draw the hands of quasi-suburban burnouts.
Deke and Hairy delivered an ounce in eighths over an eight-block radius in a asymmetric route that would make the 6 a.m. postal run a one man Woodstock if he happened to reach into to any of the bud-laden drop boxes. Ollie sweated it out hot and Sarah played a cool peek-a-boo with her tedium, since weed was always just a plant to her.
Eventually the two up front found Sarah’s boredom as attractive as they found her, and that could only mean that the warehouse was on the GPS, if they’d ever needed it. They hit 32, the vein parallel to the thin strip of highway that served as the Hudson River’s artery, the warehouse somewhere between, a tumor that took turns over the years being malignant and benign.
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