Read Online Stories From the Plague Years by Michael Marano - Free Book Online

shit like contagion. As each day grinds on, and as he slips more covert drinks in the back room, his attacks become more personal and abusive.
    My nerves fray, my hands shake regularly. I forgo breakfast, because the dread of going to work has forced me to start the day bent over the kitchen sink with dry heaves. When I come home, I have to wash the oily sweat from under my arms that reeks of the tension I’ve packed within myself. Soon, I’m unable to eat during the day, my innards are so twisted I can only keep down coffee and the odd pastry.
    I hate Keene. I hate the job. Yet I never summoned the courage to quit.
    Until I was fired.
    —
How
did Keene understand your killing him?
    —I’m not certain he understood that I was killing him, or that the bottle was. You know,
The
Bottle. All I know is he thought it was funny.
    In the storm-heavy space in which I spoke, the thought occurred to me that, as a thing of myth, did I use the poetry of the Bottle for Justice, or did
it
use
me
? The possibility seemed to make a traveling patch of sun through the cloud-dimmed ether.
    Hard-packed ice sheeted the mall parking lot, making it a sham frozen lake. Toward the corners of the lot were mounds of plowed snow, scarred with ice-chunks like boulders on steep hills. I hid behind one of these mounds, close to where I’d watched Keene park his car that morning. I wore thick clothes and thermal underwear to make my long wait possible, yet I wore something beneath my skin that kept me warmer than any outdoor gear could. Through
will
, I became what I needed to be. I didn’t wait for the spirit, the avatar I needed, to enter me. I summoned and tamed it, the way Faust would a demon . . . breaking it to suit my needs.
    From habit, Keene parked at the far ends of the lot, away from the mall entrance where it was crowded, so he could pull out quickly at the end of the day. On Fridays he forgot about leaving at six and got drunk at what had been in the ‘80s a yuppie pick-up place by the South entrance, where he got a deal as a mall manager on mixed drinks. The place was a relic, with Reagan-era décor that was a vile collision of
The Big Chill
and Planet Hollywood. It had been a matter of time before he parked by one of the snow-banks, far from where the cars of the bar patrons clustered.
    At 9:30, I saw him stagger across the ice, looking in his besotted state like a trapper from a Jack London story, trying to reach an outpost in the middle of a long Arctic night as wolves bayed in the distance. Tonight, a different sort of wolf would take him. One with glass teeth.
    At his car, he fumbled with his keys, crunching open the rusted door with a maximum of fuss, grunting as he eased his bulk in the driver’s seat. The car’s spent shocks tilted. There was freedom in my so observing him that made me feel lifted from above like a marionette, that let me run over the ice with a sure-footed lack of weight that I knew would not let me waiver as I closed on his car and slipped through the passenger door I’d unlocked with a coat hanger.
    His head snapped right, his booze-fogged eyes fixed on me, and with the awareness only fools and drunks have, he knew that I was going to kill him . . . that I
could
kill him. That I embodied the Rambo-esque spectre that stalked the tough-guy fairy tales he peddled to men who embraced Darwinian cruelty as they read books gripped in hands slathered with spa-bought moisturizers.
    He jerked up his arm. Booze and his heavy coat slowed him. It was as if a living, twisting weight clung to his wrist. With my left arm, I pinned his shoulder to the seat. With my right, I broke the whiskey bottle I’d brought against the steering wheel and drove it into his neck, where the blood pulses closest to the skin. There was a sound like tearing sandpaper. The Velcro I’d taped to glove and bottleneck let me go deep, to scrape loose the vocal cords that had cut me so many times.
    Arterial spray painted the windshield; steam