Swing Low

I’m one monitor down and a hair’s breadth from the crazy. Sometimes, it takes every ounce of good sense I have not to cover every speaker hole and slot in the token booth for fear of it seeping in. There’s always at least three per nightshift, but the overtime is too good to turn down. Until they show up, I’m just making change, fixing cards, and watching the clock.

Tonight, the first one, an older Santa-Claus suit wearing man donning a pair of nylon stockings like a surgical mask, came early, but the second didn’t come ’til ’bout half past one, throwing down his change onto the tin plate and leering into the glass. He stuck his fingers into the slot and tried to touch my hand when I pushed his card through. He took the card with the other hand, leaving his fingers there, steadily waving at me. And we just sat there, me pressed against the short back wall of the booth and he, standing rock still, with his fingers just dancing and dancing on my side of the glass.

The third was a mystic, who staggered to the kiosk, and started whispering into the heavy glass circles between us. I get on the microphone. Ma’am. I can’t hear you. What do you need? She speaks a little louder, but the only thing I can make out is I gotta brick in my belly I can’t move. The trains came and paused. The crazies got on, party-goers got off, and the rats scurried into their holes.

I figured I was home free for the rest of the night, until I heard someone scream. I hovered over the panic button and waited. Wouldn’t be the first time a crazy started howling and I called the police for nothing. Je-sus, had to hear about that one for at least a month. I heard another loud shriek and then I saw them—a young woman walking hurriedly toward the turnstile followed by a tall, thin man. They passed through quickly, he clutched her elbow, and they hurried past me toward the stairwell.

I never actually saw them enter the stairwell. They have to be somewhere behind the booth though, because I can still her them. Every few minutes, it rises up and then stops. The soft echo of a woman whimpering. I cram my face into the corner glass and try to peer as far back as I can, but all I can see is her shoe, a black strappy sandal turned over on its side. I scan the one working monitor and flip through the other channels. Nothing. All I can do is wait for the echo and see if anything else falls out. I push the panic button and hold my breath.

It’s the side vent, I think, and now, they’re right below it. His heavy breathing and her slurred string of help and stop and please. I grab the door handle and Johnson’s booming voice rips through the back of my head. I don’t care what it looks like. You DO NOT leave the goddamn booth. Look what happened to Rivers, tryin’ to be a hero. Fuckin’ setup. All he got was 24 stitches in the head and a lazy eye that still don’t work right. And for what?

The air in the box is thick and I can’t breathe. I lean on the panic button like it’s calling a broken elevator. Hurry up. I pound on the glass. I close my eyes. I can’t hear you. I sing songs and push the panic button repeatedly to the tune of whatever comes to mind, “Star Spangled Banner,” “Happy Birthday.” I put my hands over my ears and sing louder and louder. The notes bounce off the bulletproof glass before cascading down. Each note, having nowhere to go, collides into another and sticks. The box begins to vibrate and I have to rock back and forth to keep up with it. I swing hard as I can, the back wall and my chair moving as one, the desk swerving upward, coming forward to meet my chin. I push forward and then back, looking for the box to break free. Rock past this here. Skip past this now. Swing swing low, god-awful Chariot.

Fear noBody

He loved her though he was a nothing, and by that, not to say a man with little to offer, but that he physically was nothing—fog, absence, a vacuum really. That didn’t stop him from wanting or feeling, though. He had enough molecules to hold a dream or a need, or even the sum of both and it was that inverted absence he could always recognize in another, that festering fear, that thing the seer women called an “ole’ ghost rising.”

In the days since he spotted Hannah, he likened himself to wooing. She was a sad girl, without the good sense to be sad. He liked that he could see it brewing underneath the edges of her upturned mouth, not ready to spout about or leak, but just there, the steady stream simmering beneath the soil. He’d follow her to work, where he’d watch her fiddle with paperwork and fancy the bosses, to later come home and stick her face into steam rising over boiling pots of rice for one. He’d wait ’til the weekends came, to see if the dance and music would stir up the pitch in her. He’d follow her to bars where she and her friends would stand in circles and have mouth-to-ear conversations with hopeful men, but the unbuckling never came. Their hope never transferred.

Sure, there were easier targets. There were women at that very bar whose longing went on longer then the length of their spines. He could remember one whose want was so long that she tripped on it every morning upon rising and had to wind it around her waist just to get her pants on. But he couldn’t do it. Felt like he might drown them, or vice versa. So many of them could barely breathe.

No, Hannah felt right. It was something about the way she fretted, the way her own unacknowledged need broke out in plagues across her body. The sudden dry patches that appeared between her fingers, at the back of the neck, and under her arms. The cyst-like blemishes that fluttered about her cheeks on occasion or the rash of raised beauty marks and moles that rose up on her abdomen in some form of hieroglyphic Braille. He knew that when all that she buried finally broke through, it would be beyond any harness, rope, or barricade anyone could muster.

Until the day she opened, he hung on as the sticky numbness that pressed upon her head and chest, making it hard to think, feel, or see. She thought it was a virus, some old conformity catching up to her, some sniffling, sneezing once office-bound thing that had gone and followed her home. You wouldn’t believe the things going around, co-workers who caught the dog-barking sickness or truth parasites. These were not well days for hoarders.

He plotted spring for the time he would finally have her, but it wasn’t until spring collapsed into the sticky hot that made clothes unbearable, that the bitten lip finally broke. The sweat and humidity made her breasts itch and her pores open wide. The cool showers tinged with rosewater were no longer enough. Her body found itself in the business of remembering. And with it, that ‘ole ghost rose wearing an old lover’s face. Hannah’s bindings loosened and her heart became as lax and waterlogged as the sea. Down, he made it, slipping into the wettest of dreams and pouring himself between her thighs.

It grew fast, this new nothing, expelling itself from womb to room within a week’s time. This baby blank grew by the day, spreading itself wide ’til there was no separation between Hannah and it, it and the walls, it and sky and the earth underneath. Everything within a fifty mile-radius became subsumed by this blank and seemed to forget it’s very self. The trees put down their arms and walked away. The houses pulled up their pipes and swung in the breeze. And the people, too. The children grew like weeds, ’til they easily towered over the swinging houses. Their parents disappeared, some scattered by wind and rain while others simply flew away.

Hannah was the only one still somewhat similar to her original self. Though, she wasn’t sure now what she was, without him or the plagues, and if any of it made a difference in this new festering blank-free universe.