September 6th: A Short Story by Braeden Collins
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Thank you Braeden for this incredibly palpable, tangible work of art! We loved reading this short story, and we know you all will too. Content warning for drug use and alcoholism.
Finding a Needle (and Other Minor Abandonments)
I
Someone in my town discarded a needle in the back alley. Could it be? I can tolerate alcoholics. They’ve been here since the beginning, when the town consisted of a couple wagon wheels and a box of inoperative ammunition; when something analogous to a cowboy nailed together another room after the church was built, called it a saloon, and stirred the mash on the stubble grass in the moonlight. There’s still cowboys who kick away empty, stinking beer cans to get to their brake pedals. My ex drank so much I had to wipe his ass for him the last year of his life. He was forty five. I dealt with it like this: it’s as though he were the wolfman. This tendency was just baked into him, inexorably, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There’s no silver bullets around here and it’s a fusion and one part cannot live without the other. Somewhere along the line, people started smoking marijuana. Now I smell skunk when I go for my evening walks down the back alleys -- it comes from garages with peeling paint, the smoke licking up from the gap under the door. I bite my tongue. It’s nothing that I want to try but it’s been around so long it’s just normal, like satellite television or the internet. Even my good friend Esther said to me, sheepishly over coffee one day, that she had been smoking some to help the arthritis in her hip and to keep her mind settled. Well I just spooned another bite of cake onto my tongue and changed the subject --back to stuff like the hockey game last night, and just how many more years do my grand-kids have on this earth before it gets a bit too much mold on it. Scrape it off, they always say. Imagine this: the bomb drops, and instead of a mushroom cloud you get a big, lanky toadstool in its stead; it shades the arctic, makes the polar bears cold again. I hear people also eat mushrooms to sort of get their minds out into the nebulae or something. Whatever. Not here. Here they just drink and smoke pot. Maybe. My heart swallowed up all my blood when I saw that needle. It was laying at the fringe of a little puddle in the back alley. I could see my own face, wide-eyed, and then I was looking into the adjacent backyard. The Murrays. Could they? The tip of the needle caught some sunlight, punctured the air. For whatever reason I leaned down and breathed in, wondering if it had a smell to it; something mellow, I expected. Redolent of an old bruised apple peel, perhaps. Junk, they used to call it. Saw in a movie once that they wrap a belt around their arm and dart it in their vein like they’re pegging a candle onto a birthday cake. So I started looking at people’s arms in the grocery store and post office, looking for marks and knicks and bruises. I look in people’s eyes when we’re talking about the weather, looking for a sort of moistness across the sclera. Seems that everybody is in a daze, maybe it’s this heat. Hasn’t rained in five weeks. I can’t have my grand-kids out here if it’s going to be like this; someone has to take responsibility for their family and community. I’m going to find who that needle belongs to and I’m gonna give him, or her, a piece of my mind. I’ll be ready if they start shooting. Esther told me that it was probably an insulin needle. For a diabetic. I’m not listening to those people anymore.
II
The other night I fell asleep in the recliner. It was a tiring day. I had been waiting for a phone call that never did arrive. On the television between my feet, the later edition of the news was playing, rolling through stories and flashing the living room blue. So then I was back in the alley, looking at my face in the puddle. The needle was there, but I wasn’t paying it much attention beyond that nagging feeling you get in the corners of your mind when someone is looking at you. The needle was holding me in its eye like an egg yolk. Me in my bloated clothing. Something in the puddle changed, and next thing I knew my reflection was swelling off the skin of the water. I stepped out of the way, mindful that the needle didn’t end up in the bottom of my running shoes. In that moment--and only that moment--I felt like it was a comrade: we were both watching my reflection grow like a column up into the sky. Two bystanders in communion. But then the needle floated up and the little a-hole pricked my arm and disappeared. Before I realized what had happened, I had become my reflection and I was hurtling up toward the grey sky. Now, this is how things bleed together in dreams. In that half-sleep phase, I was listening to a story on the news about one of the universities in the city. Apparently they’re taking our genes and putting them into other things, making new weird beasts and playing God. That’s the best way I can describe it; I’m not good with science and I never will be. Anyway, it turns out that needle plucked out some of my essence, I felt like a tree missing a leaf. Next thing you know, it dawned on me what I actually was: I was a mushroom. A lanky toadstool, so tall I could feel my head getting cold in the clouds. Down there on the ground--it was like a patchwork, all the dry fields-- I could see my town. It looked like a satellite for the big blinking city further west. But I could only take it in for a few more moments because the mushroom burst and reproduced into a million little spores and they rained back onto the ground. All at once I was in the puddle, the alley, my living room, the post office, the city, the highway, the wolfman’s den... . I was in my grandkid’s house, deep in the city. They stepped on my spores and complained about the sun being shaded; they had wanted to play outside and dance in the puddles. They started pointing at each other with their fingers, like they were little guns. Or needles. After this I woke up with my heart beating hard, wondering if I had remembered to send them their birthday cards this year. I like to think they notice the effort I put in to things, but I don’t know that there is a reward. I haven’t found a needle since. I don’t know what the hell the dream means. Esther told me marijuana eliminates dreams entirely but I’m still not sold on it.
Braeden Collins is a writer based in the frozen prairie in Manitoba, Canada. Rather than succumb to the usual torpor of small-town life, he chose to pursue writing as an inventive way of losing money and sanity. His work has been published by JAKE Mag, and is also pinned under a magnet on the fridge.
Twitter: @BraedenACollins