Rolling, a short story

with paintings by Claudia Bitrán

Come on we’re going to Fay’s tonight, and the best part is it’s free.

Lotti Golden, “Gonna Fay’s”

From Be Drunk - Claudia Bitrán (2020)

I know a guy named Joey, and Joey goes with Moey…

“You’re gonna kill yourself and then you’re gonna kill me,” Bridge cried from a nowhere room. “Gonna roll so hard that the boulder you think you are is gonna crumble into pebbles.” Nico had heard it. Leaky casserole congealing on the chipped china, the plastic cat’s tail ticking toward 9:00. Big Step doesn’t know sunlight from fascinations, she thought.

Hell. What if sand is what I want. So she put up airs of indigestion and went to dial Jimmy.

Tuesday, Canarsie. The wet of deep summer thickened up Nico’s short split ends to a vivacious pump. She could smell the exhaust… Jimmy was stationed around the block. Hot as a shape: a slick hypotenuse to the A side of his motorcycle and the B side of the sidewalk. The C stood straight and came to greet her, nearly nuzzling into her patchouli-spritzed neck. Oh, how she wished he would. “C’mon, Faye’s dying to see us.” The two of them approximated a space launch off the asphalt. They zoomed through the warbled vector of lampposts and porch lights until the ‘burbs blurred into nothing more than dark matter.

“Hello, Manhattan!” Ignition, kickstand, lock. “Always good to see ya, Henry!” The two of them showed up low on Henry Street, where the sewer grates got plugged with sea-soaked newsprint and sudsy netting, the smell of scallops seeping in through the mouth. The street was full of schizos and lepers and bums-off-the-Bowery, just how Nico liked it. Mother was like an ant of an aircraft above in the zone of angels. And here was her little girl below, blue’d out in the rollicking substance of the city’s nonsense. Angel…

“Hey, hold it—is that AJ?” Jimmy pointed to a short Salvadorian sporting a tweed Gatsby with an oil-rubbed messenger ducking out of a subterranean globule in pharmaceutical tints. They flagged him over, asking what’s good, nodding to the weight to his satchel. “Shouldn't y’know? Sweetness…”

They spotted Faye’s right away, being the only prewar with Art Deco and Grecian lintels on the block. A panel of light radiated extraterrestrially from the sixth floor left window—that was home calling. AJ’s shoulders hiked. Jimmy’s jeans stiffened. Nico’s lips whetted.

She fished a key scratchily labelled COOKIE from out of her microscopic pocket, which she twisted with savoir into the gut of the shoddy front door lock. Tendrils of sound unleashed as she pushed inside, summoning the triad upward. Moey goes with Jamie, and Jamie goes with Sadie… After three flights, they knocked onto a yielding door; it sighed open to a green scene. Grass-shaded library lamps, deep sea fangly fishes swimming behind emptied Chartreuse—even the overhead bulbs had the hue of cat eyes. Pure verdure. And in the thick of it, the laboratory of their amusement.

“Faye! Faye!” Jimmy called out, “where you gone to shrivel now?” Nico gave him a hit to the oblique. “Deaf don’t mean she don’t have dignity,” she said. It was fair to presume the maiden was in her boudoir anyhow, listening to her 45s as high as her canals could make out and as even the furthest tenet could detect through their wafer-thin walls. Nico would make sure to give her a ‘hiya’ and fill her pitcher before leaving in the morning. But for now, the Now of Then when you’re being told, it was time to roll.

Not two minutes ticked by until Faye’s abrasive buzzer sounded the arrival of others. Nico brought them in: Howie, a friend of Jimmy with a face for a darkroom and a nylon-strapped guitar case; Fanny, a tambourine player sporting bulletproof bangs whom Nico knew from the Playhouse open jams; Tonix, a newish doll punk supposedly originating from Applied Mathematics II, according to Jimmy; and Johnny, who was Johnny.

“Did you hear the news?” Howie chirped between put-puts of a freshly sparked jay, “we’re going to war!” Bombs, embargos, decapitations, yeah, yeah. Nico left the Jimmy with the others to talk their pseudo-global-know-all and followed AJ to the kitchen where he swung his satchel onto the pink-tiled countertop. In a fluent fiddle he unlatched the straps to reveal a true array of medicine, a necessitated demeanor for his possession of a doctor’s Gladstone. “Check it,” he boasted.

And how his boasting was merited. He showed her ciba, tuies, lucy, kretek, crystal, candies, M&Ms (and M.M.), milk, ice, and snow flowing like spring melt. Ups and downs. A small stall for horse. E and T and XTC. Bullets, bandaids, beans, bars, blues, boxes of blades and bottles of balls. Cigs weren’t really his business. But lotsa greenery, AKA groceries, AKA gummies and hard stuffs. “Adolescent’s Wellness Multivitamins.” Dissolvables, tinctures, and nasal sprays. Powders, hell-broth, desiccated herbs. Not to mention—in the fridge behind Faye’s cold cuts and months-old ambrosia—enough Red Stripe to paint the streets sanguine.

Nights at Faye’s were lawless de jure, the apartment established as a sovereign state of safeguarded shenanigans. Naturally, some unspoken rules did manifest over the course of the past twoish months of gatherings, such as, You Bring Snacks, You Share. Knowing this well, AJ and Nico passed the bottles to the rest of the populace like a game of telephone until their words got sloppy with hilarity. Caps and foil wrappers fell to the ground in short order. If the medium was the message, then risk dissolved on the wet bed of their tongues, gaining profundity as sweetness sent its signals brain-ward bound.

Heads halfway out the window, knees knocked in a euphoric disembodiment. It was 11:11 PM, an endorsement from the angels for their good times. Oh, mama, don’t mind me, Nico wished as she hid a tile of acid in her mouth. It was her roll of choice—she relished the intensity to which any sensate could swell under Miss L’s love. Inoculated with a sip of ciba and Jamaican lager and time was gone. So she hoped it would be.

From Be Drunk - Claudia Bitrán (2020)

Tick tick tick. It seemed the lot had no issue playing tricks on their central nervous systems. Signs and symbols supposedly swirled all around them. Fanny studied the skeet-bites on her calves as if they simulated Orion’s Belt glimmering from a celestial swath of skin. Jimmy swore he saw the rabbit foot on Tonix’s charm-loaded bag give a flirty kick. After his third beer and second Skittle, inspiration struck Johnny. He peeled back a trapezoid of pinstriped wallpaper as some impromptu papyrus to scribble an acrostic with his Bic:

Feels

Alright:

Youth—

Eternity!

Nico frustratingly still felt a little less than buzzed. “Yo! Fangie, why donya take a seat here?” Howie hollered from the velveteen couch with his crotch obtusely spread. In Fanny’s figure Howie saw his own beatnik Bettie Page; in herself Fanny saw nothing but the plankton scattering behind her tightly closed lids. Howie was the only of the lot still wearing his shoes, the rest instinctively having slid theirs’ off by the door. But the world just had to know about his new pair of Fyre Campuses, which appeared filthy with the patina of two boroughs in an afternoon. Banana brown too, like a damn narc—no way Fanny wanted his lap. She continued to dance barefoot and vampish on Faye’s Moroccan weave.

And Pearly goes with Jetta, What a drag, what a drag…

“Talk about drag. Won’t Faye play anything but Francis? Or at least flip it,” Fanny whined despite her grooving, her eyes remaining shut in an angsty squeeze. “C’mon. That’s her namesake,” Tonix reached out from a veil of smoke, always trying to sound more diplomatic (i.e., older) than she was, being however young Sophomores come nowadays. “It’d be no difference to her,” Johnny spurted mannishly. “She’s got earwax older than amber! We could be honking on the Israelites’ ram horns for all her goddamn walls of Jericho could care. Isn’t that right, Nicolas?”

Nico never liked Johnny—not for his mean-spiritedness and overdone biblical references, and certainly not for his taking to her when Jimmy had his attention diverted, which is to say, whenever she wasn’t actively wrangling his orifices toward her person. (Her name was another issue altogether.) However, she agreed the den was in need of amplification. Music was the ultimate consumable their pleasure required. Obviously. As a rash and compensatory tactic, Nico flounced over to impart Jimmy a pec just beneath the jut of his chin—the highest her stature could manage—before setting forth to Faye’s Cimmerian chambers, not daring to look back and witness any causalities. The scuff of stubble prickled her lips perfectly enough.

Nico was the only one who braved encounters with the maiden herself. In fact, she was the one who put up the lot with Faye in the first place, a place not so far from now, the Now of Then when you’re being told.

Last spring and the promise it ported in dogwoods and finished finals plummeted hard at the Canarsie Colonial Club. Nico was put in the position of Assistant Receptionist, being paid under the table to hold down the front desk during peak vacation visitation. Her passive employment was all (irritatingly) creditable to her older step sister Bridgette, a legitimate C.C.C. employee coming on three summers of non-managerial experience. “What’s this about ‘peckish’? It’s only 7:15—find some ice chips and deal!” Bridge acted like a despot around Nico and her fellow high school associates but lacked any actual authority beyond the occasionally necessitated seasonal nepotism.

While on a smoke break by the back portico on a late-June scorcher, Nico caught the attention of a thin lady with black hair down to her hip. She had spotted her earlier that day for the first time meandering aimlessly about the lobby. Now the lady was crossing the gravel pathway in a swerve, her crow-tracked eyes gunning the ruby glow off Nico’s mouth. “Got a spare for your elder?” she asked as she arrived. Amused, Nico fished out her pack, extending it open to the stranger. Faye, still unnamed, exchanged the Gold for a quarter, placing it in the crevice between the carton and its foil liner. “Bus fare,” she winked with some strain. “No need,” Nico said. “My boyfriend’s gotta Harley,” her voice lilting at the brand name like it was an uncomfortably exotic loanword. But that wasn’t the unearned word. Truth be told, Jimmy was more a late Senior-year peer ascending into crushhood than any relationship legitimately confirmed between them. The lady must’ve detected her deception. “Well, look at you, Cookie,” she replied, diminishing her junior’s pride without malice.

She coughed hard after one drag. In her wheeze Nico could hear the entire sea: the whip-crack of cresting waves, the neat splish of a diving petrel, even the honk of a docking tugboat. Nico swam in the sound of the stranger’s sickness, the inverse capacity of her lungs she was complicit in diminishing. She felt bad, then fine, then good. Affirmed of something in herself.

“Cookie, can I tell you something?” Nico nodded, avoiding her glitterized eyes. “l don’t like it here. Hate the landscaping, the nothing-tasting tea. But it’s better than an empty parlor.” If she had known the word apparition at the time, Nico would’ve used it to name this woman’s presence. Her unplaceable face, pallid and seemingly soft like modeling compound. But behind (within? through?) her countenance was a warmth that compelled Nico, especially in relief of all the icy suburban mothers-of-three and their wrist watch husbands. A rising sulfur bubble. Plus she liked her nickname, better than the typical ‘buddy.’

Another wet hack, approaching a tempest. “Let me go get you something,” Nico said, reassuming her role of customer support while ditching the standardized airy inflection. She went back inside to the Members Bar, asking a crater-faced redhead named Chandler to pour her two Arnold Palmers with room. She then went behind the front desk to fiddle through Bridge’s day bag for a squat bottle of Very Old Barton, topping off the styrofoam cups. No better than her old man, Nico thought as she walked the cups back out to the clay ghost lady outside. Faye squished out a smile before taking a deep, long gulp. “You’ve got your finger on it,” she said. The ocean cooled. They sipped and smoked. Nico wondered how long the lady had had her hair. She still didn’t have a name for Faye, nor vice versa.

“How’re your wrists, Cookie?” Faye asked after a moment’s quiet. Nico reflexively raised her arms to investigate: a bit boney, but not terribly frail. She’d certainly seen more boyish joints. They weren’t her girliest feature either. “Look good to me,” Nico said. “Grand. Now, if you ever got a free Tuesday, you come and pay me a visit down in Chinatown. I’ll put up some tea for us, good like yours. Bring your wrists, and hell, a couple more if you got ‘em. On Tuesday I get my jars.”

From Be Drunk - Claudia Bitrán (2020)

Shadow slipped out of the door like tar onto Nico’s toes. Air sat in stale stacks, and a polyphonic hum filled the room: the A-side had just rolled off its groove, the static melding with the effortful breath emanating from the rocking chair beside the sound system laid atop a wide dresser. Nico tried to tiptoe past the limp body, using the pads of her fingers to lift the vinyl off the felt. Friction from the spindle held—she pulled up until the record set free and shook the turntable from under its release. The dresser wobbled consequentially, causing an array of aluminum picture frames to jostle and knock each other to the floor. They landed like a cymbal hit to command the maiden out of her coma.

“I’m sick, I’m sick,” she said in a hollow voice. Nico wasn’t sure if she was talking to her or an imagined audience. “Oh, hiya. It’s me, Faye.” Nico came to her side at a crouch, picking up the frame from the floor and bringing them to her bent knee to regard them in the lowlight. Images of a handsome boy, possibly near her own age. He had a Hershey-thick gap in his smile and trim, shiny hair. Of a middle school class portrait sort or something. For all her nights at Faye’s, she’d never seen this sweet face. “Hey Faye, who’s this?” she asked, making eye contact with her host for the first time in what felt like an epoch. Was her hazel always this blue? Perhaps it was the darkness. They held an intimate instant like this until Faye brought her eyes down to the picture frames. Then a tangible shift registered in her countenance.

“Why are, why… Starlight, sweet Samuel! Oh, God, twenty, too soon… He was my punishment, that cell rotting in me. Too too soon! Never missed a day of schooling, always made his bed, arranging his stuffed things just so. Kenny was ah, a kangaroo and Bucky was a beaver. Purple hippo? Oh, God made him too perfect to last, like a daylily. Sixteen, Cookie, has anything more terrible happened? Why are you showing me this? Don’t you think I already know-know-know? Stop it, I can’t bear to look at him no more! No, this is not right! Where did he go? Why? Why did you take him from me? He is my punishment. My one, everlasting punishment. God, please, please. Only twenty-two!”

Faye flailed out her arms like her fingers were caught in the bill of two falcons flying in opposite directions. “Oh God, just a daylily…” She herself appeared birdlike—a twitchy eaglet screeching from the mania of its existence. Nico, not so blindsided by this sudden outburst, sought to soothe Faye, diving toward her heart. Splish! With an ear upon Faye’s breast, she heard the locomotive chug of her heart beating much harder and faster than seemed possible, given her seated position. Faye wrapped her arms around Nico as if to secure herself from the force of her own pulsations. For an instant Nico felt like she was back on Jimmy’s bike, clutching his abdomen as they ripped over the East River. She wished Jimmy would think her long absence suspect by now and free her from Faye’s ensnarement. But she quickly abandoned that wish, knowing how Jimmy gets with his hand in the candy bag all too well. Or rather the wish was squeezed out of her.

“Mm, you do smell nice.” Faye rubbed her cheek upon Nico’s head, applying light dampness from the residue of her tears. “Patchouli and amber, amber and ambergris,” she said, seemingly soothed. The strained draw of air from her nostrils evinced the craggy textures of her sinuses, the trafficked flow of oxygen to her brain and other vital organs—a private geography formed from the erosion of a difficult lifetime. Knowing no better than the mindless perfection of her youth, Nico mapped with horror the internal acoustics of Faye’s body, the presence of which she generally tried to ignore for the sake of her own fun-having. Her being there, in Faye’s bedroom, was a repeated failure. Not to mention the yellow sunshine having yet to shine upon on her cortex’s horizon.

Of course, the lot paid no mind at all. The only thing that concerned their minds was the practice of losing them without paying a thing. So they were advocates of the liberty Faye’s apartment afforded them, how it protected their inalienable right to release their steam for the price of free. Miscellaneous authorities compromised every other space: mothers surveying their backyard usage, campus security snubbing out any attempted tailgating, bar bouncers with the blue lights on their face cards. They had nowhere else to turn but to Faye’s to cool off with snow in the summer. To nod off until dawn determined sobriety, ‘cause fuck ‘em, we don’t got no more time to give ‘em.

But there was always a body in the backdrop. Nico knew this. A body with carnelian rings on its fingers and bobby pins in its hair. A body that required water and tinned fish every day. A body that got social security checks picked up (and occasionally stolen) by the neighbor next door. A body storing celluloid reels of wedding lace, dance halls, automobiles, epidurals, stuffed animals, maritime deployment, atomic detonation, a red rose and a yellow ribbon on a white tablecloth, filled jars, empty jars, visits to the junkyard, aisles of spirits, a view of the beach, the portico, sweet tea, peace, youth like hers again. A body that dreamt of nothing more than to host its youth again.

“Faye?” Nico asked as she tried to pry herself from her cradle. Instead, Faye tightened like a twined vine on a picket. “Cookie, don’t you know? I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m dying…” Faye swayed to and fro on her rocker, animating a juxtaposed unit of flesh and scalps and clothes, reciting the rosary of her remorse. “Hey, Faye, you’re alright, you’re alright,” Nico said through her sudden stream of saline. The maiden’s ruckus always incurred crying, despite the routine of it all. Nico reminded herself it would all be the same as it has been—a ball down its slope.

“Let me get you something sweet, ‘kay Faye? Sweet for your throat.” At this suggestion, Faye unravelled a bit, allowing Nico to slip away. The room was achingly dark. The only distinguished light fanned from the bottom gap of her door, where the occasional flicker of shadowed feet fluttered across—a confirmation that the party was still rolling strong. Nico wiped her smudged eyes with her thumbs, readying herself for the scene again. Then she remembered the obligation of inventory.

Beside Faye’s quilt-draped bed was a small chestnut nightstand with an unassuming yet deep drawer completed by a curved copper handle. Nico, after looking over her shoulder to assure herself of Faye’s oblivion, carefully opened the drawer to reveal an array of bottles, slim parcels, and parchment bags. She squinted in the blackness to evaluate the psychotropes: 2x Librium, 3x Valium (1 more than last time), 4x Seconal (2 less), 1x bottle of Promethazine and Robitussin each (not siphon-able, but good to know). The containers were at varying states of fullness—some unopened, others just dregs. Nico scored an empty canister from the back of the drawer to do her divvying, making sure to pull out a few extra phrennies for Faye, who continued to utter sour-sounding strings of nonsense. She didn’t even care much for the prescribed stuff. Too suburban. But Jimmy had a taste for them, of course, and she knew AJ sought the caps for his stock, the lot’s stock. Ultimately, she aimed to please.

After securing her spoils, Nico sorted any traces of her pilfering (as if it really mattered) and headed to the door. “I’ll be right back with some liquids, Faye, not a moment,” Nico said to the disintegrating figure before reentering the green glow.

And to think it was all a fool’s errand. Howie had already brought out his Gibson, issuing tunes in lieu of the LP Nico initially intended to switch. What had appeared green now seemed silver: everyone was stratospherically elsewhere. No one acknowledged her return from sea, not even her Jimmy, swept in the dancing gyre around Howie’s lackadaisical licks off his abalone-inlaid frets. He finally forewent his boots as well as his shirt. In fact, the whole faction of them now romped around topless. Tonix twirled far from her Che Guevara shirt, broadcasting carelessness like a corny whore. Nico noticed her incipient tits tease upon Jimmy’s abdomen as they shimmied and swirled, shuddering. Had she gone grey like clay herself? An invisible polymer?

This wasn’t it, not the tempo. Nothing a little saccharine couldn’t solve though. Nico moved through the space-age living room back to the kitchen where AJ appeared to be rolling solo, his hands around a steaming mug of something. “What’s nice, Nico?” he asked in slow motion. Nico didn’t respond in her focused state. She refilled a ceramic kettle and lit the stove. Then she opened cupboards and rummaged across dusty shelves, a flash of frenetic urgency coming over her, the word storm running across her mind. Then gather. Then spill.

Nico needed this night to be good. She needed to redeem her day of drudgery, of baby-talking to the zinc oxide-faced assholes and force feeding herself Bridge’s jaundiced mush, dodging all her abuses trickled down from a father she couldn’t even blame for her being born. Nico needed to live in her notebook songs. Canarsie was hell! Everything in this sick city cost cash or courage. But not Faye’s! Faye’s was freedom, was a flight along the line between sea and sky. The metallurgy of ennui, where the idle fell from their eyelids and crashed with the weight of their perfect bodies. Faye’s was a stage, she the eponymous producer in perpetual mental absentia. And if the tax of a good time was just a little bedside manner, so be it. Nico always paid her dues. It was just like Colonial, she reflected, minus the pastel polos and Bridge’s bad temper. Plus: sweet Jimmy. And AJ and Fanny, sure. Howie too. Johnny, she could take or leave. Tonix, that corny whore.

It could’ve been the best Tuesday night in the written record of adolescence, but Nico wasn’t stoned enough. Was she? And Faye was sick, sick, sick, dying.

Finally, a mortar and pestle. It seemed to weigh a tremendous amount, an insult to her wrists. Nico popped a couple Seconals into the marble bowl, pulverizing it to a powder that shimmered like salamander skin. Then the kettle whistled a high F in elation. She filled a decrepit teapot with hot water and loose echinacea and her pharma-silt, letting it brew while she arranged a small platter with a fridge-dried lemon wedge and some stale Lorna Doones. Nice and neat, everything the maiden might need to quell her queasiness. She turned to take the tea tray over to Faye when Johnny bumbled into the kitchen, his limbs slack with so many sauces.

“Nicolas, where have you—what’s this posh stuff? Scrap that, you gotta come. It’s snowing in the bathroom!” Nico ignored him, trying to suppress the tickle elicited in her by the sound of snow. Everything was starting to tickle a teensy bit. Waiting response, Johnny’s eyes wandered then landed on the seated figure in the breakfast nook. “Oh, hey AJ. What’s up. Anyway, wanna make some angels, angel?”

“In a sec, Johnny,” Nico replied as flat yet feminine as she could. “Faye’s acting up again.” Johnny exalted an exasperated huff. “It’s a miracle she’s up at all,” he said. He turned his head out the door, torso and legs following in delay… one Mississippi, two Mississippi… Then Johnny back-stepped into the kitchen to amend his last words. “Mind if I come with you? I mean, to bring the tea.” Nico blushed at his proffer despite her despising it, him. “What, Jimmy put you up to this?” she snarked, secretly strategizing a workaround. Truth be told, she felt far away from that boy. Increasingly uncommitted to a faith in his presence, which was already pretty much zilch. “What? No, I just thought…” She wasn’t crazy. Jimmy was totally facilitating Tonix’s mammary tactics. She had her eye on him since the game season, always scheming her way onto Jimmy’s saddle after class. The thought of her on his Harley drummed a foul thing in her stomach. Brine and putrid vapors and squawking filth! It didn’t matter what Johnny said at all—they were probably already tongue-deep in the blizzarding bathroom.

“Fine, take this,” Nico said, passing the tray to Johnny. The veins in his forearms bulged lusciously, like rivers that were nerves that were ribbons of turquoise syrup. Oh, the air was playing tricks on her now. She took a deep breath and stumbled on her exhale down to the ever-checkered floor. Johnny, already headed toward Faye’s, didn’t notice. But AJ did, launching from his cavalier repose to support her back up. “Too fast?” he inquired with concern. Embarrassed, she straightened herself and tossed her hair behind her shoulder. “I don’t follow, no,” she said. “Not rolling too fast?” he said, “maybe falling-like instead?” She managed then to look AJ in the eyes, which were utterly massive. Two whole planets of emotion. But so steady, secure in the station of their sockets. Wait—was he sober?

One could mistake falling for flying when the bottom isn’t of concern. Isn’t that the point of being here? Faye thought to say. But didn’t. She laughed like the girl she thought he thought she wasn’t, purely to demonstrate the having of fun to which a girl like her would intrinsically experience. And with that, she turned on her bare feet out the kitchen, which all but vanished into history as she exited.

Johnny was waiting in front of Faye’s door. They could hear laughter emanating from further down the hall, demented like Circus of Horrors or some other horror flick. Suddenly everything threatened an edge. Thousands of harsh edges swirled around Nico’s periphery as she opened Faye’s door with her fingertips. The oil again, oozing evermore. “I can’t see a fucking thing,” Johnny half-whispered, setting the tray down just past the threshold inside. “Lemme find a switch,” Nico said, realizing it hadn’t occurred to Nico to ever turn on a light in Faye’s room. Or rather, she minded not to, presuming the maiden’s sensitivities. But what did she really know about her host? More than any other guest, but that meant nothing.

“Don’t bother,” Johnny said, ducking fast to lock his lips on the side of her neck. It was dark enough that she couldn’t see him coming. She flinched and swatted him hard like a leaping beetle one misjudged as wingless. “What the fuck?” she hissed to his nowhere face. He imposed again, this time clutching her nape and hip with his somewhere hands. The way a man can elucidate the ferocity of his strength in one unexpected instant—she tried to whip around free but he held her unrelenting. “What’s wrong with you,” Nico gasped, “Faye’s right there!” Johnny unlatched his sour lips. “The maiden won’t mind, couldn’t even flinch in protest. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, FAYE?” He roared right at the black mass that was everything around them. The depth of the darkness registered miles deep to Nico’s dilating eyes. “Stop! Don’t scare her,” she pleaded “She’s sick, needs her tea.” Johnny gave a grunt and bent down to retrieve the tray from off the floor. “You’re right, Faye needs her tea. Find the light.”

Nico felt up a wrinkly wall until her palm caught the nub. She flicked the switch, illuminating Faye’s room brighter than floodlights could stun. Instantaneous white flashed over the room, white like snow in the sun, dissolving just as fast as it fell, developing into clarity. What resolved was the sight of a beautiful, pale woman in a cream chemise, wrists crossed over her lap in a knobby rocker. And lining the corners of the room once invisible to Nico: innumerable bottles drained and scattered. Green glass, brown glass, ghost glass. Enough glass to have robbed a beach of its sand. So much sand.

Nico hadn’t seen Faye in luminance like this since their first encounter, somewhat taken back by the subtle pleasantness of her person, however wan and wrinkled. It took her a second further to register the sheen on her cheeks, eyes all red from tears cumulative and concurrent. Yet she didn’t budge.

She didn’t budge as Johnny came up to her, peering down at her as if she were a revolting manhole he couldn’t see the bottom of, and cupped her jaw in his grip. She didn’t budge as he squeezed her mouth open and poured a sturdy stream of scalding tea into her mouth. She didn’t budge, but she cried as she swallowed. “Stop it! Not too much!” Nico might’ve said if he could’ve listened. He surged with unyielding force, but she didn’t budge, not until the well overflowed. Then she spurted out the last ounces with a deep cough that threw her chest over her knees, knocking into Johnny just as Nico had earlier disturbed the dresser and all its collateral. Objects fell. The tray and china came crashing on the hardwood, firm with the thud of the body as well.

Fracturing, Nico felt water flow from her many faces. She heard Johnny yell in a hyena’s pitch but didn’t know if language was attached to the sound anymore. Her weak spine slumped against the wall behind her and she slid to the ground, level with the lump of Faye. She was peaking. Peaking now, the forever Now of the unending Then when you’re being told. Time writhed like a burlap sack of infinite ants in Nico’s head. Johnny kicked around the room, eventually knocking Faye’s bedside stash out into the chaos of chipped things. Nico heard sirens soared by, somewhat serendipitously. But she knew they were headed for other, luckier people.

The door opened beside her and the lot flooded in. It was like they had all just came from a beignet-eating contest, hyped up on impossible quantities of sugar sloppily left on their nostrils. No, no. Nico didn’t budge as her sweet Jimmy stepped over her splayed out limbs, all of thousands of them, fixedly eager to catch the red birdies freed from their cylindrical cages. Eager as Howie, as Fanny, as Tonix.

Nobody but beachcombers, and nothing but sand. Nico trembled at the world that was extending before her, nauseous, in sight of the line between sea and sky. How there was nothing. Nothing to do but keep rolling along the white, serene empty.

From Be Drunk - Claudia Bitrán (2020)

Many thanks to Claudia Bitrán for the permission to use her paintings. More of her awesome work can be found at claudiabitran.com.