Random acts of chaos

I shuffled out of my bedroom, hair like an 80s rock star, and saw Kell sitting on the floor with an open Ked’s box — my Ked’s box — perusing all my sketches. The ones I’d bothered to save, anyway. Most go in the trash with the notebook whenever it’s full. I was well past the point of trying to save everything I did.

“Hey!” I stood there. “Invasion alarm.”

“Is this him?” She had the sketches laid around her in an odd arc, and she lifted one to show me.

It was Kai. His head anyway. He was looking just to the side of the viewer and smiling that crooked smile.

She turned it back and looked. “He’s got eyes like yours.”

“That’s how we met.” I stood over her, trying not to snatch the lot and cart it off to be buried under my bed. “Everybody freaks when they find out we have the same birthday.”

“You guys were born on the same day?”

I made bug eyes at her, like “See?”

She looked at the sketch again and set it down.

“He’s a few hours older than me.” I gave up on my dreams of privacy and sat down on the floor next to her so I could see what she saw. And preemptively grab anything too private.

She locked arms with me. “And this?” She held a sketch of the dearest old man I knew.

“My Uncle Wen.”

“The herbalist guy? Wow, he’s even got the Fu Manchu beard and everything.” She stopped herself. “Sorry. Was that racist?”

I scrunched my face. “Yeah kinda.”

“Is that smoke swirling around his head?”

I shrugged. “Could be. Or incense maybe. Or steam from a tea pot. His shop was always a feast of scents: old teak and dried flowers and pipe tobacco.”

“That’s so cool.” She grabbed another sketch from the arc on the floor. “This is your mom and dad, right?”

I nodded.

“They look so sweet.”

I took it. They were round and beaming. “They can be. When they’re not worrying about everything.”

“They’re parents,” she said, as if that both explained and excused it.

She flipped through the box and pulled out the exact sketch I didn’t want her to see — an oval face with bowl of dark, neatly parted hair and a flower-print collared shirt buttoned all the way to the top. His skin was smooth and brown and he wore an expression of casual engagement — not sad, but not quite all the way happy, like he was enjoying himself but was worried everything might turn bad at any moment. That’s how I always remembered him. Reynaldo Santos, from Colombia, our third Musketeer. The three of us were inseparable freshman year. Rey killed himself shortly before finals, second year. Kell had already dropped out by then, but it hit her hard — harder than me. He was like a little brother to her.

His death certificate said overdose, but we knew the truth.

Kell looked like she was legitimately going to cry. I tried to pull the thick page from her fingers, but she held on. It was a sheet from a ream of rough-edged traditional Japanese paper my mom had sent while I was still in school. I’d drawn him with colored charcoal. I think it captured how soft he was. He was such a mild mannered boy — so quiet you’d barely know he was there. Kell and I were the only ones he really opened up to. Just not enough, we found. In the time we knew him, Rey was on three different medications. None of them seemed to chase the demons away.

“That’s enough,” I said. I pulled harder and Kell let go. I gathered a few of the sketches and put them in the box. I slid the rest to the side with my marker set and toolbox full of paint.

Kell sniffed. “You’re so talented.” She stood and got a tissue.

I thought she might be crying but she sneezed in the bathroom, like really loud — so loud there was an echo.

“What was that?” I asked.

She was laughing from the doorway, wiping snot from her nose. She looked pregnant then. Not her belly of course. She just seemed full. Fertile. Abundant.

There was a folded paper I didn’t recognize among the sketches near my bare toes.

“Don’t,” she said as I reached for it.

“Excuse you.” I opened it.

It was some kind of over-complicated star chart with lines and arrows radiating out from the center of a set of concentric circles, like a radar screen. A column of text boxes at the side explained the significance of the various marks. The label at the top had Kell’s birthday and gender. It looked like something you’d get online. For money.

“I can’t believe you fall for this stuff.”

She walked out and snatched the paper. “It’s not astrology. It’s real.”

“It looks like astrology.”

“What-ever. You told me everyone goes to the temple all the time back home and drops money in a box and prays to the spirits of your dead grandparents or whatever and then picks random fortunes out of a big bin.”

“Yeah. They do. Just like how in winter, people here bring a dead evergreen into their house and decorate it with pretty baubles to entice the sun to come back. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what you’re supposed to do.”

She helped me to my feet. “What are we gonna do with this?” She nudged the giant clit with her foot, but it didn’t budge. “Damn, girl. That shit’s heavy.”

“Yeah, the frame is plumbing pipe. I needed something that would survive the fire, like a blackened skeleton.”

“Fire?”

“We were gonna douse it and burn it. A giant clitoral effigy.” I dropped on the couch.

She snorted. “Where? Please tell me on the front lawn of some douche church.”

“Ha. How about somewhere where it wouldn’t be considered a hate crime?”

She wiped her nose with the tissue again.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Am I terrible if I keep it?”

Whoa.

It was too early for existential questions. I’m sure I didn’t do a very good job of hiding my reaction.

“I’m not serious,” she said. “I just keep thinking about what it would be like. You know?” She leaned against the door frame. “Holding it in my arms. You could be godmother and the three of us could just go somewhere. Disappear. You could do art, like you were meant to, and I could be a mom and you both could help me be a better person.”

I got up and hugged her. “Stop it. You’re not a bad person.”

She nodded at the words I didn’t say — about the baby — and stepped away, wiping her nose.

“What would we do for money?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Why didn’t he come with you to New York?”

“Who?”

“Duh. Kai.” She sat on the floor with her back against the couch.

I joined her. “Um. Why are we talking about my ex?”

“Because all we ever do is talk about me and how I fuck everything up.”

I think she was still a little upset that I hadn’t opened up about him before.

“That’s not true.”

“Which part? That we’re always talking about me or that I fuck everything up?” She paused. “I’m sick of me,” she said softly. “Why won’t you say what happened? He cheat on you or something?”

I snorted. “No.” Kai would never.

“Then what?”

“Shit, we were just kids. We barely knew ourselves, let alone each other. After — you know — what happened, shit just got really weird. What was I supposed to do? Marry a 17-year-old boy? Raise a kid? Give up New York and school and everything?”

She stared at me for a moment. “I dunno. What do you think you were supposed to do?”

Kell’s preggo stomach came to the rescue. It growled audibly and she checked the time. “Shit.” She hopped up. “Come on,” she said. “I’m hungry. Let’s go out.”

“What? Right now?”

She grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet.

“We haven’t even showered!”

It wasn’t like her, at all, but I figures she was pregnant so what the fuck. I threw on some clothes and we went to the store. Kell held the door to the street open like she wanted me to go first. Then she led us right past the bodega down the street to the big chain superstore by the train station. It had been a long time since she and I had done something mundane together, like grocery shopping, and we joked around like we were back in school. I’m sure we annoyed the other shoppers — except the guys checking her out. She didn’t even seem to notice. We raided the candy aisle and the cheap plastic toys. Kell pulled about four feet of red vine from a big barrel and grabbed the world’s largest bag of cheesecorn. I reminded her that she didn’t even like cheesecorn, but she pointed to the bag where said it was the world’s largest and asked me how could we not get something like that.

I got a cart then and she stopped the wheel with her foot when we happened by the “family planning” section on our way to frozen foods. She grabbed a very large box of condoms, the largest they carried, and tossed it in with the rest.

I took it out. It was purple and heavy. The label said 100-count. I held it up. “Seriously?”

I was going to put it back but she grabbed it from my hands.

“When was the last time you got laid?” she asked.

An elderly woman and I made eye contact as she passed in the aisle.

“So, what, now you want me to make up for lost time?”

“Exactly.” She walked away with the box in her hands.

I pushed the cart forward like I was going to run into her out of anger and she hopped on the front and I pushed her — laughing — to the bakery.

“What about Darren?” I asked out of the blue as she was perusing the magazines.

She made a face and replaced the latest Vogue. “What about him?”

“He’s nice.”

“So are toaster ovens.”

She walked down the aisle and snagged one of each of the softcore porn mags, pulling them one at a time from behind the plastic tabs that hid their covers. We went to the register and she produced a very large wad of cash from her soft lavender purse. She paid the cashier without a word. I took the plastic bags and followed her out. She had put a plastic Optimus Prime mask in the cart and she wore it on the top of her hair like a WWI helmet. She bit the curl of licorice dangling from her lips.

“Are you really suggesting I go out with Darren Freebooty?”

That was her name for him. At those odd times she dropped her phone in the toilet, or came up just a little bit short on grocery money, she’d give Darren a call. Which, you know, that’s his choice, I guess. I just hope he got something out of it.

“Dude’s gotta be in love with you,” I argued.

“God knows why.”

I froze on the sidewalk. “Please stop. You’re preggers and hormonal.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“No. But maybe you should refrain from making any life-altering decisions for a few days.”

“If I do that, then I’ll just go back to how things have been. I won’t end up changing anything. You made your statement. It’s my turn.”

“Statement?” I asked innocently. “What statement?”

She smiled at me knowingly. “It was on the news, bitch. I know your art when I see it.”

I made a face. “Are you mad?” That I’d done it without her, I meant.

She shrugged. “It was really cool.”

We walked back toward my flat, but she took a wrong turn about halfway.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“You’ll see!”

I sighed loudly and shuffled after her, groceries in hand.

She stopped in front of a dour stone building opposite the next closest station. It had once been a church, and an old one at that, but now it was a bank. On the side, in place of stained glass, there were tall ads featuring tastefully dressed men and women smiling earnestly over a company logo: two letters, TW, joined in a distinct script — some dead white dude’s initials, I figured. The corporation’s marketing team had reduced to a pair of valueless capitals with the word National at the end, which gave the whole thing a vaguely patriotic feel.

“I’m going to open a bank account,” she said resolutely.

“You have one.”

“That was my parents’.”

“Wow. This is a big deal, then. Your own account.” I reached for her arm. “Do you need me to come with?”

“Shut up.” She pulled away. “It is a big deal! Feels like surrender.”

“Oh, whatever. It’s just a checking account. How do you not already have one?”

“How do you not carry a purse?”

I scowled at hers. “Those two things are not even remotely the same.”

“This is the gateway,” she said, looking at the spire over the door. “This is how it starts. Right here.”

“Retail banking?”

She nodded. “You do it for awhile and it doesn’t seem so bad, right? Shit, maybe it even starts to feel good. So you do little more every time. Then you figure what the heck, you’ll go ahead and finance that luxury SUV, for practical reasons, because you’re not a kid anymore and you can handle it. Next thing you know, you wake up strung out on the heavy shit. You’re balancing your portfolio in the mornings before work and complaining to your friends about the marginal tax rate.”

I stepped up the stairs and held out a hand. “Come on. We’ll do it together.”

“No,” she said and pulled me back down to the sidewalk. “I need to do it myself.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded without taking her eyes from the gray stone facade.

“Well, hurry up. I didn’t charge my phone last night.”

She nodded resolutely and started up the steps. “Wish me luck.”

“Kell?”

She stopped.

“Maybe you should take Optimus off your head first.”

She pulled the mask free and tossed it to me like a frisbee. It arced to the side and I had to chase after it before it hit the road.

“Just for that,” I called, “I’m eating some of your red vine.”

I put the mask on my head and sat on the steps with the groceries while she took care of business. I used the last of my phone’s battery on a Go Fish-style pattern matching game. Cheerful chimes announced I had passed another level.

As they faded, I heard a mass chirping of birds. It seemed there was a flock nearby. After a moment, the sound got unusually loud. And close. And I heard the flapping of wings. But not the tiny flaps of sparrows and starlings. These were heavier. And there were lots of them.

I mean, lots.

I passed my eyes over the three- and four-story buildings around me. I looked up and down the street. But I couldn’t see where the sound was coming from. It wasn’t until I turned completely around that I saw what had settled on the roof and spires of the church-turned-bank.

Crows. Tons of them. Smaller than ravens, somehow seemed less mischievous too. More menacing. Like winged hyenas.

Despite their number, they were almost silent. Most of the noise came from the smaller birds, who hung around the crows like giggling groupies, watching as the larger birds peered around, like they expected the cause of their gathering to reveal itself at any moment and provide them a carrion feast. A few of them hopped here or there for a better view or to escape a feverishly scratching neighbor. But mostly they just waited on the slant roof as the sparrows and starlings flitted between them and the handful of thin trees that lined the street.

People on both sides of the road had stopped to watch the strange gathering. I was about to get up for a better view when suddenly the crows started cawing over each other, as if called to cue by an invisible conductor.

Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw.

Their calls overlapped, like the chatter of an audience before a show, and drowned every other sound. It seemed to me like they were all telling each other the same thing, and that they were each surprised to hear it.

Caw! Caw? Caw. Caw.

Caw?

Caw! Caw! Caw!

Kell came through the front doors with some of the bank employees. They all stopped on the walk in front of the old stone church and stared up at the gathering on the roof while the sparrows and starlings flitted about. The smaller birds were low enough I could almost reach up and touch them. I had fears one of them would end up in my hair, and I shuddered.

Kell had a paper folder in her hand with the same a smiling couple on the front over the bank logo.

“Are you done?” I asked over the noise.

She nodded, head craned to the spires on either side of the roof.

Caw. Caw! Caw. Caw.

A white blob hit the sidewalk near my foot. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

She grabbed my hand and we started running and then skipping down the sidewalk together like little girls. The grocery bags bounced around and hit my leg. It felt silly. And fun. And we laughed.

We ate a late lunch in the park with a bunch of people in business suits. Then we hopped a train and headed south.

“Where are we going now?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

“I haven’t even had a shower yet,” I objected.

Turns out the condoms weren’t for me at all. We walked through the doors of the Sunrise Valley Active Senior Community, which was holding it’s annual Summer Social that night, and she left the open box in the common room. There was a box of brochures near the door with a little plastic sign that said “Please Take One.” She swiped it and set it by the open box. A pair of old ladies chatting in the corner by the window saw us and giggled. They were so cute.

The cheesecorn and porno wasn’t for us either. We found some homeless guys under a trellis and gave it to them. They thought we were punking them at first and wouldn’t take it. Then this guy named Delmar came out for the box and went right for the porn.

“Alright!”

He was a veteran. He showed us this wicked arc of a scar that cut a crescent moon into his abdomen and explained he’d had a length of his intestines removed. He said there were gremlins in the Lincoln Tunnel and trolls under the Brooklyn Bridge and things in Central Park that didn’t have a name and only came out at night and we needed to be careful.

Kell got a room at a cheap motor inn near Coney Island. It had a single queen bed and brown curtains and we showered and relaxed and hit the boardwalk just as it was getting dark. I tried to win this giant pink bunny but failed miserably.

I ate a funnel cake while she used the restroom.

On the one hand, it was so totally like her. All of it. Showing up out of the blue. The mysterious wad of cash. Random acts of chaos. On the other, there was a strange air of finality to it all, as if this were going to be her last party, so she was going to make the most of it. It wouldn’t be the biggest. It wouldn’t be the craziest. But it was the last, so it had to mean something.

We stayed up late that night. She honored her promise not to drink or smoke, although I could tell she was struggling with it. We sucked the cherries and syrup from the centers of five boxes of cordials and got a sugar high and jumped on the bed and I laughed more than I had in a long time and I remembered why everyone always wanted to hang out with her and why I was always so proud that, of all the people she knew, I was her best friend.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.

Sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

The next chapter is: This is kidnapping. You know that right?

cover image by Sarolta Ban

[image error]