The Loop

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

That being said, there were times after “the incident” when their love felt like a lead fucking apron on her chest and she couldn’t breathe from all the goddamn heartfelt care and protection.

Then they both laughed and shared the smallest moment outside their haunted lives.

That’s what my other job really is. My clients think it’s one thing, and it can be that, but a lot of times they don’t see what I’m really giving them. They need someone to say, I’m here for you, and I’m open to you. You can trust me. I can listen to you. I will look at you because you matter. I’m your friend. People are lonely, you know?”

At least I’m not answering all those carefully phrased questions meant to help me along the path to healing.

One thing about raising yourself as the child of two raging alcoholics was that you developed an allergy to being nurtured.

This was her world now—sharp, brittle, sticky juniper trees and frigid desert nights where the air felt as empty and mean as the faces of the white boys who laughed at her and lusted after her at the same time.

“This place is really pretty if you don’t think about it.”

She tried to ignore the feeling that rolled up from her heart into her mind and made her want to tear the towel in her hands to shreds and smash the mirror and kick a hole in the door and keep rending the reality around her until all of it was subatomic and floating in a cloud around her anger.

They told her they loved her. She rushed into the night before that truth could cause them any more pain.

He held a fist out to Bucket. Bucket looked at the fist. Brewer said, “You don’t bump this in the next five seconds, I’m going to slug you with it.”

“Yup. The butt. Which always seemed kind of crazy, to me at least. I always saw that as a bonus level. That’s not the default game. Like, you have to beat all the bosses and collect all the stars or rings or whatever, definitely do a bunch of oral, and then maybe you get to the butt. But here goes Tina, throwing it out there like a level-one mid-boss.

Lucy had found that answers that caused a dull ache in the pit of her stomach were usually the right ones.

Lucy wondered where she might be at that exact moment if she hadn’t spent so much time trying to be the right version of herself for those around her.

At least she’d sent him a jerk-off fantasy. Others had taken more from him, and been less kind.

Then, as she had learned to do as a child, she became a ghost and wandered among the living.

She fell asleep under cantata shrubs outside the nursery of a new baby named Sandro, stealing his lullabies for herself. She woke at dusk with tears in her eyes.

Then she looked up and saw the shadows of bedlam stretching out on the cave walls, and she realized that she had escaped nothing and her nightmare had become the world.

Her want took her nowhere.

The truth was that she’d always sensed the world’s eyes on her, the way it objectified her and wanted to destroy her.

There was some sick goddamn hierarchy, even here, at the end of the world.

Lucy looked down at all that red and thought, That’s never coming out.

The present became everything, and action overrode thought, and that was how it had to be.

In their broken world, even the truth felt like wave upon wave of lies, so reality crumbled and drifted further from the world they inhabited, and their shared nightmare coalesced as they drove the streets of Turner Falls in search of anything that might return them to the world they once knew.

And Lucy learned a lesson: if you ever want a loadie to go one way, point the other way and say, “Cops.”

Besides all that, she secretly believed that no matter what they did, there was only more death ahead of them. They might as well take a shot at scoring some pancakes.

Thanks, god. You totally had a chance to prove you existed, and you went and fucked that up.

First real kiss and my first time committing multiple murders happened the same night. There’s no way that’s not hardwiring something shitty into my brain right about now.

Because the night is long, our watch is eternal, and our eyes are sharpened by the light of the truth.

When you’re a kid, that’s when you feel everything so much. Everything counts. Everything is as intense as it will ever be. Now, with this adult bullshit, it’s all so repetitive that a year disappears in a blink. It’s like I only half feel any day that I live, even the great ones.

two. One-two. One-two. One-two. The beating came into her, strong and steady, and there was joy in the sound of life continuing, the persistent motion of the heart and the feeling of it reverberating against her skin.

Jake seemed fragile right now, and Lucy wasn’t sure he was ready to hear his dad had probably been slaughtered in a military cover-up. Poor guy had already had a really big day.

The more they hurt you, the more they strip away what you love, the easier it is to understand what’s happening, without all that messy hope or projected morality getting in the way. Then you can tell the truth.

Of course, any time you propose suicidally triggering a nuclear assault, there’s bound to be some dissent.

Lucy and Judah tossed the saturated red rags into the street. Littering. We’ve finally descended into a postapocalyptic society.

Lucy opened her eyes on a world with one less kind soul, and wondered if such mercy would ever be afforded to her.