Black Sheep

by Rachel Harrison

As I stood singing the birthday song for the fifth time that evening, I realized I was wrong for not believing in hell. Hell was the birthday song. Hell was Shortee’s. Hell was the green polo shirt, the khakis, the whole stupid fucking uniform. Hell was my life.

we all applauded and whooped and I longed to feel what I typically felt, which was numb, instead of what I felt in that moment, which was miserable.

“You know, you’re not pretty enough to get away with being as mean as you are. And you’re really pretty.” I almost applauded. It wasn’t easy to burn me, and she’d straight up smoked my ego.

I laughed again, but underneath this laughter was a staggering rage. It wasn’t fresh; it was there always. A seething I kept stashed away, like a baseball bat behind the headboard. I experienced it in the usual way. A brief flare of blinding, white-hot anguish, followed by a mild chill of despondence, and finally a return to indifference.

Kerri told me I should try not to think the worst of people. “I don’t,” I’d told her. “It’s intuition.” She didn’t seem to believe me.

I didn’t have the energy to be angry. I rarely did. Constantly treading water really takes it out of you.

“I’ve been here for three years,” I said, not certain why I felt compelled to fight for a job I didn’t even care about. It wasn’t about the money; I’d find another job, another Shortee’s. It wasn’t about the injustice; I’d known from a young age there was no such thing as fair. I thought maybe it was about getting fired instead of quitting, which I’d fantasized about since my first shift.

Easy to forget stars are mortal; they’re born, and they die. They shine for legacy.

The thing about danger is, it always has a face. It chooses whether to show it to you or not. “Go on—come out,” I whispered. “Why delay the big reveal?” There’s something you should know about me, that I’ve come to learn, that I should probably tell you now, so the rest of this makes sense. Seems I’m the type to pick at a scab until it bleeds, then peel back the skin to see what’s underneath. The kind of curious that invites self-destruction.

Part of me wanted to frisbee the envelope out the window and move on with my life. Watch some trash reality TV dating show on Netflix that would reassure me I wasn’t such a disaster. Start a job search in the morning, or maybe just start over someplace else, pack my shit and go, a total reset, something I’d often daydreamed about but was too lazy to implement.

Sometimes I would imagine a ledger inside myself, floating in my skull. An ancient-looking scroll where, with quill and ink, I’d tally up the incidents that subsidized my cynicism, my lack of faith in humanity. I had no idea where the visual came from, or what purpose it served. It was goofy. Sometimes it’d make me feel better, other times not so much.

There’s so little empathy and understanding when it comes to family, the cornerstone of society, the root of existence.

I imagined my anxiety as an amphibian, a slick, nimble creature dancing under my ribs. That’s how it felt, this anxiety. Alive. Tricky. Slippery. Quick. Difficult to catch.

Some people need conspiracies, finding the simple horror of the truth too brutal.

I could tell it was going to be a violent sunset, the kind that would scorch your retinas, that would linger in your vision long after you looked away.

It was a curb stomp, broken teeth, an eyeball free of the socket, a bone poking through skin, a shockingly brutal injury. This person whom I was so madly in love with, who claimed to be in love with me, whom I’d known my whole life, didn’t actually know me at all.

Faith is so time-consuming. You sit there spewing nonsense for five minutes while your food gets cold.

I wondered if my whole life would be this way, comparing bad to worse. I wondered if I’d ever be anything but resentful of perspective.

One thing I’d learned out in the world was that nobody’s so different. We all buy toilet paper, contemplate the ply. Request help at self-checkout because something always fucking goes wrong, doesn’t scan. We all spend too much money at Target, stand there in the parking lot going through the receipt, brow furrowed. We forget to take our vitamins, to take out the trash. We microwave leftovers. Set our alarms. Waste time on the internet. Forget our passwords. We worshipped gods of our choosing. Satan. Christ. America. Celebrities. Capitalism. Clean living. The New England Patriots. La Croix.

So it goes. There’s no place like home.

Iwatched the thrash of translucent wings around the light, the beauty of such stupidity. “You’re all going to die,” I told the moths. “You dumb fucks.” The rusty screech of the porch swing seemed to scold me. Seemed to say, You’re no different.

Nothing terrified me more than this. The notion that without a choice we inherit parts of us that we cannot change. Cannot cut out.

Whatever I’d felt when I first read the invitation—shock, rage, resentment, malice—I didn’t feel it anymore. I was back to indifference. I’d thought that my apathy was a defense mechanism, and maybe to an extent it was, but I worried then, sitting on that porch, that maybe I was just incapable of sustaining feeling.

“This is all so Shakespearean,” I said. I laughed to myself. “ ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’ ”

Nah, I thought, yawning as I climbed the steps. I’m probably going to have a boring death. I’m going to die of heart disease in a shitty nursing home. Arteries clogged from eating too much chain-restaurant food. Or maybe it’ll be my liver, courtesy of that goddamn fishbowl honey jalapeño margarita.

It occurred to me then, mouth full of chocolate chip banana mush, that our past is not the truth. It’s warped by time and emotion, inevitably muddied by love and resentment, joy and shame, hope and regret. I couldn’t trust my own memories. Good or bad.

It was hard not to think about the kiss. It was such a good one. We’d always had amazing chemistry. I wondered if Brody touched Rosie the same way he’d touched me. Maybe. But she didn’t touch him the way I had. That, I knew.

She was so happy, glowing like a pearl. About to marry someone whom I had been with first, the only serious boyfriend I’d ever had. She was about to live happily ever after in a life that could have been mine, if only I could have stomached it. I was jealous that she got to be a dumb, giddy sheep, never questioning anything.

I couldn’t tell you what we laughed about. Probably nothing. That’s what’s special about adolescent laughter. So much, so big, over so little. You lose the ability to laugh like that as you get older. The more you know, the less funny it all becomes. I longed for a simpler time, for ignorance. For how easy it’d been to love her when little else mattered.

I’d lived long enough to know that it’s possible to experience a moment so unbearable, you feel like dying, just evaporating into the ether, escaping into nothingness.

He was old, had immense jowls that shook when he spoke. He looked like a human basset hound.

I’d been in obscurity for so long, I’d forgotten sometimes it’s harder to be around people who know you than people who don’t.

It’s a cruelty of life that we can never protect our own innocence. We can only watch ourselves lose it in retrospect. Scream at memories.

I wondered if I would ever find someone outside of Hell’s Gate who could make me feel the way that he did, who would love me as much as he did. I knew the answer was probably yes, but then again, as far as I knew, my mother had never had any serious relationships after my dad. I worried. Maybe some of us get only one love, have it in us to do it only the once.

Why were they so willing to believe in something so ridiculous? To shirk science and logic for imaginary idols? Was it really such a hard pill to swallow that the universe was just random, that there was no higher power?

Or was it death that drove them to faith? Were they not brave enough to accept its inevitability? Did they need to believe they could transcend it in order to live?

was home, but I was still alone.

I sequestered myself at the bar, perched on an end stool, my back angled to the mingling crowd. I had my phone out, which was rude but effective in keeping people away. I wasn’t in the headspace for small talk.

Sarah’s in the second grade now—I can’t believe it! She’s singing in the choir. I’d have to nod along, feign interest. Well, I wouldn’t have to. Being an asshole was always an option. Being honest. But it was easier to keep to myself, slurp my bourbon in solitude.

I was so tired of being told that faith was the answer to everything when it never seemed to solve anything. I wondered what the difference was between being told to have faith and to be quiet. I suspected there wasn’t one.

“Does anyone know what electrolytes are? Or did everyone just sort of decide they were a thing and that we need them?”

I never really liked parties, especially ones not for me.

My heart felt like it was being wrung out. My bedroom light was on, and there was a shadowy figure standing in the window. A person. Someone. Perfectly centered. Looking down at me.

Everything felt strange, so nothing did. The absurdity of it all somehow blunted itself.

When I was younger, I’d had this confidence, this attitude of I can do anything because someone dumber than me has figured it out. I used to tell myself that when filing my taxes, acquiring renters’ insurance, building IKEA furniture, freezing my credit.

It was never a good sign when charismatic men started talking apocalypse.

The truth was, Kerri wasn’t the kind of friend who was interested in your life, your history, how you were doing. She had main character syndrome. She used everyone around her as springboards, saw us all as opportunities to talk about herself. I was okay with it, mostly because I didn’t care to talk about myself. I didn’t really care to listen to her talk about herself either, but she was easy enough to tune out.

My pride was bruised. I felt stupid, which was worse than feeling hurt or sad or scared.

I also decided I didn’t regret going to the wedding, because at least now I wasn’t pining over a long-lost father, over Brody, over Rosie and Aunt Grace and a community that valued me for who I was. There would be no more what-ifs, no more missing. No more illusions. Maybe my ignorance had been easier, less painful, but it was still ignorance. Now I knew the truth, brutal as it was.

“Wouldn’t kill you to be nicer, though, right?” “It might,” I said.