Nightmare Magazine Issue 29 by Nightmare Magazine

Author:Nightmare Magazine [Nightmare Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Dark Fantasy, Short Stories
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

III.

He tried to call back the payphone, but nobody answered. Typical, he thought, just like her. He tried not to go, really he did, but it was too late, the damage was done. A part of him, an admittedly infinitesimal part, thought that it was just possible that there had been a reception problem, that she did, honestly, think that he was coming. It was ridiculous, the rest of him knew, but that doubt, no matter how small it was, was not something that he could navigate smoothly past.

He kept thinking of her, alone, waiting at the convenience store, night coming, nowhere for her to go. She was a terrible person, he knew that — she had stabbed him and left him — but if he didn’t go, wouldn’t that make him a horrible person too?

He wasn’t a horrible person, he knew it. And he could prove it. He could just go and get her, just drive her somewhere, and then his obligation would be done. Then, he told himself, he’d never have to see her again.

At the next exit he got off the turnpike and went back the other way.

• • • •

It took four hours, each one harder on him than the one before. The farther he went, the more he felt like his mind was no longer his own, like he was once again a man driven out of his own body, like once again she, Tammy, or rather now she, Star, was in charge.

The whole drive he turned over in his head what he might say to her and what she was likely to say back, how the conversation might turn and twist and where in the end it might possibly end up. But no matter how he turned and twisted it, no matter how generously he slathered it with luck, no matter how willfully he tried to squint away what she really was and the control she had over him, he could not see any way in which things would turn out well for him. At best, at absolute best, he would see her and it would devastate him. Even if it did turn out that she really was asking just one more thing, that after this she would be willing to walk away and let him go, it would still take him weeks, if not months, to recover.

And that was only the best possibility. Chances were he’d be back in a relationship with her, suffering for months, if not years, until the time that she once again stabbed him and, probably, this time killed him.

For a while he tried not to think about it, but how could he help it? He turned on the radio as loud as he could, tried even for a few miles to sing along to drown out his thoughts, but all the songs were about mending shattered relationships. They were giving the wrong part of his subconscious ammunition.

When he stopped for gas at the service area just shy of Buffalo, he got out and stretched his legs.

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