Ashes and Entropy by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nightscape Press
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

THE ONE ABOUT MAGGIE

by Greg Sisco

Let me tell you the one about Maggie. I’d say stop me if you’ve heard it before, but you ain’t heard the one about Maggie, baby. Ain’t nobody heard the one about Maggie.

This Maggie, right, she’s the type of girl’s paid rent with sex more times than money. Type of girl’s flushed cocaine to the soundtrack of the police, and I ain’t talking about Sting. Type of girl, when the phone rings at noon on a Saturday, it ain’t Mom. You know the type I mean.

So Maggie wakes up screaming one morning in a field in those blue hours where dusk’s setting in, which ain’t nothing new for her. And after the scream gets loose, she realizes she don’t know why she’s screaming or where she is or how she got here or what happened for most of the second half of her life, which ain’t nothing new for her either. Sometimes when she wakes up like this, screaming like from a bad nightmare and not remembering nothing, that’s as close to peace as she gets. And where she is now, this field full of daffodils she’s lying in, it’s easy to feel at rest. So she lies there a good long while and tries to stop herself remembering, but eventually it all starts to come back, like shit has a way of doing.

Ain’t until she finally stands up and looks behind her that it dawns on her just how deep into shit she’s stepped. When she turns around and looks at the smoking ball of metal and glass that used to be her car, the ten empty beer cans spilling out of what used to be the windshield, the fact there’s thirty feet between her and the whole thing, must’ve been flung through the air all this way, she’d fall on her knees and praise the devil she can stand if it wasn’t for the backpacker.

Instead, she stops breathing, thinks she might pass right back out.

Just a few feet behind the car he is, lying in a patch of dirt next to the carnage. Mr. Backpacker ain’t lucky enough to be lying in daffodils, much less to wake up. Boy’s covered in blood with bends in his limbs where there oughtn’t be and curves a body oughtn’t have. His eyes are open and staring at nothing and there ain’t no expression at all on his face. Not horror or peace or nothing. Just a face like a cliff’s got.

She kneels over him and shakes him, screaming, “Please wake up,” and when it don’t work she pounds on his chest and yells and cusses at him, and he just lies there and takes it like dead folk have a way of doing. When ten or fifteen minutes goes by and ain’t no change in Mr. Backpacker’s condition, little Maggie’s got but nothing to do other than sit there and think how she’s gonna spend the whole rest of her life locked in a room and that detox that’ll follow is gonna be one bitch of a bitch.

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