The Disassembly of Doreen Durand by Ryan Collett

Author:Ryan Collett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2021-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

The sky turned pink. It refused to turn dark blue or even purple. It was pink with clotted cream clouds, showing off. An enormous Waffle House sign lit up yellow and buzzed like a beehive. The seven o’clock crowd of regular civilians was leaving the restaurant, some of them satisfied, others filled with regret – families and people on their own, groups of teenagers – none of them batted an eye at Doreen slumped on her side in the corner of the parking lot. She was just part of the eight o’clock crowd now. A night patron. The kind of person whose life circumstances had misaligned them from appropriate business hours. She pulled a few blades of dead grass from her hair.

Her past felt fictitious. The hard asphalt beneath her, the damp sweat in the small of her back, the hot mouth of Atlanta’s night sky. These were what felt most real to her now. Everything else was just a delusion or a mockumentary or a flash of light across a knife before it stabbed into something.

She was missing a shoe. When did that happen? At the airport? Some time before that? She kicked off her other shoe so she could at least commit to a look. What else did she need to lose? A limb? She picked up her phone but dared not check it. She extended her arm and held it out away from her. She dangled it, pinched between her thumb and forefinger above the ground and let it drop. It fell onto the asphalt again without a scrape. She put her chin on her knees and stared at it – how this stupid phone had caused her so much trouble, or at least enabled most of her trouble. Inside it was that empty space between her and Whitney. The violated space between her and that delivery boy, whatever his name was. The weird space between her and Leo. What had that space been?

She was sore when she stood up. She arched her back, breathing in and out. There was a black wall of trees behind the Waffle House. That would be a good oblivion, she thought. She picked up her phone and walked, then broke into a run. The crumbly asphalt poked the bottoms of her bare feet. She ran behind the Waffle House, to the very edge of the parking lot, right up to where the pavement turned into litter-strewn grass and a steep embankment. Her muscles contracted and she threw her arm forward, flinging the phone out into the oblivion. It cut through the air and spun like a windmill, a rectangle blurring into a circle. A whooshing sound. Then it was gone.

A big gulp of air filled Doreen’s lungs. She breathed in and out. She forced herself to smile. Her lungs filled with air again and in just the right way, enough to jiggle a grain of dopamine in her dead brain and remind her of two things: that she was OK – really, it would all be all right – and that she was hungry.

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