The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

I don’t need long to recognize it. Those rippling, crinkled shades of black portray a close-up of your standard ten-gallon garbage bag, wrapped poorly (and perhaps hurriedly) over a small, half-formed face.

I look down at the floor. The floorboards are missing and I see the soil, still marked by divots from the spade shovel.

I’d scream, but at that very moment, I hear John rummaging through my kitchen cabinets, no doubt searching for crank.

“John!” I shout.

He’s still in the kitchen when I get up there, clutching my crank to his chest, as guilty as a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Clearly he’s been up all night. I can smell liquor on him and he looks to be on the back-nine of last night’s crank.

He moves his lips as if to speak, but his throat merely clicks. His right arm is wrapped in gauze from his hand up to his elbow. There’s a hospital bracelet on his left wrist.

“John?” I ask.

He offers a silent stutter, and I’m not sure how much meth this idiot snorted, but I’ll be motherfucked if I’m about to let him put a dent in my eight ball. I snatch the bag off him and shake a nugget onto the counter. I mash it into powder with the bottom of a coffee mug and chop a line.

“Allison and the kids are dead,” he says.

I’d just put the rolled-up dollar bill to my nostril, but I pause. John looks at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for consolation, but I still catch him stealing a glance at my meth. A sudden, visceral hatred overwhelms me.

I snort the line anyway, sensing John’s jealousy when I shake out another nugget, crush it up just like the first, and snort that too, expediting my blastoff. I light the remains of a cigarette, resting on the mouth of an empty beer can. “And you’re here, why?” I ask.

“I just need someone to talk to,” he says.

“But you didn’t come here to talk. You came here to steal my crank.”

“My wife and kids are dead,” he says, as if that absolves him.

And perhaps that should elicit some sympathy from me, but it doesn’t. Because now I realize that, should John be the person who eventually finds me dead, he’s going to rummage through my shit looking for crank before he dials 911, if he ever dials at all.

“The house was on fire when I got home,” he begins.

I plop the cigarette into the beer can, extinguishing it. “I don’t need to hear the details.”

“But my family—”

“Your family, not mine,” I tell him.

I smile at his palpable desperation, a feeling I know well. He obviously finished the last bag I procured for him. Crashing now, in his grief, he knows I hold respite in my hand, that I can alleviate his anguish—cauterize it, if you will—simply by handing the drug over to him.

“I’m not giving it to you,” I tell him, wondering if he’ll just take it from me. He could, if he wanted; he’s a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier. He could, but he doesn’t, the same way I could give him instant relief, but I don’t.

“Alright,” he says. “I’ll leave. I won’t come back.”

“You will,” I tell him. “When you realize that you can’t get a fix anywhere else. Or maybe you’ll read my obituary in a few weeks. Then you’ll come back, digging through my shit again, trying to pick the bones. Because that’s the only reason why you’re here. Let’s not lie to ourselves.”

Then he leaves. His desperation lingers after he’s gone and I smile perversely, taking far more pleasure in his suffering than I anticipated.

I make a call and my dealer drops off another eight ball. Forget blastoff; by noon I’m in low orbit, intent on hurtling toward heaven.

I can’t sit still. Normally, when I’m this tweaked, I’ll fire back a few drinks to even myself out, but today I have no such compulsion. My brain’s running just like an old laptop. My circuitry is overwhelmed and I can almost hear the cooling mechanism in my skull, fans whirling, CPU chugging as the screen fails to load.

It’s working, working, working, but spews forth no data.

That’s quite alright. I know my reasoning even if I can’t articulate it. If I sleep, I know where I’ll wake up. I’d rather end up there on my own volition. I snort another line, spark a Marlboro, breathe it into my ragged lungs, and sit at my bedroom window, flip phone in hand. It feels strangely warm.

I wonder what time, specifically, John found Allison and the kids, wonder if I should check the time I received that voicemail, though it hardly makes a difference now. Behind the sky’s gray veil, the sun arcs and descends and by the time the sun begins to dip below the skyline, I’ve already lost track of just how much meth I’ve snorted.

I turn the phone on. It lags for a solid five minutes before it begins to beep with notifications, vibrating in my hand like an egg about to hatch. I start with the text messages, over a dozen from a private number, all multimedia messages that my elderly phone struggles to process.

They all look vaguely similar, photos of a dark room framed by fire, the only difference being the flames inching inward with each subsequent pic, growing closer to three black figures in the center. They just stand there, reminding me of shadows seared onto a wall after a nuclear blast.

I blink and an hour passes. When I look out my window again, the streetlights have winked on. There’s something rustling in the bushes across the street. I see the tip of the burning cigarette before I see the figure.

It steps out of the bushes, watching me watch it, and steps directly under the streetlight. It seems to draw the light in and trap it, its edges simmering as if distorting the gravity around it, a walking event horizon.

A walking nothing, an