Grayspace

Bomber on Campus

I was massaging her bare freckled shoulders, when she said she was thinking about killing herself.

It was as casual as a comment about picking up bread from the corner store. Nonchalant and dismissal.

I ran my fingers through her hair and felt the heat of her scalp. I pulled her close, as if she were an anchor. "You won't do that to me," I whispered.

Maybe she didn't hear me.

Or maybe she saw something I didn't.

The Witmer Tower burst in a flash of dust and brick. The whole frame of dignity it carried, with the stately clock tower and the ancestral ivy that snaked up to its conical peak. Debris bulleted bystanders. One scrawny young man had his left eye pulverized through his glasses. He spent a month in the hospital.

A large blonde girl with acne took a brick to the left of her skull; she expired with a brief "Oh," and nobody really remembered her after her name made the papers.

A really pretty girl named Chelsea had a fragment of rubble rupture her left eye as it cut across her cheek. She was studying cosmetology. She never lived the injury down. People started calling her "Winky Chelsea."

Sixteen others were pulverized by the explosion beyond recognition. Just messes of bloody meat and bones with wallets or purses containing ID. Cattle in the mechanics of slaughter. The radio said they'd be remembered forever. But the explosion butchered them into shapes nobody knew.

----

I made her favorite tea. Earl Grey with a pinch of Cinnamon. I waited for her to arrive. The steam off the cup like an incense of summoning. Something in me believed she didn't know what she was doing. The better me knew I was wrong. But the rational me held out for something more. She just wasn't the kind of person that would snuff out a few dozen lives. That's what I kept telling myself.

___

I woke up someplace that definitely wasn't my dorm. We both lied about our financial statuses so she and I could share the same living space. It's kinda funny how they never caught on. I dreamed about the last time we got ice cream together. That pink tank top. Her pink tongue and the bluish white dollop on that cone she paid three dollars for.
The memories evaporated on the stark reality of a room just shy of an inch wider than my shoulders, built of mossy bricks, scarcely constructed for the purpose of habitation. And there I was. I breathed heavy as a steady wind whispered outside the narrow, glassless windows.

---

I'm back in my dorm, clutching my white bedsheets. Birds sing outside as peach rays of daylight paint the world.

---

I want to kill myself.

---

Her toothbrush is gone. Who could have taken it? Who else has a key to this dorm?

---

I called off in every class. Told my professors I wasn't feeling well. Which is the truth.

I hear her footsteps in my dorm. I can smell her tea. I pinch myself and Im definitely awake. Its the sound she made just after she took off her shoes. Tired and light.
---

I'm taking a late evening nap. Her footsteps stop just short of my bed.
---

"What about trees?" I ask her. She's leaning her head on my chest.

"Every tree has a story," she cooes. I guess that's as much philosophical depth as you can expect from someone four years younger than you. The sky is clotted with shimmering green and birdsong clamors in all directions. Her hair is a rich reddish chestnut and I could stare at how the sunlight reflects off of it all day long. I could hold her until nightfall and be happy. Her breath, her heartbeat is music that my agitated soul needs.

---

Ive fallen asleep again, and I'm back in a place cold and uncomfortable. I'm in a dark hallway barely wider than my head. black grass swallows my feet and a purple moon spears diseased light onto my legs that teases me.

---

I wake up to a glade of brownish green grass, walled in by tree with leaves like dying candles. Amber, orange, rusty red, flickering. When they fall, they are snuffed out into a cold darkness. Their veins are pulsating with light until they touch the ground.

---

I can't tell if its sunrise or sunset. Every time I open my eyes, there's muffled light on the horizon. I feel her breathing in my ear, as if she never left my side. I want to kiss her forehead. My lips meet with empty space. I want to kiss her neck. I only find my wrist.

Where did she go? Was she ever here?

Was there a single kiss of mine she ever felt? I gave warmth. I feel cold. Would she really leave me like this?

---

I'm standing by a creek. The sky is a cancerous gray. The water is laughing at me and my empty left hand, where she used to be. I feel nothing but the march of seconds, measure in cold heartbeats.