Eight Minute Infraction

Segment IX

Segment IX: unedited

“To forgive is to forget,” his grandfather said. Wrinkled elbows leaned against the grainy table, whiskered chin dipping towards his flannel chest. He kept trying to look stern, but mostly – as had been the case since Keane had left – he just looked mournful.

Gideon had a hard time coming to grips with his grandfather’s version of forgiveness. He could forgive a scraped knee or a stray incident, but not a childhood of broken promises and acts of cruelty. “Is absolute forgiveness necessary?” He asked again, just to be sure.

His grandfather nodded, white whiskers swallowing his wrinkled neck. “Forget about the circumstance, boy. Some things are better left behind.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” Gideon pushed his chair back from the table, giving his grandfather a half-hearted smile. He fled from the kitchen before the words began, an endless barrage of forgive and forget that seem to rotate around in circles. His grandparents had strange ideas about forgiveness – that once forgiven, an incident could simply be glossed over. The incidental trigger would remain, quavering like a knife between his ribs, until it began as much an appendage as his arms or legs or blistered heart.

Triggers, Gideon knew, could not be erased. And if they were allowed to remain, the forgetting part was impossible. So why was he walking towards Bethel Boulevard, running from his present and towards his past?

Some things in life could not be explained. That was the only way he could rationalize his hands, trembling in his jacket pockets. His footsteps, a dusted trail to the apartment doorstep. His movements, thick and unsteady as he pressed the doorknob, shifting uneasily in his shrunken jacket and his bitter memories.

“I thought you weren’t –” The door swung open. Her face appeared, white with something akin to worry. Pain. She was gripping the knob loosely, swinging the door open far too wide. One hand rested in a tight knot over her stomach. “Oh.”

Lumi stopped short. Her forehead creased as her eyes narrowed, and she just stood there for a moment, taking him in. “Gideon.”

His throat closed. He had come expecting Keane and found instead his errant girlfriend, the blind shadow by his side. It was the trigger – the knife in his side, the burning in his eyes. He sidled away, heels hanging over the edge of the step. The farther away, the better. He could not count her freckles from a distance, or measure the twists of her teeth up with the bow of her smile.

“You don’t live here,” he said finally. Heat rushed to his neck, pulsing at the base of his throat. Where was his voice? His fostered confidence? “I was…I wanted to talk to Keane.”

At the mention of his name, Lumi shrunk back. Her hand tightened over her stomach, working the buttons of her blue cardigan open and closed. She worried her lower lip, peering past his shoulder. “Keane…isn’t here.” Her voice was trembling. After a moment she lifted her chin, as if masking her fear, and glared at him. “Did you have something to say to him, too?”

Gideon glanced pointedly at her stomach, frowning. “Do you?” Curious, he stepped closer, floorboards groaning under his feet.

“Possibly.” Lumi smiled, a tiny half-moon that split her face between fear and hatred. She pursed her lips, gaze sliding over him. The wavering voice vanished, and her hands dropped to her sides. She tucked a stray ocean strand behind on ear and cracked the door open wider. “Would you like to tell him together?”

Gideon edged another foot forward. His heart was thumping. Something had happened. Something terrifying. And somehow, in the spaces between memory and reality, he was tangled in. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I have news,” Lumi said. “News Keane will be enamored to hear.”

“What are you saying,” Gideon repeated. Frantic. The balance had been disturbed. The gap somehow bridged, the tide between him and this beautiful, mysterious girl somehow changed. Up close, she wasn’t quite as beautiful as he remembered. There was an unsettled glint to her eyes, a twist to her lips that was not entirely angelic.

Lumi placed her hand, palm-flat, over her stomach. She shifted the blue buttons backs into place and uncurled her slim fingers. The gesture was almost protective.

“I’m having a baby,” she said. “Congratulations.”  

Three seconds to realize and one second to process what she was instigating. What she would be telling Keane – this terrible, shattering news. Gideon stumbled back. She was not beautiful. Not beautiful at all, anymore. She had a sick, smug smile on her face, and she looked entirely too pleased with herself.

Congratulations. She was having a baby – not Keane’s baby, not his baby – and she was blaming him. And who could Keane believe – his girlfriend, or the brother who had, only weeks before, betrayed him?

“God.” Gideon stumbled off the steps and started running. He could feel her eyes, burning through his back. “God!”

He was trapped. He was going to die. And Lumi – beautiful, innocent, ironic, lying, manipulative Lumi – would win her game of love and separation with one fell swoop. There was no denial, in the business of hatred.

Gideon had been felled, framed, and destroyed by a girl with ocean eyes. A riptide in her hair and a poison in her heart.

Keane had not picked her because of petty jealousy, or sibling rivalry, Gideon realized. He had picked her because they were exactly, terrifyingly alike. What Keane had failed to see what how alike him Lumi really was.

Infinity and immortality crossed spades under cover of the second thunderstorm. Reality had been thrown aside. Now only Gideon remained, with his nightmares and his self-hatred, lures that had led him straight into the trap of a girl with a guilty conscience.