Spookyness

#FlashFiction

*Story time, with Lake Lopez*

I Know

All in one breath he told her he loved her and that it consumed him like hunger. They stood outside a café, shivering, a beautiful girl and an awkward boy. She said, “I know.” It tore his heart. It wasn’t hard enough to break it, but the tear was deep. He’d needed to see her heavy grin rise toward her eyes as she confessed. But all she’d said was, “I know.” At her apartment they made love. He was quick and frantic, as if he knew their time was at its end. Afterwards they rested on her pillows, a space of rumpled sheets between them, and he asked, “Why not?” She looked away. Got up. Found cigarettes. “I wish I did,” she said, and fire smoldered between her lips.

In the weeks that followed he sent flowers to her job. He left cards on her windshield. He followed her to work and sat outside her office. At night he wrote poems about the crazy way she raced through traffic. She failed to recognize the value of this attention. The beautiful girl refused to accept the fact that his addiction to her was unbreakable. “My love is forever,” he wrote in red spray paint on her Honda. She called that night and ordered him to stay away. “Don’t ever come near me. Ever.”

They knocked one morning, two policeman in suits and asked him, “Do you know where she’s gone?” He explained that they’d broken up, that she’d found some crazy guy with an obsessive nature and that it was a turn-on for her. “He even vandalized her car,” he said. The cops glanced at one another. “Lots of crazies out there,” one of them said. He replied, “I know.” She’s forever close by now, but he only thinks of her when he’s cold and lonely and watching the smile on a lovely strangers face…

Under The Apple Tree

“…Looking for a short blonde laying under an apple tree eating an orange…” No way to spend the day, he told himself. Dreams like that never made any damn sense. Too many symbols meant they symbolized nothing. The pictures hurt his brain. Apples – the forbidden fruit. Evil? An orange – the last thing his mother had given him before… Don’t think about that Davey that’s what makes the monsters come you know they will you keep those bad thoughts away. The girl – an older version of someone he’d known. That’s what itched at him. If only he could get a longer look.

He continued walking. Sweat dripped down his neck. The brown bottle of pills clicked in his pocket. When his feet started to hurt as bad as his head he told himself it was a waste of time. But the images. The symbols… Then, just outside of city limits, he found her –

And the picture that developed in his memory was of the two of them; they were teenagers, children really, two babies sitting on the trunk of his father’s rusted Impala, huddled close because they loved each other and because the night was foggy and cool and, above them, a few brave little stars struggled through the fog and cloud cover and shone like shimmering pinpricks of triumph, her hand was warm and moist and tiny within his own and her eyes were the kind a boy could share a secret with, dark blue and full of something wonderful, and he had to whisper to her in a trembling voice with too much pleading, as if she was magic and could will his dream to come true simply by wanting it for him…

“Leslie?” he asked.

“I want to hurt them,” he’d told her. “I have to.”

“Don’t do it,” she’d said, all those years ago.

Now she smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you, Davey.” Specks of orange pulp stuck to her teeth. “You know why?”

Davey shook his head.

“’Cause I should’ve listened to you, should’ve helped you do it, should’ve helped you hurt them.”

Her eyes hadn’t changed at all and while staring into them his head cleared. Tranquility filled him. Nothing hurt now.