My path in life becomes clear to me as I spit in Soto’s coffee.
Senior year at Mustang High is gelatinous. It slinks forward. Every class is an almost failure. I’m no good at English, worse at math. In my art elective, we’re tasked to oil-paint a chair on 16”x20” canvas. My painting is so awful the teacher grimaces. He says we were supposed to paint a chair, not a rock. He says at least it looks like it can be sat on. Gives it a C minus.
My whole short life is a C minus, drooping towards D plus. I can’t afford college. I can’t achieve a scholarship. What happens to me after high school is something I don’t care to know. When I finally step into the Future’s office for an interview, the Future won’t even shake my hand. It won’t even see that I’m there.
Soto doesn’t see me either. That turns out to be a good thing.
Sam Soto is wide-jawed, dirty blond, and six-foot-one-thousand. I’ve never seen the top of his head. He does shot put, hangs with the athletes, has a new giant Ford truck, silver, wheels custom-made to flatten asphalt like a steamroller. He never bothered me, never bullied me. He never even noticed me.
We’re all in the gym. Brandy or Molly or Jessica or whoever just brought coffee. Fancy stuff. Cappuccinos and flat whites and caramel milk whatever whatevers from Dierking Cafe. I’m studying on the bleachers, she’s unloading her cargo of a dozen large cups, each labeled.
Soto takes his latte. It’s too hot, so he removes the lid, sets it at the edge of the metal bench, and proceeds to tell another story about his rival at the high school in Jackson. No one knows this other guy, but they hate him. They laugh as Soto recounts, enthusiastically, another fight that he has won against anti-Soto. Soto got the upperhand by popping anti-Soto’s bike tire with a nail, leaving the guy stranded in the marshlands near Walmart. He did the same to anti-Soto’s friends—his pathetic, wannabe gang. Six bikes, twelve tires, all flat.
The group leaves me there, unnoticed, among their backpacks and notebooks and jackets. They play a few rounds of basketball. Six vee six. Soto’s latte cools, unprotected.
I spit in it. A big, foamy, ocean-bubbles thing. My throat hurts after so much effort dislodging the yellowed phlegm and swallowed snot.
No one notices me.
I watch Soto drink it. He drinks the whole thing. He tells his stories, his exploits, gets the group laughing with him, and inside of his mouth is part of my mouth. My venom coats his throat, it burns into his stomach lining.
After lunch, history class. We watch a mini-documentary from the BBC. I can’t understand the host’s accent. They are talking about Henry Ford, how he industrialized or manufactured or something. He invented factories. He assembled lines, innit. I only start paying attention when the little TV on wheels shows a silver truck, the same kind as Soto’s. The camera swirls around it in a full 360 degrees. The class murmurs and chuckles, oohs and awwws; that’s like Soto’s truck.
The Brit host, he tells me about specialization. The word uses every part of his mouth. Specialization. It takes a full minute just to say it. He says that Henry Ford realized that workers were at their worst juggling too many tasks. Stamping. Welding. Painting. Assembling. Each worker should do one task, and do it well.
I realize now the feeling I felt at lunch, in the bleachers, spewing my guts into Soto’s coffee and cream. This is my specialization. Not math, not English, not art, not anything else they dump onto my lap from 7:30am to 3:00pm. I would spend the rest of my life doing one thing, and doing it well. I had a specialty.
I would torture Sam Soto.
************
I have a rock in my stomach. Oval, smooth, speckled, about the size of a prune. A piece of pea gravel, the kind used in garden paths and patios. It doesn’t hurt, but it won’t digest. It rolls around sometimes, like the ball in a can of spray paint, frothing the stew of my guts.
I dedicate the next few weeks to littering my notebooks with ideas. Spitting in coffee wasn’t going to be enough. But I also couldn’t go too crazy, especially not early. I needed patience.
My biggest asset is my invisibility. I have always kept my head low. Never got in trouble. Never got attention—no friends, no enemies. No one ever called me pretty, no one ever called me ugly, no one ever called me anything. If I didn’t show up to class, no one would notice.
This is how I would haunt Soto.
My father collected car junk. Bumpers, fenders, mufflers, melted pistons, broken radiators, bent gaskets, rusted husks of Cadillacs and Chevys and a ton of cars named after horses. Our backyard hugged a copse of trees. His junk collection spilled into the entanglement for half a mile. Trees grew out of chassis, moss blanketed car seats and steering wheels. I used to go into the woods with a bread knife and saw the seat belt buckles off their straps.
I’m out there with a knife again.
From my count, there are only twelve tires that are inflated enough to be of use.
Popping a car tire is harder than in the movies. I envisioned a switchblade, a quick thrust, a retreat. But movies trick you.
The sharpest knife I can find is a steak knife. It has problems. It’s hard to push in, and hard to pull out.
After a few hours of testing, resting, thinking, I find a method that works. I press the tip of the steak knife into the flat side of the tire, hit it quick with a hammer from my old man’s garage, and then yank the handle out with the hammer’s claw.
With every yank, the pebble inside me hops and flips.
I do this, over and over, until it takes me about ten seconds, max. All twelve practice tires are mutilated.
************
Sneaking out of English class is not hard. I ask to go to the bathroom. My teacher barely acknowledges that I’ve left.
Mustang High campus is set up with outdoor “halls” rather than the interior hallways you might find in large, richer schools. It’s more in the neighborhood style, less hospital style. Once I leave English class, I’m outside and heading toward the student parking lot.
It’s October, and there’s a chill. A darkness. Everyone else is indoors, either teaching or learning.
Senior class consists of about eighty students total. Small school. Among them, probably fifty of them have their own car, usually the richest ones. (I take the bus still.) That means that, in the span of an eight-minute bathroom break, I must somehow manage to pop forty-nine tires on forty-nine cars. That’s 9.8 seconds per pop, I guess—I suck at math. I lose count, too, some time after car twenty-five. I’m more focused on staying low, yet casual. I weave casually, I duck casually. I’m like a boxer. A dancer.
My handbag has a hammer and a knife.
Point the knife. Slam the handle. Yank with the claw.
Point. Slam. Yank.
Point. Slam. Yank.
When I get to Soto’s glistening Ford F-150, the Burj Khalifa of the parking lot, I put my tools away and leave.
I take my seat in English class. The bell rings, and we all shuffle to our next lessons. If anyone goes to their cars during break, they don’t notice the slight tilt. The deflation. Maybe they feel something is off, but there’s no time to inspect.
When lunch comes, it’s unavoidable.
Soto scoops up a couple friends and leads the charge to McDonald’s, a pleasure only the people with cars might indulge in. Three other cars attempt to follow.
Their attempts fail.
Confusion turns to questions. Questions turn to accusations. Accusations turn to chaos. Lunch is over, and half the senior class is in the student parking lot, yelling, pushing, complaining. It’s clear someone is an asshole saboteur. It’s impossible to know who. But here, one of the football players explains, are the facts:
All of our cars have been vandalized.
Except for Soto’s.
Soto explains it would be stupid to pop everyone’s tires except his own. It would make him look guilty. Many agree. Many others think that’s too convenient. Some think he must have an admirer who spared him. Others think he wants his truck to be the best car in the lot. Brandy or Molly or Jessica or whoever remembers, in a stroke of genius, that Soto was just recently bragging about popping bike tires over at the Jackson high school.
I giggle to myself as Soto is called to the principal’s office. I have no idea what he says in there, or what they say to him. I do know that by the end of the day, his silver behemoth no longer towers, nor glistens. Someone, or a group of someones, ripped his tires to shreds, carved obscenities into his doors, and spread shit on his front window.
************
Topping the tire prank would be hard to do. I decide to lay low—even lower—for a while. If too many strange things happen to Soto, it might look like he’s being targeted. Which he is.
Soto’s reputation doesn’t quite recover, but he still has a close group of elite friendships. Most of the friends who abandoned him did so because they enjoy the drama or, in the case of Brandy Molly Jessica, because his parents took his truck away. Now, Soto was the only one in his clique who rode the bus.
I’m on a bus right now. The wrong bus, in the wrong direction. I need to know where he lives.
I see it. A simple house beyond the suburbs. There’s an empty lot in front of it, filled with high desert shrubs and yellow grass.
A week before Christmas, I wait in that lot, hunkered behind a prickly bush, freezing. I have in my hand three Christmas cards. I pulled them from his mailbox. I’m reading one from Soto’s grandpa. It is written in silky cursive. It’s sweet, and I feel bad for the grandpa as I pocket three crisp twenty-dollar bills.
It takes me an hour and a half to walk home.
I steal his mail once a month. I slip gum places I know he’ll sit on or touch. I get bold one day and rip a few pages from his notebook while he’s distracted, hoping the lack of information will cascade through his study time and into his test results. I get petty, I get crafty.
I sneak into the men’s locker room during a basketball game and steal his wallet as he sinks the ball through the net, winning the game. He blames the losing team for the theft. There’s a Walmart gift card from his grandma inside worth a hundred buckaroos, which I use to buy a more comfortable bra, a dark blue hoodie, and some candy for the neighbor girl I used to babysit. It occurs to me that my specialization can be profitable, if done correctly.
We all graduate. All eighty-something of us. A small ceremony is held, and then we’re all off to Sober Grad, an event in the public park with rides and games and, most importantly, no alcohol. I get patted down on the way in. So does Soto, except for some reason he has a flask of my father’s whiskey in his backpack. He swears he’s never had a drink in his life, but they don’t let him in. I ride the bumper cars over and over because, from the corner of the arena, I can see the marshland through the little metal diamonds of a wire mesh fence. He’s out there, sitting in a stew of grass and mud and water, head in his arms, sobbing.
I want to feel something for him, but I have a job to do.
************
I’m working the till at Kmart.
Following my specialization has become difficult ever since Soto got accepted into community college and I, well... there was no point in applying.
Being a retail grunt got me money and, even better, got me out of the house. After my father and step-mother decided to stop killing each other, my father “took a break” from his job and spent all hours of the day in the garage with stacks of nudie mags and one of Mary Shelley’s makeshift Broncos. I needed to pay rent.
Stocking shelves, dealing with customers. I’m not good at this job. I am terrible at counting cash. I’m slow at shelving. I don’t smile at the customer enough. And yet I’m a perfect fit—a perfect nobody, working the register, yet completely unregistered.
I infiltrate Soto’s campus. It’s not hard. Campus security seems to think I look like I belong there, and I don’t argue the point. I’m free to go where I please so long as I have a backpack and a textbook. I quickly learn that most professors don’t care who is in which class. They are tenure seekers first, lecturers second, paper pushers third, and, if they absolutely can’t avoid it any longer, sometimes teachers.
I sit in on Soto’s courses. I don’t even need to go to the very back. No one knows me, no one sees me, and if I feel too exposed, my dark blue hoodie is enough to shield me (thank you, Granny Soto).
During his philosophy course I learn about “essence.” A knife, says some old dead guy, is only a knife if it can cut. Its verb is to cut. Without a handle, it is still a knife. Without a blade, it is nothing.
I am the philosophy of the knife. Without Soto, I have no essence.
My verb is to cut.
His engineering courses don’t go so well. I think he has what it takes mentally, but for some reason, he submits two tests during the final, one with my handwriting. The exam starts, they hand me an exam. Me, a complete idiot, filling in answers right or wrong—who knows?—and slipping his name at the top. Soto can’t explain it. The handwriting is the same, even, as if someone has been watching him for a long time. He says he’s being pranked, at which point I stop my doppel-exam trick, so he doesn’t catch on.
One day, during another important exam, he is caught with a piece of paper gummed to his shoe. This piece of paper looks suspiciously like something he’s using to cheat. They know about it because I know about it, and I convinced a TA to take a look after we made out in the men’s room.
A year and a half goes by. All of my little pinpricks have added up, and Soto leaves. I don’t know why, exactly. Did the college kick him out? Did he give up? It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that he doesn’t graduate. He doesn’t go on to a university. He doesn’t get his degree.
What matters is, like me, he’ll never go anywhere in life.
************
My boyfriend is tense, heated. He wants to know about all the pictures he found. All the notebooks.
He asks me who the hell Sam Soto is.
We’ve been dating for a few years. I met him at community college. When he learned that I wasn’t a student there, I had to juggle some fancy stories about scouting and hoping and affordability. He got his Bachelors in Food Science. He joined me at Kmart shortly after. Nowhere else was hiring, and I was the manager of the Pantry Department. Close enough.
He wasn’t like most other men I’d know. He wasn’t bitter that his degree wasn’t helping him the way that he’d hoped. He didn’t feel the weight of student debt pushing him forward as if he were the boulder in the myth of Sisyphus. He didn’t mind that he worked under his girlfriend, in a lower position, for lower pay, at a store chain that was being swallowed by competitors.
He cared that I had a box full of Sam Soto.
We are fighting. I am making a million excuses, and none of them are any good. There is no way to explain why I don’t have a single picture of my family, yet I have a thousand miniature Sotos boxed up like plastic army figurines.
We have sex one more time, but it’s not good enough. He moves out. And as I sit alone on the brown carpet of my one-bedroom apartment, I see that I’ve lost my way. There’s something wrong with me, something foamy and gross.
I feel aimless. Purposeless. There’s only one way to recover my ontological essence.
Sam Soto, where the hell are you?
************
It has been a few years. I’m rusty. I don’t even know where he lives.
I Google him, I search him up on MySpace, then Facebook. Bingo. He’s left electronic bread crumbs everywhere. I see pictures of him at Hastings, at Olive Garden, at the Arapaho Bridge. I mentally triangulate. I take notes. Screenshots.
Within a week I find myself staring at Soto, once again behind the diamond metal of a wire mesh fence. This time, he is on the inside. He’s an apprentice ironworker. He’s hanging almost completely upside-down beneath an I-beam, welding. After every few blasts of sparks he lifts his face shield, squints at the bubbling seam, and goes at it again with his magic fire wand.
His face is the same but different. Rock-hard jaw, bean-bag eyes. He’s red from the sun, chubbier in the cheeks. His arms are thicker, stronger. I imagine what it would be like being stuck in his violent bear grasp, unable to move.
Luckily, he doesn’t even know who I am.
Figuring out how to sabotage Soto becomes a real puzzle. The construction site is for a lab from some rich private company. They don’t allow strangers on site. My recon is limited to sleeping with a few of the workers, pressing them for info. I choose older guys, guys I don’t see talking to Soto too much. I don’t want them blabbing to him about their lays, gloating about the skinny department manager they banged after six hours and a couple beers. My entire scheme has relied on being unknowable. I need to hold on to that forever, if possible.
Soto gets some verbal abuse after a few helmets go missing. Some more abuse after misplacing the company truck’s gas receipts. At one point, his shoelaces are tied together and he trips—a bit of high school triviality still in me. But when his foreman loses an envelope of cash from his trailer (he pays for labor under the table), the noose lowers.
Soto is one of the new-bloods. It’s always them. He’s the obvious culprit.
The foreman lays into him. Most of the other ironworkers have their issues, their debts, but they would never take advantage of their brothers. They are all they got. Each other. Brothers. You have to trust your brother when you’re walking on a beam 700 feet in the air, heavy wind. The foreman tells him this with bright red eyes. Every man on the site shakes his head in disappointment, and Soto’s let go. The foreman slaps Soto’s helmeted head, hard. Soto slinks away, his patchy beard wet with stubborn tears.
Word gets around. Soto can’t find other work. His union application is denied. He again moves back in with his parents.
I steal some more mail while I’m checking in on him, for old time’s sake.
************
I don’t know where the time goes.
I end up married. To a vet. Not the war kind, the animal kind. Funnily enough, he’s the son of one of the ironworkers I had interrogated years before. His father and I never talk about it, but when we meet up for family dinners, he hugs me a little too close.
Being a veterinarian’s wife is a dream. I didn’t know I loved animals.
My father only liked dogs, and only ones trained to submission, characterless, hopeless. Once, I tried to adopt a stray German shepherd mutt. I named her Shep. I fed her chicken bones and the water from canned corn. My father got annoyed that she was shitting in the yard, didn’t know “no,” couldn’t sit or stay. He drove her out to the marsh and we never had another pet.
I ride my first horse with my husband. He does on-call appointments at a ranch. The owners let me ride a beautiful Appaloosa named Lexus.
I become a veterinary nurse. I work alongside him, take every opportunity to play with the dogs and visit the horses.
In his clinic, I stroke the bunny-soft ear of an aged basset hound. My husband has just mended the dog’s leg. The dog had been clipped by a Mustang. His name is Skippy. He belongs to an elderly couple, who lovingly refer to Skippy as their only son.
I want to have a kid.
I tell my husband this. He smiles. We wait until dinner to discuss it. He’s pure love, this guy, and the only reason I’ve never let him find a better wife is because I’d like to become the type of woman he deserves, and then give him all the credit.
My vet husband has a few too many glasses of wine and confesses that he doesn’t think we’re right to have children. He worries we won’t be good parents.
But he’s an animal doctor! His heart is full of care. There is no better parent-to-be on this planet, as far as I’ve seen. I tell him all this, full honesty, eyes locked on his.
The wine flows up through his throat, takes control of his tongue. He gurgles. He tells me he loves me, but.
He loves me, but.
He informs me, with love, that there is an anger inside me. Something hard. He says this in the same voice he used to inform Mrs. Winshaw that her cat had feline leukemia virus. He is worried about me. He sees how sometimes I press too hard when setting medical braces. How I jab syringes. How I check an animal’s teeth by pulling their jaw open just a little too hard, a little too fast.
I tell him I want children.
We have this conversation forty-nine more times over the years. Usually all three of us are there: me, him, red wine.
During the fiftieth spat, I go too far, threaten him with a steak knife. Threaten to pop him like a tire.
We reach an agreement. I will never have kids.
************
I watched an online video once that said marriages usually dissolve after the five-year mark. If you survive the five-year mark, you survive at least another five. Statistically.
In defiance of this video, we get divorced six and a half years after our marriage.
He leaves me with a decent pot of money, not because of a prenup or because I begged, but because he’s a genuinely good man. He then kicks me out of his animal clinic. He keeps our two dogs and three cats and the fish.
The last thing he says to me is that marriage feels like a hundred tiny tortures, spread out over an eternity.
I move into a small apartment. Getting a job is tough. I have no degree, and my experience is worthless. Other vets won’t hire me because, despite six years of nursing, I was never formally trained and have no documented qualifications.
I take over a struggling thrift store. All of our products are donations. Most of our employees are volunteers from high school working for community service credits. I spend most nights in the back of the store, drinking tea and honey until 4am, reading milk crates full of dog-eared romance novels. I solve a million sudokus.
I’m filling the front window. Mannequins. Purses. DVDs. I set out a display of used knives. One of the blades falls off. I remember the philosophy of the knife.
Sam Soto, my essence. Without him, I’m all handle.
He’s nowhere to be found.
I drive out to his parents’ house. Whoever is living there now is not a Soto.
I save up. Pennies from used dresses, dollars from silverware sets, a few lamps, some rubber tubing. I borrow a little from my ex.
I hire a detective. He gets to work.
Everything he finds out about Sam Soto is in a folder on my lap. I am on my apartment floor. I have no bed, I don’t need one. A quilt and a pillow is fine. And this folder.
Sam Soto, 36, is a vet. The war kind, not the animal kind. He worked various odd jobs until, at age 26, he enlisted in the US Army. His Military Occupational Specialty was 15J, armament and electrical repair. Most of the time, he drove the forklift in a warehouse in Fort Novosel, Alabama. Three years in, his leg got mangled by shifting palettes of military-grade decorative pea gravel, used for gazebos. He currently lives in a trailer park near Crescent City, California. His parents passed away from cancer, both of them. Same cancer as his grandmother. Possibly genetic. He sold their family home four years ago. He survives on government paychecks and occasional work as a freelance mechanic. No wife, no kids.
Crescent City is only a few hours away.
Time to get back to work.
************
I drive to the trailer park once, maybe twice a week. Four hours there, spend the night in my old, beat-up Pinto, four hours back, go to work. I’m getting back into form. I feel myself becoming myself.
Soto is fat now. He hobbles on one leg, a mangled, skinny thing he keeps wrapped in gauze. His dirty blond beard is in full, covering that once-chiseled jaw. His eyes sparkle, even from a distance, lounging under baggy eyelids. He smiles and greets all of his neighbors. He treats the kids like he’s their uncle, giving them advice, swinging them around. He eats dinner alone at the TV.
I’m sitting here now, watching from afar. I’m using a smartphone as binoculars. The zoom feature is handy, the camera unreal. It had better be. The phone costs almost as much as my junk car, which, for some reason, was smoking or steaming on the way here, and won’t start up again.
So I watch him watching TV.
He’s watching sports. He’s a simple man. He works, he eats, he watches sports. I kind of like the simplicity of it.
He gets up, washes his dish in the sink. I duck, but not in time. He’s seen me. Or at least, he’s seen my car. He sits back down, watches sports.
But he’s noticed.
It gets dark. He gets up every half hour or so, comes back to the window, scratches his beard, wonders what this car is doing here right outside the trailer park community. An unfamiliar car. A car sort of hidden behind the fence, unmoving.
It’s raining now. He comes out anyway.
I’m shaking. My stomach hurts.
This might be it. I try to start the car, but only a heated bubbling sound comes out. Fuck. Damn. He’s coming out in a dark blue t-shirt, wobbling on that crooked leg, coming. He taps on the window.
Oh no.
My invisibility. My unknowability. It’s gone.
************
We’re inside his trailer. It’s warm here. The ambience of the TV, low volume, sets a homey mood. We’re both wet from the rain. He grabs us some beers, says he’ll go take a look at my car when the rain lets up. I tell him not to bother, it’s too dark. I’ll sleep in my car, call for a tow in the morning. He wants to help. I say no.
He says, don’t I recognize you? I shrug. But he knows my name. He knows me from high school. He remembers my beanbag chair from art class. I’m surprised. I never told anyone it was supposed to be a beanbag chair. He laughs, full and pleasing. The assignment was to paint a chair. What else could it have been? “Our art teacher,” he says, “was an idiot if he thought that was a rock.”
I pretend to kinda know who he is.
Soto, right? Sam Soto? What happened to your leg?
“Accident,” Sam says. He takes a sip. “Accidents follow me around. This one was military. But the bad karma started way back.”
I nod, yes. After you popped those tires, right?
He should be angry at the accusation, but he laughs. “No, no. The Senior Parking Lot Incident? Hah! No idea who did that. That’s part of the bad luck, though.”
I tell him I meant when he popped the bike tires of the guys in Jackson. Anti-Soto, and his gang. He told that story a lot.
“I made them up.” He leans forward, bites his cracked lip, swirls the beer around in his can. “I made them up. Don’t know why. I did a lot of lying after... after grandma died.” His mouth mimics a smile, tight, but his eyes are somewhere else. “That’s where all the bad things began.”
He talks about his grandmother. The one person he loved most. His best friend. She died of cancer, the same cancer that would later kill his parents. He was destroyed, angry. Sad. Deeply sad. She was his life. No, he didn’t know why he lied about fights he won, people he tricked. He never did any of that. His parents bought him that souped-up Ford F-150 thinking it’d help him move on from the grief. It kinda did. Soto got to be a bigshot at school. He was cool for a minute. Had friends. And then, as payment for his lying and his pride, the bad karma struck. He got blamed for vandalizing. Then his own truck was destroyed. His parents confiscated it, said he couldn’t take care of it properly, sold it off for cheap.
“But none of it matters,” he says. “I only wanted my... my grandma back. Fuck the truck.”
I say nothing. I touch his knee.
“I’m glad to see you doing okay, though,” he says, genuinely. His eyes sparkle. “Glad to see one of us made it out okay. Don’t let me bring the mood down. You look great, by the way. Wannanother beer?”
We have more beers.
I wake up in his bear arms. He blankets me. His breath on my neck scares and comforts. Together, we are the story of the Princess and the Pea, except I am the pea and he is a massive pile of mattresses. There is no princess.
He rolls out of bed, into the kitchen, makes me scrambled eggs and toast. I can feel his excitement. He is so lonely, so ready to please. He is static electricity. He brings me coffee on a tray. Strokes my hair back, gentle, respectful. His eyes are sad for a moment as he tells me he is going to fix my car. He doesn’t suggest I stay, but doesn’t suggest I leave, either.
As he steps outside, I spit in his coffee.
A weak, pathetic spittle. My venom is running dry. It seems childish now, mixing my spit into his drink when his mouth is rank with my whole body. I spit again anyway. Extra foam.
I watch through the window as he crawls into my car, gets his hairy arms covered in black grease, replaces some pieces, turns the key. Fills a container with blue liquid, wipes his forehead with a rag, turns the key. Replaces a tube, turns the key.
I can’t forget my specialization.
I’m pinching myself as I think about my mission—as I remember last night, Sam Soto over me and around me and between me. He is my essence. We have infiltrated each other.
If I want, I know I can stick around. I could torture Soto every day, perhaps.
A hundred tiny tortures, spread out over an eternity.
Every day. This could be what my mission had built up to, how my deep knowledge of Soto would keep me near and haunting him, chained to him, adjusting his coffee every morning with the taste of my own insides.
I see it in his eyes, too. The longing, the loneliness.
He has been living by himself for so long. He isn’t bad at all, really. A nice guy. He never bullied me, or anyone. He was just a guy. A normal-ass guy. A boulder to be pushed, a chair to be sat on. A guy, down on his luck, looking to share his life with someone, anyone.
He comes in, glistening, towering, a Burj Khalifa of a man, wide-jawed and grinning. He wipes the grease from his fingers. Your ride is as good as new, he says. And yet, he gets shy when he asks me to stay for dinner. He’ll make it proper, he says. A real treat, just for me. A recipe from his grandma.
Sam Soto. Honest. Pure. A grandma’s boy. Beaten. Crippled. Lonely.
We go to bed again. I give him everything. I make sure he feels love, feels loved.
The rock inside me softens, dissolves. My gut digests it. No more rolling around, no more frothy bile.
In my final act of torture, I drive away and never look back.
------------
Image: Shutterstock
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