Prose
One Last Round
by Morgan Victoria
by Morgan Victoria
Simon already didn’t like to drink. He always complained about the stupor-inducing, sack of potatoes hangover he got for a three day minimum when he drank too much. And he especially didn’t like how I looked at him in the days following. A gaze he said followed him with a stinging earnestness that reminded him of cleaning a cut with an alcohol swab.
But after he sawed through his finger, that was the true beginning of the end. Blue laughed and laughed until it didn’t make sense to be laughing anymore. So much blood on both of them, on the floor, it should have rung alarm bells that it was scary. I knew right then I couldn’t have held more color in my face than a fresh sheet of snow. My hands shook and I couldn’t open my mouth all the way without making a bird-like sound of shock. Blue left the room. When he came back, he swung out and grabbed Simon’s bloody hand before plunging it into a mug of table salt.
“It’s what soldiers do.” He said with a sideways smile. The E.R. nurse disagreed and actually yelled at him when he explained what he did. His smile never faded from his face. Of course, she was a melodramatic bitch and Blue was in the right. Of course. Of course. How silly of any of us to doubt him. He still had the damn hand, didn’t he? Though according to the nurse, Simon didn’t get infected either through an act of God or pure, bumfuck luck. Blue said that considering how hideous Simon’s face was, it wasn’t God helping him out, and then ran away from the kick Simon tried to level at his shins.
Throughout all of it, he kept his composure much better than should have been expected. Admittedly, I haven’t been in a lot of circumstances where someone cuts off an extremity. But Simon just telling us where his wallet and keys were and then googling the nearest hospital felt more capable than someone who cut nearly half their finger in two should have done.
Simon cupped the mug of salt while we sat in the astringent smelling waiting room of the E.R. for a few hours. Blue rotated around in one of the plastic chairs, bending and twisting his legs and hips around until a patient with yellow eyes and a dripping nose snapped at him to keep still. He saluted him and hung upside down until that got boring and then watched a movie loudly on his phone while his face faded from the red of asphyxiation. I held Simon’s mug for him so we could play tic-tac-toe on crumpled-up Dunkin’ Donuts napkins from his glove compartment. We played until my eyes blurred X’s and O’s after every blink like I was seeing the world through a love letter. When we finally got into a room, we all sat through a flurry of nurses and one surly doctor and then got to be alone.
In the early morning, men’s button up blue of the sky, Simon leaned his forehead against the hospital window. “I want a cig,” he said, his breath fogging the glass.
“Me too,” I agreed. If I were taller than him, I would have ruffled his hair or slung an arm around his shoulders, but I wasn’t so that felt weird. Loaded without meaning to be, but too much nonetheless.
“Is it always gonna hurt this bad?” He asked, and he sounded so much like a child, the part of me that remembered the bone crushing, chest stealing fear of childhood ricocheted between my ribs. His finger looked mummified, encased in a thick swab of gauze and tape the nurse instructed him to change in three days' time.
I tucked my head against his shoulder and slugged his side in a ghost of a punch, fingers curling against his jean jacket stiff with the scent of cigarettes and dirty kitchen. “It won’t if you don’t fuck with it. And don’t listen to anything Blue says.” I could say that because Blue was on a mission to get Almond Joys from the downstairs cache of vending machines in the nurses' station. According to Blue, none of the ones for patients and their guests had any ‘decent’ candy and he wanted to get back at the nurse who yelled at him. He could say that as much as he would like, but I knew he was doing it because Almond Joys are Simon’s favorite. I stayed with Simon and we waited for Blue to come back and tell us what to do like he was Jesus. Or just a skinny, candy-bearing Santa Claus.
“It’s not that bad though, right?” I asked, not looking at him full on because I knew the answer.
Simon would have had a lot more promise if he’d just been born to a different family.
Sometimes, during sweltering summers where we could only go outside at night because the day smeared us into sweaty zombies only complacent in front of an A.C. unit or sneaking into someone’s pool, we got crossed and laid out on Simon’s roof. We only had access to it by shimmying onto his boot-printed bathroom sink and crawling through the window. One of those times, he told me his earliest memory was of his mom trying to kill him.
A ridged slat of roof tile dug into my back when I turned to him.
“My dad likes telling this story too,” he said and laughed. “I don’t remember exactly– my dad always said I had a mouth on me, even at like, seven years old–” He screwed up his face and made a funny little voice to cloak what he was saying. “Simon, you always had such a mouth on you and that got you into such,” he stressed this next word with rolled eyes and a louder, warbled intonation, “trouble with your mom.”
“What did you say to her?” I asked. I looked anywhere but his face, instead at the exposed stretch of skin from the thin tank top he wore. The swirls of his tattoos were so vivid and beautiful that I wanted to stroke the psychedelic spiral of them, press my fingers to the warmth of his black-inked olive skin. He accumulated them through friends of friends who wanted to practice on someone. Some of them were impressive and some were just a mess, but they somehow all pulled together.
He shrugged. “I don’t remember. I just remember my mom like, her face getting all twisted up and this fuckin’ rage in her eyes, fuck–” Simon paused again to laugh, at what he considered to be absurd and what I considered to be terrifying. “And she like, she tried to come at me, her hands–” He made clawing motions at the night air, at the black sky that held no stars because it was cloudy and light pollution in the city prevented most, if not all of them. “She started to come at me and my dad had to grab her by the middle,” He curled his outstretched arms and mimed pulling something broad in a quick, angry motion, “and pull her away from me while she screamed.”
At the hospital, when Blue came back with a handful of Almond Joys, all of us trundled out of there in our huge coats and scarves. Simon clutched his discharge paperwork and audibly counted out the amount of extra shifts at work he would have to do now to pay this new medical bill. The numbers swirled around and around in my head as we walked out into the biting cold of the parking lot. Blue laughed at him, clinking Simon’s keys around in his hands. The sound reminded me of this TV show Blue and I used to watch at 3 a.m. when we were little and unaccompanied, about an old-timey sheriff who liked to dangle prisoners' freedom in front of them before walking them outside to get shot. We watched a lot of late-night TV together when we were young. The house got too silent with just the two of us in it, so we would sit and watch until the sun rose and we could hear our street wake up again. Our parents weren’t the greatest either.
“Gonna have to do a lot more mopping, kitchen boy.”
Simon spat onto the ground. “Gimme my keys you fuckin’ waste of space.”
“Nah cripple, I’m driving.”
It must have been March because Simon let Blue drive us into the McDonald's drive-through so we could get those green milkshakes that taste like a sweet root canal. I remember the shine of red on all of us from the rear lights of the car in front. The way the crimson hit Blue’s hand when he placed it on Simon’s thigh. I pretended to not be staring, picking at the empty wrapper of an Almond Joy in my pocket. Simon didn’t do anything, but I could see his smile in the rearview mirror. We were all a little too in love with each other back then.
But after he sawed through his finger, that was the true beginning of the end. Blue laughed and laughed until it didn’t make sense to be laughing anymore. So much blood on both of them, on the floor, it should have rung alarm bells that it was scary. I knew right then I couldn’t have held more color in my face than a fresh sheet of snow. My hands shook and I couldn’t open my mouth all the way without making a bird-like sound of shock. Blue left the room. When he came back, he swung out and grabbed Simon’s bloody hand before plunging it into a mug of table salt.
“It’s what soldiers do.” He said with a sideways smile. The E.R. nurse disagreed and actually yelled at him when he explained what he did. His smile never faded from his face. Of course, she was a melodramatic bitch and Blue was in the right. Of course. Of course. How silly of any of us to doubt him. He still had the damn hand, didn’t he? Though according to the nurse, Simon didn’t get infected either through an act of God or pure, bumfuck luck. Blue said that considering how hideous Simon’s face was, it wasn’t God helping him out, and then ran away from the kick Simon tried to level at his shins.
Throughout all of it, he kept his composure much better than should have been expected. Admittedly, I haven’t been in a lot of circumstances where someone cuts off an extremity. But Simon just telling us where his wallet and keys were and then googling the nearest hospital felt more capable than someone who cut nearly half their finger in two should have done.
Simon cupped the mug of salt while we sat in the astringent smelling waiting room of the E.R. for a few hours. Blue rotated around in one of the plastic chairs, bending and twisting his legs and hips around until a patient with yellow eyes and a dripping nose snapped at him to keep still. He saluted him and hung upside down until that got boring and then watched a movie loudly on his phone while his face faded from the red of asphyxiation. I held Simon’s mug for him so we could play tic-tac-toe on crumpled-up Dunkin’ Donuts napkins from his glove compartment. We played until my eyes blurred X’s and O’s after every blink like I was seeing the world through a love letter. When we finally got into a room, we all sat through a flurry of nurses and one surly doctor and then got to be alone.
In the early morning, men’s button up blue of the sky, Simon leaned his forehead against the hospital window. “I want a cig,” he said, his breath fogging the glass.
“Me too,” I agreed. If I were taller than him, I would have ruffled his hair or slung an arm around his shoulders, but I wasn’t so that felt weird. Loaded without meaning to be, but too much nonetheless.
“Is it always gonna hurt this bad?” He asked, and he sounded so much like a child, the part of me that remembered the bone crushing, chest stealing fear of childhood ricocheted between my ribs. His finger looked mummified, encased in a thick swab of gauze and tape the nurse instructed him to change in three days' time.
I tucked my head against his shoulder and slugged his side in a ghost of a punch, fingers curling against his jean jacket stiff with the scent of cigarettes and dirty kitchen. “It won’t if you don’t fuck with it. And don’t listen to anything Blue says.” I could say that because Blue was on a mission to get Almond Joys from the downstairs cache of vending machines in the nurses' station. According to Blue, none of the ones for patients and their guests had any ‘decent’ candy and he wanted to get back at the nurse who yelled at him. He could say that as much as he would like, but I knew he was doing it because Almond Joys are Simon’s favorite. I stayed with Simon and we waited for Blue to come back and tell us what to do like he was Jesus. Or just a skinny, candy-bearing Santa Claus.
“It’s not that bad though, right?” I asked, not looking at him full on because I knew the answer.
Simon would have had a lot more promise if he’d just been born to a different family.
Sometimes, during sweltering summers where we could only go outside at night because the day smeared us into sweaty zombies only complacent in front of an A.C. unit or sneaking into someone’s pool, we got crossed and laid out on Simon’s roof. We only had access to it by shimmying onto his boot-printed bathroom sink and crawling through the window. One of those times, he told me his earliest memory was of his mom trying to kill him.
A ridged slat of roof tile dug into my back when I turned to him.
“My dad likes telling this story too,” he said and laughed. “I don’t remember exactly– my dad always said I had a mouth on me, even at like, seven years old–” He screwed up his face and made a funny little voice to cloak what he was saying. “Simon, you always had such a mouth on you and that got you into such,” he stressed this next word with rolled eyes and a louder, warbled intonation, “trouble with your mom.”
“What did you say to her?” I asked. I looked anywhere but his face, instead at the exposed stretch of skin from the thin tank top he wore. The swirls of his tattoos were so vivid and beautiful that I wanted to stroke the psychedelic spiral of them, press my fingers to the warmth of his black-inked olive skin. He accumulated them through friends of friends who wanted to practice on someone. Some of them were impressive and some were just a mess, but they somehow all pulled together.
He shrugged. “I don’t remember. I just remember my mom like, her face getting all twisted up and this fuckin’ rage in her eyes, fuck–” Simon paused again to laugh, at what he considered to be absurd and what I considered to be terrifying. “And she like, she tried to come at me, her hands–” He made clawing motions at the night air, at the black sky that held no stars because it was cloudy and light pollution in the city prevented most, if not all of them. “She started to come at me and my dad had to grab her by the middle,” He curled his outstretched arms and mimed pulling something broad in a quick, angry motion, “and pull her away from me while she screamed.”
At the hospital, when Blue came back with a handful of Almond Joys, all of us trundled out of there in our huge coats and scarves. Simon clutched his discharge paperwork and audibly counted out the amount of extra shifts at work he would have to do now to pay this new medical bill. The numbers swirled around and around in my head as we walked out into the biting cold of the parking lot. Blue laughed at him, clinking Simon’s keys around in his hands. The sound reminded me of this TV show Blue and I used to watch at 3 a.m. when we were little and unaccompanied, about an old-timey sheriff who liked to dangle prisoners' freedom in front of them before walking them outside to get shot. We watched a lot of late-night TV together when we were young. The house got too silent with just the two of us in it, so we would sit and watch until the sun rose and we could hear our street wake up again. Our parents weren’t the greatest either.
“Gonna have to do a lot more mopping, kitchen boy.”
Simon spat onto the ground. “Gimme my keys you fuckin’ waste of space.”
“Nah cripple, I’m driving.”
It must have been March because Simon let Blue drive us into the McDonald's drive-through so we could get those green milkshakes that taste like a sweet root canal. I remember the shine of red on all of us from the rear lights of the car in front. The way the crimson hit Blue’s hand when he placed it on Simon’s thigh. I pretended to not be staring, picking at the empty wrapper of an Almond Joy in my pocket. Simon didn’t do anything, but I could see his smile in the rearview mirror. We were all a little too in love with each other back then.
About the Author:
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Morgan Victoria is a barista and writer whose work has been published in Horned Things Journal of Literature and Art. They were a finalist for the Ember Chasm Review Fiction and Poetry Contest of 2021. Follow them on Twitter @mvcgan. |
