The Kiss of Death

Content warning: Mental health, Substance abuse, Talk of suicide

Get up. Nobody’s coming to save you. 

I laid on the couch thinking of ways to kill myself and reasons not to. Gun to the temple? No, gun to the chin. Razor to the wrist? That was the token ladylike way to go, but it took too much precision, not fast enough. If I thought I could stomach it, I’d swallow drain cleaner, but I always hated throwing up. 

I sat up and glanced through the front window into the neighbor’s house across the street. It was dark. The lights on their Christmas tree leaked and blurred in my vision, liquid fireflies in rainbow colors. My throat burned with dry heat. I couldn’t remember the last time I drank, or ate, for that matter.

I twisted my hair into a knot on top of my head, checked to make sure the Smith and Wesson .38 was still on the coffee table and realized it was New Year’s Eve. The thought of putting a tree up never crossed my mind. I’d been in the two-bedroom halfway house for almost a year. Like everything else in my life, it was bland, non-descript and it wasn’t mine. It would never be mine. All it did was mock me, around every corner, behind every door, teasing…it’s almost a home; you’re almost a normal forty-year-old. Almost. 

I used to be addicted to painkillers. I didn’t recover. They quit doing their job, so I fired them. Come to think of it, that was around last New Year’s Eve. I could call it a resolution, but that would be lying. 

I was bloody knuckles and broken glass since the day I was born. I was left—left for Las Vegas and a shellacked blowhard (my mom…and her boss), left for a sticky bar with a few good men named Jack and Jim (my dad) and left for the aftermath of a diabetic coma from too many Honey Buns (my grandmother). I decided if I couldn’t make people love me, at least I could make them afraid of me. 

I sat up. 

I turned the television on. Two talking heads were seated in a loge above a crowd in New York City. The man wore a blue suit, the woman wore red sparkles. Her plastic hair moved in a clump when the wind blew. 

“Stay with Theresa and me for more from Time’s Square.”

“That’s right, Matt, we’re happy to celebrate with you as you prepare to welcome a new year, full of things that have never been…”

“I beg to differ, Theresa.” I snapped the TV off. Don’t try to fool me. We all live the same year 75 times and call it a life. I stood up and stretched. 

I slid on a pair of slippers that could double as shoes and did double as shoes for the depressed and lazy. I slid my coat on over my hoodie and threw my purse over my shoulder. Tradition called. I didn’t bother to lock the door behind me. 

Like my halfway rent-a-house, my twice-used car was gold and non-descript. The vice store two blocks away from me was busy. Of course, it was. Liquor, lotto, cigarettes, junk food. After tonight, all the nitwits buzzing around in there would make a resolution to give up one or all those things. It wouldn’t stick. “Fare thee well, tobacco!” and predictably, in two days or less, grandma will light up at Tuesday night Euchre over the junk mail on her kitchen table with the same sentiment, only reversed, “Fare thee well, resolutions!” Shallow optimism and mediocrity. Two of my many, many pet peeves. 

I parked in front of the ice chest by the front door. An old woman sat in the car next to me, furiously scratching lottery tickets with her overgrown thumbnail. 

I went in. The lights were blinding. The floor was sticky, and the place smelled like strawberry sugar, burnt coffee and rubber. 

I needed one shot-size bottle of Yukon Jack. I hated the taste. The burn made me gag. But a toast of two fingers of the foul shit was the last memory I had with my dad. I was barely 20 that week between Christmas and New Year’s when Roger Maxwell finally got the best of himself. The neighbor found him dead on his kitchen floor three weeks later when he leaked into the man’s ceiling. He shot himself in the head. 

I squeezed past an old man in a denim coat at the drip coffee station. He smelled like cigar smoke. No doubt he was a recovering alcoholic. They trade beer for coffee. They don’t need alcohol or caffeine. What they’re really looking for is something to hold onto that they know they can always get more of; something they can take all the way down to nothing, knowing the coolers and burners will always provide. 

I turned down an aisle, crowded with kids in snow boots, wiping snot on their coat sleeves and decided there was sugar down there, but probably no whiskey. 

The beer was along the back of the store in coolers. A tall woman with red nails, obscenely long, and curly hair talked on her cell phone, loud enough for the old woman scratching for jackpots in the parking lot to hear. I rolled my eyes under the lids and pushed by her. 

There, in a rack of wire baskets, were one-ounce bottles of assorted liquor, all brands and flavors mixed together like boxes of books at a yard sale. I found what I wanted in the third basket from the top and moved to get in line.  The last of the snot-wiping kids fell in behind his mother and cut me off. 

I thought about setting the bottle on the shelf next to me, in front of the tree shaped air-fresheners, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I just didn’t like people and I despised waiting. I stared out at the parking lot while the clerk cashed in seven one dollar winning tickets from the woman in the car. 

The bell on the door jingled. I turned to look at the next sinner to come through the door.

I knew him. 

We locked eyes. 

There would be no turn of the head, pretending I didn’t notice him, no way out of the small talk I despised. It’s frigid. Yep, so cold. Winter in Ohio. Heh heh. Take care. 

“Wednesday?” I was born on a Sunday, but as the rhyme goes, Wednesday’s child is full of woe. I think my mother was a lukewarm prophecy and my dad was too drunk to care. 

“Mark, hi.”

Mark Bregant was four years older than me but ran with the same post high school crowd I pretended to like for a while. Until the pills. Everything normal, albeit forced and false, was until the pills. 

I was confused. Mark went to prison in 2002 for second-degree murder. He ran his girlfriend over with his Jeep in the backwoods of Wellsville where we used to camp. The public defender told the jury it was because she had a seizure in the middle of the woods and Mark panicked. She was suffering. It was a mercy killing. He went to prison for fifteen years to life. At least, that’s what I heard from the four-wheeling recalcitrant waywards we hung out with.

After Mark went to prison, I stopped socializing altogether. It wasn’t long until I befriended Percocet. Mark’s girlfriend, Hannah, was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Whether it was a seizure or his Goodyear All-Terrains, she was dead and so was the sliver of me that was vulnerable to loss. You can’t unbury the dead.  

“I thought you were…”

He shook his head. The line moved. The lotto lady stepped out of the way to organize her seven ones, face-up into her wallet. “I’m out.”

“For good?” It was the only thing I could think to ask. 

He glanced around to make sure no one was paying attention. “Possibly. Parole.”

The man in front of me with the coffee and bag of mini donuts turned to look at Mark. 

He stepped close. His blond hair was the same but receding with some gray in it. Although he looked worn, drugs and alcohol hadn’t aged him the way they do people on the outside. In a way, I realized, we’d both been in prison, just different versions. 

“Has it been that long?” I whisper-talked.

“Twenty years. I was up five years ago, but they denied me. I wasn’t in enough programs.”

I nodded, eager to be left alone. He didn’t scare me. His acquaintance with me invaded my bubble. My bubble was fragile and bitter. 

I said nothing, but he didn’t move. 

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.” Always the same lie.

“Why are you in here New Year’s Eve with that sip of whiskey?” He pointed with his hand in the pocket of his generic nylon coat. It looked prison-issue blue. I wondered if they gave it to him when he left. 

“Oh, just a tradition. I don’t drink. Except this,” I held up the small bottle, “one night a year for old time’s sake.”

“You married? Kids?”

“Nope and nope.” I stared at the old man’s gray hair in front of me. 

“Wow. I thought you’d be some professor in Chicago or New York. Never thought I’d run into you here.”

“And yet…” I fake smiled and held up both hands. The line moved again. The old man in front of me was next after the circus of crusty kids moved alone with their harried mother. 

Mark moved with me. I didn’t like it. 

“What are you here for?” It couldn’t be beer, not on parole. He probably didn’t have enough money for lottery tickets, and I assumed he kicked the nicotine habit while he was in the clink.

“Coffee.”

Of course. 

The old man was sticking his wallet in the back pocket of his Levis. I moved up to the counter. 

“Listen, I’m in the apartments off of Cedar, for now anyway,” as though that should give me hope for his future, “I’m alone. You’re alone…”

I put the plastic shot bottle on the counter swiped my debit card. The clerk, Todd, had deep cuts on his dry fingers and chewed a piece of gum to death. His eyes danced between Mark and me as we spoke, breath bated with suspense to see if I’d turn him down. 

“No one should be alone on New Year’s Eve,” he finished. 

I thanked Todd, slid the bottle in my pocket and walked toward the glass doors. “I’m always alone, Mark. I like being alone.”

“I have a curfew. It’s 11:00 p.m., but it’s better than nothing. Come on. For old time’s sake?” I hated it when people reused my words against me, almost as much as I hated small talk. “I noticed you the second I walked in. It has to be fate.”

“The blessed are always under surveillance.”

“And you’re more beautiful than I remembered.”

“And there’s nothing worse than a grown man telling lies.” I opened the door, forced a middle-aged woman to stand aside and didn’t hold it for her. 

Mark followed me out to my car. “What about your coffee?”

“Forget the coffee,” he said. 

“Are you okay?” I wasn’t sure if he meant permanently or at the moment. 

“I’m breathing, aren’t I?”

“I know she was your friend. I guess all I can do is say I’m sorry.”

“Did they teach you that in prison school?”

“All I’m saying is time moves whether you move with it or not. You have to have hope.”

“Hope,” I let out a dry snort. My breath fogged in the cold air. “Screw hope. Hope is an awful thing.” I got in the used gold non-descript, slammed the door and left Mark standing in the parking lot holding his hands up. 

I walked in the house and let the storm door slam behind me. I had a habit of leaving the man door open, even in the winter. I threw my purse on the floor next to the front door. A papery brown leaf fell off the sagging poinsettia on my windowsill. Some Christian group left it on my doorstep. I brought it in because it had the audacity to survive the snow for two days on my porch. It was my only dependent. I grew to like it, then I killed it. 

I tossed the shot on the coffee table. It landed next to the gun. I had a half hour to kill before midnight.

I went to the kitchen, popped a can of rip-off diet cola Granny Max got me hooked on and made my way back to the couch. 

Heavy pounding on the glass of my storm door stopped me mid-sip. 

A man stood there, but I couldn’t see his face. The glass was covered in fog-going-on-ice. 

I set the can on the coffee table, knowing it was either the cops or Mark. Anyone else would’ve stormed through. 

I opened the door a crack, then further. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“I followed you. To the store too. I’ve been following you. You don’t go too many places.” I stared at him. His hands were in his generic nylon pockets. He motioned with them to my living room. “Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.”

In the time between seconds, I tried to decide whether letting him in was a bad idea, but I lived my life like I had nothing to lose because I didn’t. I held the door open. 

He looked around, judging my builder-white walls and corduroy couch. 

“Nice place. A step up from my cell.” 

“Why are you here?”

Mark shrugged. “We all sit down to a table of consequences sooner or later, Wen.” He strolled past me without asking, looking around.

“What consequences?” I looked at the gun on the coffee table and wondered if he noticed it. I put one bullet in it and spun the cylinder this morning. I regretted it. “I think you need to leave.” 

Mark put the cup next to the gun on the table and sat down on the couch. He rested his elbows on his long legs. 

I suddenly had the urge to protect myself. It was something I didn’t remember feeling before. 

“I’m not going anywhere, Wen.” He patted the cushion next to him. “Come. Sit. It’s a night for old acquaintances, a round for old time’s sake, right?”

I sat down next to him, only because it put me closer to the gun on the table. “I like to forget old acquaintances.”

“Just a defense-mechanism.” He looked at me and sat back. He clasped his hands behind his head. “Being locked up…well, it does a lot of things to man. It gives him a stigma, like he’s not smart enough to follow the rules. But really, it makes him patient…and bitter. The more years go by, the time he has to let the fury fester. 

“Then, they sit him in front of a panel of suits and, as long as he shows remorse and begs in the right tone of voice, which is simple to do when that’s all he has time to do in his cell—practice the way he should sound and look—they stamp a paper. One paper, Wen.  And you know what happens then?”

I shook my head no. I inched to the edge of the cushion, ever closer to the gun.

“They create a monster then they let him out.” He laughed. “They set him free.”

I wasn’t nervous. My heart didn’t pound, not like someone with a heart that wasn’t black and bitter like mine. My senses were suspended; hanging in mid-air, waiting to be told what to do. 

“I think you know what it’s like to be a monster, don’t you, Wen?”

“I know what it’s like to need someone that’s not there.” I stared at him head-on. “That doesn’t make me a monster. That makes me someone who refuses to need anyone ever again.”

“Not Hannah, though. She was there for you. Until I took her.”

“So, you did it on purpose. She never had a seizure, did she? It wasn’t a mercy killing.” I couldn’t help but let out a half-smile. “You didn’t put her out of her misery. You murdered her. Why?”

Mark turned his face toward me, the smallest hint of a grin nipping at the corners of his mouth. “You wanted me to.”

I shook my head. “No. I didn’t.”

“You wanted to be mine. She was in the way. There was no way she’d let us be together. I saw the way you used to look at me.”

I backed up. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the couch. He sat me down next to him.  I glanced up. The crowd packed into Times Square moved like an ocean wave caught it. Confetti flew. The camera shot to the glowing ball ready to descend to a new year. 

My left hand crawled across my knee for the gun on the coffee table. His right hand followed it. 

“Ten…nine…eight…seven…” The countdown rang out from the masses.

My hand found the revolver. Mark’s hand found mine, covered it, and squeezed until the steel of the gun ground into the palm of my hand. 

“Three…two…one!” I closed my eyes. 

Mark’s lips mashed against mine, dry and hard. I felt the cold barrel of the revolver against my temple and knew it was the kiss of death.