The Emerald Incident

A twinge spurs in Kim’s wrist but she continues knocking on the apartment door. She presses the doorbell for the fifth time. Her friend Lori groans behind her, Kim looks over her shoulder and shoots her a glare.

Lori segues the groan into clearing her throat before inquiring, “Do you think he’s even home?”

“I know he’s home, Taura saw his car when we parked. Remember?”

Lori retorts, “Yeah, but you’ve been knocking for like ten minutes. If he hasn’t come to the door by now, I don’t think he will. Besides, I’m hungry as fuck.”

Taura piggybacks, “Me too, I didn’t eat this morning.”

Kim shuts them down with, “Shane has food inside, you both can go crazy once he opens the door.” Before she turns around and continues knocking with one hand, pulling out her phone with the other hand to call him.

For the last three weeks, it’s been radio silence from Shane. Originally, none of the girls found this weird. The election was stressful for all of them, but Shane took it particularly hard due to the prospect of losing access to his testosterone. Shane’s always been reclusive but never to such an intense degree. He entirely stopped attending his classes and Kim has started to suspect that he hasn’t even been leaving his apartment. He would always respond to Kim’s invitations to go out, but he’s completely quit interacting with her at all. She had to resort to weekly, “Are you alive?” texts, to which he would only answer with a thumbs-up emoji.

As the phone rings, Lori and Taura lean up against the railing alongside his porch and chat.

“He probably relapsed.”

Taura laughs, “How do you relapse on weed?”

Lori chuckles, “He’d find a way. This is fucking ridiculous. If I knew we’d be doing this, I wouldn’t have come along.”

Kim balls up her fist and begins striking the door with a near violent urgency.

Lori shouts over the banging, “Kim!”

She whips around, “What?”

“Let’s just go! He’s not coming out. You’re being super loud, you’re gonna piss off his neighbors.”

Kim grits her teeth, but finally quits the knocking. She sighs as she ends her attempted call to Shane. As she turns around and takes her first step towards the girls, the door opens.

Shane’s eyes are puffy and red, the bags under them leaving purple-gray craters in his cheeks, small indigo veins cutting like little rivers through the dark canyons. Once the door is open, both of his hands instantly clamp over his ears. He winces, standing partially hunched over and his limbs, eyes, and neck sporadically twitch. He squeezes his eyes shut, Kim rushes to his side, Taura and Lori shoot off from the metal railing and surround him.

The girls clamor, asking what’s wrong. His fingers curl, his uncut fingernails dig through his greasy dark hair and into his scalp. He barks like a doberman, “Come in! Please, come in! It’s quietest in the bathroom!”

Shane spins around and scrambles back inside, the girls all exchange concerned glances but follow him in. His agonized snarls echo through the dirty apartment as he tears through the living room and barrels down the narrow hallway leading to the bathroom. He hip-checks the edge of the couch and slams hard into the wall when he can’t hit the turn in time. He’s unfazed and scampers on. 

Kim lunges forward to follow him but is stopped by Lori’s firm grip around the curve of her arm, pulling her backwards. “Oh, hell no. Let’s go.”

Taura turns on her heels and begins to head out with them, Kim yanks her arm out of Lori’s grasp. 

Kim cries out, “Come on, we need to help him!”

“Are you serious? What the hell are we gonna do? He’s having a psychotic break! Let’s go, we can call an ambulance or something-”

Kim darts down the hallway and throws the bathroom door open, Lori growls, but trudges with Taura behind her.

Shane is curled up in a ball, leaning himself upright against the sink cabinets. Blood trickles from his nose, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. He looks up at Kim with tearful hazel eyes and asks, “Can you hear them?”

Kim crouches down, getting on her knees so she can look Shane in his eyes, Lori and Taura stand in the doorway, looking down at the two of them on the floor. Kim cradles Shane’s face in her two hands as she assures him, “There’s no noise. What are you hearing?”

Shane borderline screams in exasperation, “The grass!”

Kim frowns, “What?”

Taura giggles.

Lori grumbles, “Dude, what are you on?”

Shane begs, “Close the door! I can barely hear myself think! Please!”

The girls ease themselves into the cramped bathroom and wait for Shane to calm himself down. He asks Taura to turn the fan on, somehow this white noise and the airflow helps soothe him.

They all sit criss-cross on the tile floors across from each other as Shane explains what’s been going on. 

It started abruptly one morning, nearly a month ago. His eyes opened and he could hear voices in his head. Not just one, not two, not ten, Shane could hear millions of muffled voices speaking over one another. Shane could recount some sporadic times in his life where he had heard voices in his head which gave him clear instructions to harm himself in the most convenient way he could. Somehow, this was worse.

He tried to wait it out, the voices didn’t stop. The amorphous drone of constant noise never let up for even a second. He could fight off random demands to chug laundry detergent or cut off his fingers, but he had no idea what to do with this new mentality.

It was when, while still in bed, Shane covered his ears with his palms that he realized the voices weren’t in his head at all. They were coming from outside. He got up and looked out his window, scanning for some event or gathering of people and saw nothing, just the big patch of emerald grass surrounding his building and all the others in the complex. 

Shane stuffed cotton balls in his ears before he ventured outdoors. The ceaseless chatter swells as soon as he opens the door. Ears covered, he stomps to the parking lot and looks around, only seeing one or two of his neighbors who give him odd looks as they spot him, seemingly unbothered by the racket.

He noticed as he walked that the rattle of voices rose and fell. Shane further plugged his ears with his fingers then trekked towards where the volume was the highest.

It was the middle of the grass patch where the voices rang the loudest.

The grass was speaking.

Not to him. Not about any particular topic. Every individual blade of grass was having its own eternal discussion with one another.

“So, okay,” Lori interrupts, “you’ve been hearing these voices for weeks and you’re positive that it’s the grass.”

“Yes! I know it’s the grass! There’s nowhere else where it could be coming from! Nothing else could possibly produce so many voices!”

Lori scoffs, “Maybe it could be all the particles of dirt talking. Did you think about that?”

Shane’s face drops at this suggestion. Kim makes a swatting motion towards her, urging her to quit.

Taura cocks her head at Shane, then asks, “Is there anything you can do to make the voices stop?”

“No! That’s the weird thing,” he turns his whole body to face Taura as he raves, “nothing that I’ve done has made them all stop! I’ve tried asking nicely, I’ve tried yelling at them, I got so mad one day that I ripped a handful of grass out of the ground and all the blades I tore up just started fucking screaming! They wouldn’t stop, they never stop! I can’t sleep, I can’t go outside, the noise is everywhere! Nothing makes them shut up, I feel like I died and went to hell!” 

Shane bursts into tears, his hands still pressed tightly to his ears. Kim crawls over to him on her hands and knees and wraps him up in a hug, humming lowly in her throat to distract him from the hellish noise he described. 

“What can we do to help you, Shane?”

She plants soft kisses on his face, which he has no reaction to, but she feels his body untense in her arms. Kim pulls away and runs her tongue over her lips, tasting his fatigued, salty tears.

“I don’t know… I don’t think there’s anything you could do.”

Kim eyeballs the price tags on the two boxes containing noise-cancelling headphones and scowls, then turns to face Lori. 

“Lor, which one should I get? I think this brand will be better for the actual noise-cancelling, but this one is cheaper and it might be more comfortable for him to wear.”

Lori shrugs, “I honestly don’t give a shit. I think all of this is unnecessary,” she gestures to Kim’s shopping cart; at the black soundproof curtains, the white noise machine, and multiple boxes of earplugs that she picked out for Shane. Kim rolls her eyes and tosses the cheaper pair of headphones into the cart.

“Kim, stop! He doesn’t need any of this crap. You know he’s just acting up to get attention. He might be having an episode, but there’s no way it’s as bad as he says it is. He always pulls some shit like this when he gets bored.”

Kim folds her arms and bites down hard on the inside of her cheek. 

She sighs, then questions, “If Shane were doing this to get attention, why hasn’t he reached out to any of us for weeks? Why did I have to bang on his door for ten minutes in order to give him the attention that he apparently craves so badly?”

“Well-”

“I know there’s a million things you’d rather be doing right now, but Shane needs our help. Yeah, he might be having a psychotic break, he might be annoying, but he is clearly in a lot of pain and I would really appreciate it if you’d quit being such a huge bitch about everything.”

The corners of Lori’s lips twist upwards into a snarl, but before she can escalate their conversation into an argument, Taura reappears, be-bopping up to the cart and setting two twelve-packs of hard seltzer into it. Any urge to fight between the two girls fizzles out instantly.

“No,” Kim orders, “put those back.”

“Why?”

“He’ll knock out at least one case before tomorrow.” Lori says.

Kim begrudgingly agrees, “Yeah, Shane’s never been great with moderation.”

Taura attempts to sway them with, “Come on guys, Shane needs to get drunk right now! He’s so sad!”

Both the girls stare at her.

“Taura… When has getting someone drunk made them less emotional?”

Taura contemplates this for a moment.

“Okay, fair,” she sticks her pointer finger in the air, “but what if instead of giving Shane the alcohol we just pour it out on the grass?”

Lori blinks, “Why on earth would we do that?”

“So the grass can get drunk! I dunno, maybe that’ll make it shut up.”

Kim reaches in her cart and grabs each case by the handle, “Or, maybe, a bunch of the billions of blades of grass that he can hear are angry drunks! Then they’ll get mad and start arguing with each other! I don’t think Shane can handle that right now. Put them back.”

Kim offloads the cases back into Taura’s arms. She puckers her lips before setting the cases back in the cart, saying, “Fine, then they’re both for me!”

When Kim’s balled-up fist hits Shane’s front door, it creaks open on impact. The girls are puzzled by this, but step inside.

“Shane,” Kim calls, “we’re back!”

No answer. No movement, no pained yowling, no sobbing. Total silence.

The girls walk inside and set the items on the dining table, Taura opens up her case of seltzer and pulls out a can. Lori pulls out a chair at the table and plops down, immediately holding her opened hand out to Taura, which a can of seltzer fills. Kim takes the white noise machine box in her hand and heads down the hallway leading to the bathroom and Shane’s bedroom. She tries the bathroom doorknob, it’s unlocked and the room is empty, the lights were left on. She frowns and flicks the light off, closing the door behind her. She figures he has to be in his bedroom.

Kim breathes a sigh of relief to herself at the notion that Shane was maybe able to fall asleep. She considers leaving and letting him rest, but she peers out around the wall and sees Lori and Taura sitting together at his dining room table drinking, content for the first time all day. She decides against leaving and softly raps on the door.

“Shane? Are you in there?” No answer. She presses her ear up against his bedroom door and listens intently, holding her breath.

No noise. She speaks softly into the door.

“I’m glad you were able to get some sleep. I was really worried about you.” Her hand wraps around the doorknob. She slowly twists it and pushes the door open. Light from the living room spills into the dim bedroom. She’s expecting him to awaken, to stir, but her presence inspires no movement. She doesn’t step inside.

A shudder runs down her back.

“I got some stuff from the store that I think will help you. I’ve got a white noise machine right here, do you want me to plug it in?”

She takes one step into his cluttered room and turns to face his bed.

There he is.

The blanket is pulled up to his cheek and he’s lying on his side, facing away from Kim. There’s an outline of something long and narrow balanced upright on the side of his head. She calls out his name one more time before she turns on the lights. 

Kim shrieks. Both of her hands shoot up over her mouth, dropping the machine as tears stream down her cheeks.

“Kim?” The chairs in the dining area squeal against the wooden floor before both girls scramble to the bedroom. Lori gets there first, poking her head in the doorway and whinging, “Oh, my God!”

The wooden handle of an icepick sticks up out of his ear, an eruption of blood spills out, drenching his head, his pillows, and blanket. The silver part where the blade meets the handle is lodged completely inside his ear, he drove it all the way in. His dark hair is caked with blood.

Kim’s shaking hand instinctively reaches out to the icepick but her fingers curl back. She yanks her hand back to her face and swipes her tears away, she snorts up a glob of snot. She instead grabs the blanket covering him and lifts it up.

“Taura, call the police. Kim, what are you doing? Kim!”

Kim ignores her friend and slips herself under the blanket, taking sniveling breaths through her open mouth. She rests her head on the pillow next to his, she lays herself in a small pool of red. Shane’s blood is still warm. Kim reaches up under his shirt and sets her palm on his bare back. He’s still warm too.

“Kim, get up! You’re contaminating it!”

She blinks tears away and scoots herself closer to his corpse. She slides her free arm under his blood-soaked pillow, cringing as the heat warms her skin. Kim curls her other arm around his chest, carefully pulling herself as close to him as she can get. She holds her breath as she presses her face into the back of his neck, his matted hair rustling against and staining her forehead. 

Lori continues pleading, now crying for Kim to get up. Kim shuts her eyes and tries to ignore the metallic scent of his blood tainting the way his body naturally smells as she breathes him in. She leaves gentle kisses in between his shoulder blades. Her lips are stained with his blood. She snuggles closer to him, ensuring she won’t miss a second of feeling his body heat before it’s ripped away forever.