Souls - XXVI

There’s something especially strange about leaving through the door of a building that is missing a roof and a large portion of its walls, more of a polite approximation at tradition than anything else. If the door defiantly grasps onto it’s hinges I should at least give it the gift of using it. 

It creaks appreciatively as I exit.

Despite the door’s insistence, St. Annes is no longer a building, just a shoddy compilation of stain-glass, mortar, and dry-wall. Tucumcari is also no longer a city, at least from what I can see. It is dust and emptiness, the buildings standing out of habit. 

Everyone is gone.

After I study the surroundings I can think of nothing to do but sit, so I do. I sit right there in the dusty road. I want to cry, I can feel it well up within me, but I can’t. So many emotions fighting to break through my shock, but none will come. I simply sit, and wait. Wait for what, 

I don’t know. 

That’s when I make the decision.

The decision had always been foreign to me, the people who chose it quixotic cowards. Life was for living, death was something to escape. 

Period.

But now I understand it, when life has no through-line, when your foundation of rationalizations is destroyed, living seems shiftless and shapeless. I had no souls to collect, I had lost my soul to return, my boss seemed to have been destroyed by my daughter, my daughter seems to have been destroyed by herself, every speckle of narrative glue that was holding my life together has dissolved. I am just a woman sitting in a dusty street in New Mexico. 

Nothing more ahead. The decision is clear.

I stand and make my way back to the diner. Time to join the fat man.

Trying to enjoy the final moments of my life, I make sure to amble to the diner; no need to rush. Watching the town slowly slip by, lit by the pulsating skyless sky above, I remember what it was like. What it was like to be annoyed by an alarm clock, to be annoyed by lines for coffee. When we all rushed places we didn’t want to be only to rush back to homes we couldn’t really stand. But we did it because that was life. Life had a progression: birth, adolescence, education, job, family, retirement, grandkids, death. This was the pattern. Now there is no pattern, no cycles of time. There is only dayless days and nightless nights, no one can really be sure the Earth is even moving anymore. There is no natural death, we are eternally forced to be ourselves; no end to any of it.

This is hell.

I’m so lost in all these thoughts I don’t even notice the shadows shifting around me, following me. 

I sigh, thinking I have figured it all out and the solution was my brain speckled across a stainless steel grill hood. The diner is right ahead.

When I enter, the bell positioned above the door dings as if the world is just fine and dandy. I can’t help but giggle a little. 

Goodbye little bell.

I approach the fat man’s body, his insides spilling out through his neck. I don’t even remember what we had done with his head. I peek under the counter and almost immediately see it. It is under where he had been sitting, it was what he had been looking down at. 

A shotgun.

It’s shiny and new, looking like it is just dying to finally be used. Who am I to argue with it.

I pull it out from under the counter and open it up. It’s loaded. I close it and turn it around, looking deep into the dark caverns of it’s barrels. I imagine the spark when I pull the trigger.

Let there be light. 

Stepping over the considerable girth of the dead man’s body I move to his stool and sit. I put the barrels of the gun in my mouth and wince at the taste of metal. I flash back to seeing my dad do the same thing, his tired eyes looking to me as he did it.

“I paid my debt.” 

Good for you pops, good for you.

I reach down for the trigger, my fingers barely able to reach the trigger guard. This is not as easy as one would imagine. I reposition myself and I manage to keep the business end in my mouth and put my pointer finger on the triggers. 

Time to go.

BLAM