PHOTO: Elleringmann/Laif

One minute I’m sleeping like a goddamn baby, cradled in the web of a strange but pleasant dream. The next, I’m desperately trying to extract myself from the tangle of sweaty sheets, stumbling towards the bathroom, and propping open the lid before blammo.

After that, everything becomes crystal clear.

“You okay, hon?” Shannon called from the bed.

There I was, clutching the cold porcelain bowl, trembling like a china cabinet in an earthquake, tears streaming down my face and vomit stinging my nostrils. I wanted to say, “Great tofu tetrazini last night, Hun,” but a more decisive answer was forthcoming. I kicked the door closed and aimed my head over the hole just in time for round two.

When I’d finished she asked through the closed door if I’d be going to work.

“Yes.”

“How about tea? Want tea?”

Was she intentionally making her voice sound high and pinched? I belched in reply. It felt like a blow torch had just gone off in my throat.

“Mint’s good for this sort of thing.”

“Fine, fine, whatever,” I said, wiping the whole side of my face against the toilet paper roll.

It wasn’t until I had gotten into the shower and was pissing a warm, orangey stream down the drain that I realized just how good I felt. Damn good. You know the way that so-called unpleasant things – like taking a huge shit that leaves your rectum raw and bloody, falling off your bike and winding up with a leg full of gravel, or fucking the wrong girl at the right time, because one or both of you is married and you’re twice her age – can make you feel really alive in an eerie, this is it way? Well, it was like that. So, when it happened again the next morning, I celebrated by running Shannon’s bidet, swishing the water around my mouth, and spitting it full force against the open toilet seat. The following day it came at my office, just ten minutes before patients started arriving. In the middle of HWY 10 gridlock the morning after that. Wonderful, wonderful feeling every time. Before one gastric disaster could finish, I found myself longing for the next. I even tried to spur these episodes by closing my eyes and imagining that feeling of untenable fullness, a surge, and then, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I was probably dying. That’s what I figured, though nothing I’d learned in dental school could explain these odd symptoms. Shannon didn’t think I was dying. Oh no no no, she thought it was nerves. She thought I should see our friend Rick, a gastro-intestinal specialist, to find out if I had an ulcer, adding, “if you wait a couple more days you can probably lose a couple pounds.” She called it “the nausea,” like it was a joke or something. “The nausea, the nausea, somebody’s got the nausea,” she chipperly sang. Eight years of marriage and I still don’t know how she comes up with this shit.

We met at an American Dental Association convention in Hawaii. She was in a booth selling teeth whiteners, and I could see she wasn’t lying when she said she’d used them herself. That mouth of hers had serious wattage, though the fluorescent lights revealed the ghostly traces of her exorcized stains. Next thing you know my plans to lay by the pool and sip scotch all weekend are blown. Instead it’s Shannon and I going out for fancy dinners, drinking ourselves silly in the hotel bar, fucking like monkeys back in my suite all night.

Now obviously a man does not remain a bachelor for 41 very satisfying years only to give it all up for the first convention bimbo to blow him thrice in one night. I burned through a lot of women before deciding it was time to finally settle down. At 38, Shannon was still pretty good looking, voracious in the sack, no kids (infertile, thank god), intelligent enough to talk a good talk but didn’t take herself too seriously. So she had all the surface credentials. And I’ll admit after so many years of bachelorhood I was feeling a bit lonely, starting to wonder who was going to look after me when I was old, that sort of thing. Truth is we couldn’t get enough of one another. It was love this and love that. For weeks and months I felt all electrified and benevolent. Come to think of it, meeting Shannon was a lot like puking. And damn if things didn’t happen fast. Six months from zero to wedding. The plunge, Shannon called it. She liked to say it in a gravely whisper, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. The pluuuunge. The pluuuunge.

And what a plunge it’s been! Over in a barrel we went and next thing you know I’m living in Shannonland. In Shannonland, you simply couldn’t start your new life together in a home that stunk of somebody else’s memories. We had to buy a NEW house in a NEW neighborhood, only “pre-aged” so it would look like the place had been around for generations. At the time, I thought we’d be better off cashing out our savings and using it to fuel a bonfire. But our investment in what the realtor described as Cape Cod meets Southern plantation – think: red wood-shingled roof folded like an open book, with an ostentatious row of columns and long porch in front, eggshell white with “Virgin Forest Green” trim – quickly tripled. In fact, identical pre-aged communities have sprouted up in more than 23 states since we bought ours. Sometimes I imagine there are little Shannons and little Me’s living in houses just like ours only instead of Southern California outside it’s Ohio or New Jersey or Texas. I like to think of us all getting up in the morning, puking, driving to work in the same leased luxury sedans, popping in after work to the exact same men’s section of the exact same department store to purchase a new pair of socks, wolfing down the same low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie ginger fig bars on the way home.

With the house and some money (mine), Shannon felt she could fully express her domestic side. My wife has many talents, but decorating is not one of them. What she has is stacks and stacks of glossy lifestyle magazines. She’ll find a spread she loves and copy it, coffee table for coffee table, vase for vase, bamboo frond for bamboo frond. She’ll even buy the same fine art books to put on the shelves. I might as well live in a furniture show room. And it was Shannon, of course, who urged me to give up my family dental practice and specialize in veneers after I’d hooked her up with a set of her own. For all her reckless shopping, she’s a financial genius. The demand for veneers soon shot through the roof. Even people with perfectly fine teeth were compelled to hide them behind a set of perfectly perfect teeth. If I was comfortable before, in Shannonland I was loaded. But at a cost, right, because it’s the same fucking shit day in and day out. Get the new teeth in and the patient out, numb, grind, adhere, polish, do it quick, comfortably, do it at top dollar and just well enough so that you don’t get sued. I was nothing more than a well-paid robot. Instead of planning my retirement and taking long lunches and three-day weekends, so I could enjoy my life while there was still some feeling left in me, I wasn’t getting home until seven or eight and often had to go in on Saturdays, too.

Which brings me to the matter of my fiftieth birthday party. Five-oh. With the practice booked solid a full six months in advance and no end in sight, to say nothing of the nausea which started a month or so before the big day, I would have liked nothing more than to let the date pass without notice. But Shannon, now four-six, oh Shannon would not let it be. I had to have a party, a big fucking party, with paper lanterns and balloons and all of her stupid friends invited. As the event approached, not a day went by when I wasn’t being reminded of the fact that it was all downhill from there.

The nausea went on for a full week before I could get in to see Rick, whose veneers I’d done back when I was just starting out with the new practice. Forbidden from eating and drinking anything but water for 12 hours before my 8:00 AM appointment, I only managed to hack up an unsatisfying drizzle of dark yellow bile into the sink of our guest bathroom before leaving the house. After taking my temperature (normal), weight (Shannon was right), and blood pressure (no higher than usual), the nurse, a chubby, middle-aged Filipina named Maria, handed me a cup of chalky fluid and looked on sternly as I swallowed it down. It was cold and I could feel it slowly coating my mouth, then my throat, like spilled paint creeping along a tilted floor. Maybe I would puke pink, I thought hopefully. After she left, I sloughed off my khakis and oxford, but before I slipped on the blue paper robe, I stopped a moment to take stock of the situation. I was still tan from a recent trip to Mexico, and I liked the contrast of my white hairs against the bronze skin. The skin around my chest and stomach and – I twisted around to look – behind was getting loose. I peeled back the mouth of my boxers. My dick swayed lazily to the left as was its wont, and my balls looked like swollen raspberries dusted with a light white mold. Releasing the elastic band with a snap, I wondered what was it gonna be. Ulcers? Cancer?

As Rick ran the fluoroscope over the long tube of my esophagus towards the stomach, I searched the screen for one of those football-sized tumors they’re always pulling out of six year olds. Empty. Oh, but we weren’t done yet. Next he had me drop my boxers and bend over so he could wiggle a gloved finger up my asshole, apologizing as he went. What if he found something up there? That I hadn’t even considered. We could be here all day twisting the damn thing out.

“Yup. Uh huh. Done. Thanks,” Rick said, peeling off his gloves.

It was nerves, of course.

“You gotta stop throwing up, though. I don’t need to tell you that it erodes the enamel of your teeth. Shannon still got you eating all that healthy crap?”

“Sort of.”

He smiled and I noticed that my work hadn’t held up as well as one would hope. Early veneers never did. They looked real but a bit too perfect. Only freaks were born with mouths like that. I felt a little chill down my spine and had to fight the urge to run out of there, paper robe and all.

I took the pills, first for the nausea only, but I missed puking so much that I wound up taking the happy ones, too. After a few days, it was as if the nausea had never happened. At one point, fully awake, I dropped a highball of scotch, good stuff. I just watched it shatter against the stone floor and laughed at the way the shards and alcohol and blood mingled on my feet. There was still hope. Some unidentified pathogen could still be setting sail from my GI tract towards my vital organs, where it would replicate indefinitely until full system collapse carried me off to Nothingland. Blame the pills, but it was comforting this thought of my sudden, tragic demise. Ah, the loving funeral accolades giving my life the depth and meaning it had always lacked. Shannon finally able to play the role of martyr-wife that she was born to – the kind who dabs her eyes with a folded tissue to avoid runny mascara. Me, picking up the phone, and telling Tess, “Not coming in today. I’m dead. You figure it out, you office-managing twat!” But these happy daydreams always ended in a panicked, dizzying feeling of time running out.

“I’m going to go see a therapist,” I announced over dinner about a week before my birthday.

Shannon looked up from her lemon chicken, broccoli, and orzo salad. “Why?”

“Because I’m going crazy, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Shrinks screw you up. Look at Roger Harmon. He’s much worse.”

“Oh come on. Nausea, stress, nerves. Don’t you think it all adds up to something?”

“Hmmmm, let me see. How about, the pills aren’t working?”

“Give me a break.”

There’s a face Shannon makes. I call it her poo face. She screws up her features into a little knot that reminds me of a dog’s ass. She was making that face and I could see that puny brain of hers was really chugging.

“When’s the last time you golfed, or went sailing on your brother’s boat? I bet he’d like to see your new maritime office.”

“And how do you propose I find the time?”

“Babe, come on. You know I’m open-minded to all sorts of woo-woo bullshit, but I’ve seen it before. Shrinks screw you up until you end up talking like that guy.”

“Shannon, I have no idea what - “

“Weird guy. Had a monkey.”

“This really isn’t the poi - “

“P-P-Portnoy!” she bellowed, slamming one hand onto the table, causing the glasses to wobble on their stems.

Shannon, Shannon, Shannon. You’ve got to hand it to her. I won’t even get into her weird habit of affixing literary references to anything in her life that doesn’t make sense to her. If you’ve got a problem. She’s got a SOLUTION! Depressed? Take up GOLFING! Ugly? Try getting all your FAT SUCKED THROUGH A HOSE! I used to find it charming, until I realized she actually believes in this shit. In fact, I believe it’s possible to chart her entire spiritual progression by examining all the crap she’s sold in her lifetime: student credit lines in college, lingerie and sex creams just after, preventative cosmetic surgery for teens (“If only I’d had the chance when I was that age . . .”), gym equipment that helped you stretch more efficiently, weight-loss vitamins, breast-enhancement pills. The teeth whitener, I might point out, was necessary after all the lattes and cigarettes she sucked down in her go-go 20s. Lately, collagen, a female orgasm pill that had to be yanked when it proved weakening to heart valves, Botox of course, a toxin-straining air filter, even robotic medical assistants that would take your blood pressure, weight, and measure your pulse. Our unpleasant college friend Roger hooked her up with that last weird gig.

Maybe I’m being a little unfair. Things in Shannonland haven’t been all bad. The woman means well, and her many SOLUTIONS do have a way of distracting me from worries that, ultimately, only exist in my own mind. After the shrink argument, for instance, she got out her strip-aerobics pole, put on some lacy panties, and gave me a private show. And when she was done, I was hard enough to get her moaning like the girls on the videos do. When we were done, she drew me a nice bubble bath and rubbed my neck and shoulders until I couldn’t even remember my own name. In bed that night she let me suck her nipples until I fell asleep. I’m not ungrateful for that privilege.

No, it’s better to say Shannon was part of the problem, but the problem was much, much bigger than she would ever be. Take this party. No big deal, right? Just a party. But just try getting a single thing done. One day it’s our draconian neighborhood association telling us we had to get a special permit three weeks ago so we could have a taco truck into our own backyard. The next it’s the dim-witted receptionist at the talent agency who doesn’t know the difference between a mariachi and a flamenco dancer and even worse doesn’t seem to care. Shannon may have sent me to rent the heat lamps, buffet table, and other party paraphernalia instead of doing it herself, but she couldn’t have predicted that I’d have to hit three different places in crawling traffic to find everything on her list. She may have sent me to stock up on supplies at Liquor Hut, but it wasn’t her fault that the checkers there were forced to perkily mispronounce the name on my credit card or get fired, a practice that has always made me want to crack a bottle of Jim Beam over their heads. Everywhere I went, I was surrounded by overly polite idiots peddling disappointment and incompetence. Society itself was crumbling all around us, I was certain of it, yet it wasn’t going to go down without a “have a nice day.” For me, I didn’t need a fucking party if this was what it took. But not Shannon. She shrugged off the neighborhood association and had the taco truck drive in, lights off, in the middle of the night. She laughed and asked if the talent agency at least played good music when they put me on hold. When I complained about the traffic and the under-stocked party supply stores, she told me that’s just the way things were. At least we had penicillin and cherry-flavored lattes. “Do you remember,” she said, “when you couldn’t get decent coffee anywhere?”

PHOTO: Maria Marshall

Gil, our handyman, apparently took a job at the Home Expo Center which charged you three times as much to rent the same guy, so on the afternoon of the party itself, it was up to me to hang orange and green lanterns from tiny nails along the edge of our roof. I’d been going to the gym several times a week and never smoked, so I wasn’t in all that bad shape. Still it was not an easy task. I had to lug the small generator all the way from the garage, through the kitchen, up the stairs to the end of the hallway, and then up the pull-down ladder to the roof because none of our six million extension cords seemed to reach from there. It’s a small but unwieldy little machine, metal with plastic outlets. The set of cables you use for sparking up a dead battery kept jabbing me in the groin, and I could hear the gasoline sloshing around its insides, shifting the weight forwards and backwards as I maneuvered it up the pull-down ladder and through the hatch that opens out onto the long flat spine of our roof. Once there, I had to lug the thing over to a small concrete platform where a few antennas were lodged. By the time I managed to get the damn thing set up, I was dripping with sweat and lightheaded, so I sat down on the edge, where the roof slopes steeply, and dried my face with the inside of my shirt.

I hadn’t been up there since Gil started doing our Christmas lights five or six years ago. We lived at the far end of the valley, first subdivision built, nestled slightly up in the foothills. But with the hills to my back, I could see the whole expansive hive mapped out before me, the identically curved cul-de-sacs peeling back from the main thoroughfares like blood vessels stretching out from an artery, only far more neatly arranged. The valley stretched all the way to the I-5. I knew it had gone that far, but it was another thing to see it.

From the roof, you couldn’t see that the streets had once been sandblasted like a designer pair of jeans to give them a slightly faded look. You saw only the tops of trees, not the donut rings of raised dirt enclosing them that revealed just how recently they’d been planted, more so by the highway than in the older section, where we were. The roofs, color-coordinated it turned out, barely concealed that the gothic/Tudor/plantation/Italian villa/barn/hacienda/ranch house facades gave way to near-identical floor plans, so that visiting a neighbor’s home was eerily like being inside your own, but not quite. The windows are in the same place, only looking out onto a different view; the kitchen was exactly where you knew it would be, but with copper counters instead of marble and the silverware in the drawer to the left of the dishwasher rather than to the right. The repetition in shape, frequency, and length of streets – grid-like in their precision, though strategically placed slopes and curves and calculated landscaping choices made them seem quite organic when viewed from street level – didn’t reveal that the valley had, in some ways, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Real age had finally set in. People had customized, remodeled, painted. There was even a hierarchy, and Shannon and I, being in the oldest pre-aged neighborhood in the valley, were at the apex. “Wow. You live in the classic district,” people would say to us.

And yeah, yeah, I know most of the planet can’t afford a decent dinner nevermind a home as nice as ours and fantasizing about a dirty bomb going off and filling the whole place with rotting corpses makes me a fucking dickhead, but so be it. As I looked down I tried to appreciate our perfect dark blue swimming pool, to feel warmth for the giant banquet table already skirted in red and green, the taco truck purring like a contented cat beside it. I attempted to be thankful for the green hedge that hid a sound barrier to protect us from our neighbor’s children’s cries. Every well-planned detail piled atop others so that no imperfection, no unexpected mishap, could ever break through the scrim of perfection. Small planes would always crash into other people’s living rooms. Sinkholes would always form in other people’s backyards. Nothing extraordinary would ever be allowed to happen here, and if it did, we owned nothing so precious or unique that it could not be replaced with a credit card number and a phone call.

When I finally eased myself back down the ladder, my face was slightly pink from the sun and emptiness clawed at my stomach, though nothing I could imagine eating appealed. Could it be the nausea has returned?

They came bearing gifts of pewter and crystal, engraved so as to mask their impersonality. Thrusting the store-wrapped packages towards me, they would chuckled as they declared “the big five-oh, eh?” and “not a day over 39!” like they were the most original goddamned phrases in the whole English language. The men wore the standard uniform of khakis and blue collared shirts, identical brown leather belts wrapped around a wide variety of girths. The women spiced things up with their brightly patterned blouses and dresses, barely concealing the leathery skin and nutrient-starved bones. As our so-called friends eagerly trotted towards the alcohol station, it struck me that I had not confided in a single one of them about the nausea. I’m not even sure I would know how to bring such a thing up. I mean we all somehow knew that Lori, Shannon’s old roommate, had a son who was probably dealing drugs out of her guest house, but what she was simply dying to know is where she could get her own taco truck for an upcoming corporate event. Who hadn’t noticed our neighbor Greg’s name and address, published in the neighborhood association’s police blotter column for soliciting a hooker on Commerce Blvd? Yet all anyone could do was compliment his wife on how good she looked as a redhead and ask them about their upcoming Alaskan cruise. And Shannon, she was the fucking master, all outstretched arms and cheek kisses, “so nice to see you!” and “aren’t you the sweetest!” To watch her you’d think it was the most natural, happy gathering on Earth.

By sunset, everyone was positively soused and oblivious to the tiny flies buzzing around the sour cream. The suspiciously pale mariachi band was quietly assembling in a corner of the back yard, and Roger was making an ass of himself dry-humping a heat lamp and bellowing something about it being warmer than his wife. Shannon was draped over a chaise lounge by the pool in a cluster with her lady friends, all in similar sloppy repose. They looked like a squealing clump of spaghetti. Watching them, it occurred to me that I could have married any one of them and my lot in life would be exactly the same. Men walking between the taco truck and the bar every now and then would grab my shoulder and give it a squeeze. “What can I get for you, buddy?” When I said “water” they’d hand me a beer several minutes later. God I felt terrible, queasy, depleted, like I had felt just after completing what I knew was going to be my last precious round of vomit, yet this time I wasn’t even given the satisfaction of ever having been sick. Sunstroke, perhaps. Or one too many peach-flavored margaritas.

All I know is I’d been staring at the pool for longer than could be considered normal, watching it reflect the gradual darkening of the sky, when Shannon tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear, “It’s time for the lanterns.” I nodded and turned towards the house, up the stairs, down the hall to the pull-down ladder, up the ladder, through the hatch to the rooftop, and along the flat center to the concrete platform where the generator stood waiting. With a shudder, it rumbled to life. The crowd below let out a few half-hearted cheers as the lanterns flickered on. Lucky bastards. It took so little to please them.

A cool breeze carried the scent of carne asada through the air. I stood on the narrow concrete platform and looked out across the valley. A blue electric streak of daylight stretched across the furthest edge of the horizon. All around the valley, lights blinked on, forming a beautiful, randomized configuration, like glowing buoys bobbing on a black sea. Ah, they could make the grid and they could insert us all into our designated slots, but they had no control over this, these spontaneous, patternless illuminations. It was beautiful. Just that. And all I wanted, all I could think about in that very moment was diving head first into that still, black water and swimming among them, perhaps capturing a few of those lights in my pockets before a sudden tide could pull me out and away from this horrible place. But there was no way. It couldn’t be. And, ah, there was another light, flickering on in the east near the furthest base of the foothills. And over there, right in the center, a haunting pink glow.

I didn’t have to think about it. I just walked over and stood before our generator and took hold of the battery chargers by their rubbery safety handles.

I pulled them to the antenna and clamped them on to the metal rod. Sparks flew and the lanterns flickered off, eliciting an awed “ooooohhhh” followed by giggles from the revelers in my yard. The antenna trembled and crackled. If I could just grab on to it and hold on and not lose my grasp –

Shannon was up in a flash. I have no idea how the woman is able to move so fast. I was still standing there like a dope with my hands hovering shakily over the volatile metal rod when she poked her blond head up through the hole in the roof and asked, “What on earth are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” I snarled.

Her eyes darted from the electrical hazard I’d created on a whim, to my feet, which could theoretically have slipped out from under me at any minute sending me plunging over the roof’s edge, to the yard below. Although the sky was getting darker fast, I could still spot a sputter of recognition in her eyes.

“It looks like you’re trying to electrocute yourself. Is that it?” she finally said and shot me some serious poo face.

“Bingo!” I yelped, my voice pitching a high, throaty note. You gotta hand it to Shannon. She’s one of them, but once in awhile she really gets it.

“This, this is just silly.” She sounded truly exasperated.

“I don’t know, Shannon. Seems pretty fucking serious to me.”

“You’re acting just like that stupid lady. You know the one. Waiting until there’s a party so she can go off herself and turn the whole thing into a funeral – “

“Goddamn it, Shannon! Can you please put a plug in it for just one goddamn minute?”

I’d inadvertently screamed that last bit. The party below suddenly went silent. I could feel them looking up from their drippy crème caramels, ears perked, eyes groping the darkness for some clue as to what was happening. Shannon’s shadow and my own faced off in silence as the whispers and giggling grew. At some point Roger announced loud enough for the whole world to hear that he was heading up there to “save the marriage.”

“Great. Wonderful. Why don’t you take all our dirty laundry and foist it off the roof while you’re at it?” Shannon said, wiping away the first hint of tears from her eyes.

Real tears. Boy if that didn’t take the wind out of my sails momentarily. What was I doing? What was wrong with me?

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’ve blown it. Beautiful party. All our friends here. All that work. Ruined.”

She could have at least acknowledged my apology. “I’m really sorry, but – ”

“Do you think you’re the only goddamn person on this planet who gets depressed now and then? Because you’re not. OK? You’re not.”

Her whole face seemed to tremble as she resisted the sadness pulling at the corners of her mouth with all its might.

“I’m not listening! La la la la!” I sang, removing my hands from where they hovered above the antenna to plug my ears.

“For Christ’s sake, look at yourself? All these people are here and why are they here? For you. They’re here for you. OK? You’re an amazing success, with a thriving practice, a beautiful home, a new car every two years, and do you know why? Because you’re good at what you do and for reasons I’ll never understand people like you. That’s why. And you’re lucky – do you hear me? – lucky to have a wife who’s willing to throw a party in your honor, who decorates your house, who makes doctor’s appointments for you when you’re sick. Why? God knows you don’t deserve it. I just love you. That’s all. But you don’t give a damn. You spit on your friends’ generosity and you spit on me. You hate your success. You think you’re too good for all of us, too fucking good for the whole goddamn world.”

“Shannon –” I tried to interrupt, but she just kept going.

“Think I’m too fucking stupid to notice? Is that it? I see you, you fucking bastard. So let me tell you something for once, you fucking piece of shit, you deserve to be unhappy.”

“Then why didn’t you want me to see a shrink, huh? Tell me that, Shannon who suddenly knows everything.” I tried to sound convincing, but she and I both knew there was nothing behind my words.

She looked at me and shook her head. As she began to speak, it seemed she had suddenly grown quite old and frail. “You know what? I don’t care. It’s your party, as you’re so fond of reminding me, so be my guest. Kill yourself or whatever you want to do. You won’t even have to clean up the mess.”

With that, she disappeared down the hole from which she’d come, and slammed the hatch behind her. A few seconds later, the mariachi band began to play. I stood there, shaking, listening to a particularly hideous rendition of “Yo soy Mexicano” for what felt like fifteen minutes, my hands repositioned above the buzzing metal antenna until I felt the soreness start at the back of the throat and a sound, an undeniably human moan, rose up from somewhere deep inside my body. I flicked off the machine, and began to stumble around like some drunken nut job all over the slender flat part of the roof, painful dry heaves doubling me over – oh for one wee little drop of vomit to fall from these pale, chapped lips! – until I couldn’t fight it any more and salty tears drained from my eyes, drenching my cheeks, like water from two throbbing, pierced blisters.

As I saw it, I had three no-good options. I could leave Shannon and hole up in one of those divorcee apartment complexes with all the other mid-life crisis victims. I could stay put and go on living my life just as I had always done. Or I could kill myself like whoever the fuck Shannon was talking about. End of story. God how I didn’t want to end up some character in a book that had already been written.

Exhausted, I slumped down on the flat part of the roof, letting my feet rest on the slope towards the party below. Ever-resourceful, Shannon had set out candles and nobody seemed to mind the unlit lanterns overhead or the fact that the party’s raison d’être had fled the scene. They were dancing and talking as if nothing had ever happened, like I was already gone. If I closed my eyes I could almost drown it all out with the sound of my heartbeat and the hissing wind, wrapping itself around me, cold and damp.

After the band had finished, the outside speakers began to emit light jazz and a group of stragglers huddled beneath a heat lamp, I roused myself and stood up, taking several deep breaths to help steady myself on the top edge of the roof. It had just come to me, another way out, something Shannon couldn’t have imagined for all her so-called insight into my problems. The best part was not even I could predict the outcome.

My heart squeezed and released, squeezed and released. Poodles turned flip-flops inside my belly. I sprinted hard. I sprinted fast, whirling my arms around like one of those fucking dervish types to propel me forward, faster and faster, until there was no longer anything beneath me to return the press of my feet.

And my god, it was all too brief, too chaotic and strange to truly savor the moment, but I do remember wondering as my body sailed through the cool night air whether I would land in the pool or in that quiet, dark patch just beyond.

_San Francisco-based writer Jennifer Shreve recently completed a short story collection.

 

COMMENTS:

Wow, is Chuck Palahniuk using a pen name now?
JP

One of the scariest visions of life I've ever read.
D351

wonderful.


mentioning Chuck P is flattering, and I guess I can see it from the subject matter... but to be frank the style is not minimalist at all. A delicious piece.
Evan

Captivating read. The Nausea...just like Jean Paul Sartre but not to such an extreme.
Eric

Pretty good. For once someone who has a decent prose.
kenivel

I found this incredibly poignant and rousing. The mixture of beauty, sadness, hilarity and overall nausea was beautiful.
Annie

Phew. So that's life in the comfortable lane in the US? Actually, it reminded me a little of the acute sense of suburban claustrophobia evoked by Marilyn French in The Women's Room. I found it pretty compelling reading. And felt vastly relieved that I'm not on the treadmill the narrator describes. But it seemed somehow unfinished. And the conclusion well, a bit lazy in some ways.
David LePage

chaise longue, not lounge. awesome story!
jason

Fucking awesome. Echoings of Ellis and Palahniuk, the latter in more than just subject matter, though it is clearly not minimalist. I loved the ambiguity of the ending, just like real life. The protagonist gets more vitriolic as the story progresses, which is disconcerting. Needs editing, but is a fucking awesome story. Whatever it exposes about myself, I am struck that it was written by a woman. I am shocked to find such good fiction on a late night random association internet orgy.
SammyJ

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