FANTA

Fiction. Published in Hidden Door Journal 001.

There was a foul wind coming through the wall behind you. Not over the wall, or around. Through.

You were stoned. On days when inhabiting your brain felt like trying to steer from the back seat of a car, you smoked weed and it made the dissociation feel more pleasant, more purposeful. It flattened your mood, made you soft and slippery. It heightened your appreciation of textures. You’d spend half an hour paying dazed attention to the nylon in your socks, the way it felt like the memory of burning plastic. Uncomfortable without immediate impact. It made you aware, too, of temperatures, of air pressures. Hence, the wind.

It was the kind of almost-night that stagnated on a winter evening, a shitty grey blanket on the world without the crisp relief of dark. You had a bottle of Fanta in your left hand, and a rime of sugar on your lips. Behind you, the fluorescent lights of the 7/11 seeped across the cobblestoned laneway, the shortcut you took between your apartment and the convenience store.

You liked this phrase, convenience store. How convenient, you thought, and then again, as you ducked into the laneway, saving yourself (you had timed this, once) forty seconds of walking time. You imagined those seconds banking up, somewhere. You tried to avoid imaging the equivalent accounting system for the hours you spent thinking about the socks.

Nobody used the laneway. Or rather, people used it for discrete and easy-to-complete purposes, like dumping rubbish, and pissing, and scribbling tags in black texta. Few people used it for your own shortcut-type purposes. Who decides what the purpose of a laneway is, anyway? For shovelling shit out of toilets, once. Someone probably still does that, every few months or so. Some swearing, sweaty guy in high vis, arse hanging out of his pants, gloves on, elbows deep in some fucked up gunky pipe.

The point being, the wind. The point also being, the eyes. You couldn’t help but feel that these were related, in some way that escaped your current processing. You had staggered out of the immediate path of the wind, but you could still feel it on your back, hammering into the opposing cracked concrete wall, and reeking of something heavy and damp. River mud, maybe.

The eyes were at the end of the alleyway. God, your brain. Things swirling, impossible to hold. There were two of them. Some dog-part of your thinking assessed that they were between you and the road, your road, the one that contained your apartment. The same dog-part also assessed that the wind was between you and the other road, the 7/11 road.

You felt something twist in you. Not quite fear — fear was for the non-stoned you, the one who had spiky, jumpy feelings, not this low ache of nothing. Still. You glanced over your shoulder at the wall, the wall with the wind. It looked normal. Or rather, it looked almost normal. It sort of rippled, the way a road does when it’s hot and you’re driving uphill. There was no apparent source of air. No sound, either, like you’d expect from an exhaust outlet or fan. Just the feel of it.

You turned back to see the eyes and fucking hell, they’d jumped right up. Metres closer. Nobody moves that fast, or rather, nobody moves that fast when you’re not blazed. Maybe you’d lost a few seconds. Point being: close. Stepping closer. You opened your mouth, and the cracked ring of Fanta goo around your lips ached. You forgot about words, and pulled out your phone instead. Swiped up on the toggle bit down the bottom. Turned on the light. Nailed it, you thought, first try. You lifted the light.

A woman. You sagged. Just some old woman, slumped over. Could have been your nan, same bend forward, like she was going for a bow and gave up halfway. You tried out a laugh, but it didn’t quite come out right; a sort of orange wheeze. The woman – shit, she was old – laughed back, and holy fuck, that one was no good either. The laugh, that is. Sounded like someone trying to saw a keyboard in half. Kind of grating, clacking. It made your tongue itch.

There was a clatter, and you jumped, but it was just the Fanta bottle, skittering on the stones. Must have dropped it. This tended to happen. You stooped to pick it up, and by the time you were upright, she was so close you could have kissed her. Mate, you are wasted as all fuck, losing time, losing seconds. Eating into that forty you kept saving.

You tried to say ‘You right?’, but she opened her mouth first, and it was a black, black hole, nothing at all behind the lips, just dark, dark, dark. There was a shift in the wind behind you, as though it had slackened and then tightened again. You closed your eyes for one second (what the fuck was time anyway) and opened them again and tried to make your brain go in straight lines.

Lost all her teeth, poor fucker. Needs a bloody chapstick. This made you laugh, and so you did, head tipped back – stars – and then you put your head back down and she was gone and the wind was gone, too. Ah, fuck.

Full piece in HDJ:001.