Rhymes With Nothing (pt 6).

Faye’s yellow eyes are narrow slits and as hot as laser beams, glaring at you while you wrap the telephone cord around her, and then add an extension cord on top of that; she’s practically cocooned to the chair by every binding your could find, her mouth x’d closed by tape. The kid told me everything, Lee says to her, adjusting her ropes and wiping sweat out of his eyes. I had no idea there were so many kids like him planted all over the place. They’re right, they are fly traps.

He laughs too, more than a little insane by now. It would be hard not to be at this point.

Faye tries to say something; it takes everything Lee has to not take the tape off and listen. But he is only human and human characters need to get out of the way when larger beings are at work.

January is outside; he shows Lee the cartoon of Faye tied to a set of train tracks while Lee stands over her wringing his hands menacingly. Then he takes one end of the Faye-package and helps carry.

They have to rest frequently carrying her through the headstones, and Lee wishes they had blindfolded her as well because it is hard to look at her. During one of their breaks, when the air has gotten blacker and brighter, the heat brushing against their faces and the screams from just over the horizon getting louder, Lee reached out and took the kid’s hand. It was as rough as sharkskin. I wish you people understood something, he says. I wish you knew that the rest of us are only human. All of these things out there, the magic and black holes and time bending, we’re like ants to those things, we just get knocked around and we don’t even know why. We call that stuff fate and Jesus and I guess anything else we can think of but for you guys it’s something else. We’re so bad and we’re so good but who cares right because it’s just ant-good and ant-bad and you guys probably don’t even notice.

Lee swallows; the air tastes bitter and sulfuric. The clay at their feed has become blood-soaked this far west of the real world. Oh, he says with a shudder. I walked every step of this god damned life right next to him and there was never a word for what I was, not to him.

The kid opens his notebook and presses the pen to the paper – whatever he’s about to write down would split the world in half, and Lee can feel the big bang ready to go off in the first letter of the first word; he tells the kid please, not to do it, please.

Instead he flips through the pages until he finds one near the front, stained with food and ragged at the edges – something he has shown many people over the years, Lee thinks. it was the rearview mirror it went through my head like butter we were coming home from the orientation meeting after everybody got hired to work the casino i guess i am lucky

They lay her down on her back; the brilliant fiery glow before them casts long shadows that stretch behind them for miles. Lee’s brain begins to fail handfuls of cells at a time, withered to death by the sounds of the damned. Faye thrashes in her chair on the onyx-glass ground; they don’t look back at her, they don’t turn to see what is taking her. It takes thirty-one days for them to return to the diner, and by then Lee has lost any ability to speak for the rest of his life. On some nights John presses him on what happened, but not too hard, and in their diminished ways and until their deaths the following year, they were as happy as insignificant little humans can be.