She ignored the smell of sizzling fat and the burning sensation on her skin, pressing the utensils to the pufferfish on the plate. As the pain receded and the scent disappeared, she shut up the last of the voice that begged her to direct the knife upward and in, into her brain.
In her peripheral, she saw the panicked man against the vast backdrop of white, naked with face and lips pressed to the glass, a pufferfish in his own right.
Some seconds passed, and no longer content to stare, the man stepped back and screamed for her to stab the knife through the glass, to direct it upward and in. To end his horrors unending. She couldn’t hear his voice, but she knew this was true.
She sliced through the obscenity on her plate as her eyes twitched and she struggled to keep her jaw straight. Raising the fork to her mouth, she expressed her gratitude to be alive and proceeded to chew to the tune of temporary silence. The man had stopped screaming, but others would take his place. This spelled a moment’s rest, and she was already recovering, soon to move on as she’d always done.
On cue, the waiter appeared, eyeing his work with pride. “Is everything all right for you today? How are you liking the food? Do you need anything else? I can take care of anything you like. Oh! Empty glass. Empty empty. Can’t have that. Let me refill that for you.”
She plastered a smile on her face without looking up from her plate. The waiter grabbed the glass and she turned to face him, the only other human for miles, with the grace he deserved.
***
She got up from her seat to relieve herself before the drive home, nodding thanks to the waiter as he pointed to the restroom with a smile. Stepping through the door, she found that his round, jovial face lingered in her head, and she felt shame for her inability to leave a better tip. The waiter hadn’t been the silent brooding type prone to sparse words and flat gestures. He’d talked and moved with so much gusto that her attention had mostly slid away from the transparent walls and ceiling, which had been her aim in leaving home in the first place. Lounging on the couch reading, watching television, poring over work material for the children at school, doing anything, had begun to feel impossible. How was she to focus, with bodies pressed against the glass, with glares and pleas and silent vitriol bombarding her every second?Her skin began to sizzle, to scream, and she pressed a hand over her mouth to cover the revolting stench that was only true to her but no less real.
She took a deep breath as she sat on the toilet, forcing herself to calm down.
A wonder, the situation was. She’d lived her life aware of them. Thought little of it in her younger years and knew not to question it as she aged. But the more she acclimated to her state of being, the more the foundation shook. People always said strength came with the years, with the scrapes and their mending, with the calluses and their stays. Yet the older she grew, the more she learned to endure…the more she began to break. The years had weathered, not bolstered her. Never before had the elements seemed so damning.
With an overeager smile, she stared into the mirror and washed her hands.
***
Driving was the best. The world moved too quickly for her to focus on them. In this high-speed divinity, the outside was just a blur. If those beyond the transparent walls scrambled for her gaze, if they clawed at and crawled over others, or even tore their neighbors to shreds, she could pass by without knowing. There wasn’t even tapping from above, for the clear ceiling always soared to the heavens on highways. It was a rare place where she could breathe, at least in part.Strange, life was. This time, she reflected not on what people always said, but what some once said. Or were believed to have said. She’d heard there were those among the old folk who loathed the automobile. They found it suffocating, isolating, an inexorable monster ensuring monotony every day. Indeed, it was a strange line of thought. She could not think in such terms. To her the automobile was the greatest creation. Not because it carved out freedom (there was none of that) like some of the other old folk supposed, but because it granted distraction. Abeyance, but distraction still. Though she knew little about the old folk, and though they surely led different lives, it was a struggle to imagine. The automobile, a scourge? She could not think in such terms.
She glanced to her left, looking at the blurry shapes that came and went. Maybe she wouldn’t come to the restaurant next time. Perhaps she would simply drive.
***
“Home,” she said, not expecting a response. She’d gone straight from the school to the restaurant, assuming her husband to be out working. There was a faint flicker of surprise when she heard him say, “Here.”The house was small so it was only a few steps to the dining room where he sat, twirling some cold spaghetti around a hunk of meat. When she walked in he smiled faintly and gestured with his fork. “Eat?”
She looked at the fork, wrapped in spaghetti. The sauce was thin, sparse, and dry. None of it fell to the plate as his hand hovered in the air. “Did.”
He nodded, set the fork to the side of his mouth, and inserted it slightly, taking about half the food off the utensil and chewing as he continued to look at her. She glanced to the side, where a woman stared directly at her through the close clear wall. The woman stepped forward, splaying her breasts against it. She walked back, then forward and splayed them again. Repeat.
Repeat.
Her husband continued to look at her, smiling now. Without breaking his gaze, he reached down with the fork and spooled more spaghetti to the side of his mouth, again smacking up only half. “Loving,” he said, nodding, chewing. “Loving, yeah.”
When she turned to glance back at the woman, she was on the barren flat floor, blood pooling beside her head. How it happened, she didn’t know.
She turned back to her husband, and flatly said, “Loving.”
The burning within her began to recede.
***
She buried her face in the pillow as he continued his rhythmless thrusting, stirring no pleasure for her while he panted out of breath. This was fine. There was no pleasure but there was no pain, which was as good as she hoped for. Here, she could avert her eyes from the outside without suspicion.“What’s wrong?” He stopped, backing off.
A chill ran down her spine. When had he ever asked that while so preoccupied? How could he think something off without seeing her face?
No time to waste, she sat up and turned around. “Just tired.”
He studied her long and hard, expression flat. Her heart raced.
“No,” he said.
Her heart froze.
“No. You’re stressed. Why?”
She swallowed.
“Money?”
She shrugged, and shook her head slightly.
“I told you. Don’t worry about money. Money’s not a problem.”
She nodded.
He kissed her on the forehead before leaning back to look at her again while resting his hands on her shoulders. “Money is not an issue. I mean it. I’m trying for more overtime. There’s more cases, more crime. I’ll have it. And a raise will come soon enough.”
She nodded.
“If not,” he said, “We’ll figure it out. Like always.”
They went on loving, this time with him fumbling on top instead of working discordantly from the back. As he loved, talking about the fools he’d busted and the violence he’d restrained, she looked to the side, to the gruesome scene mere inches from her face. A male corpse slumped beyond the wall, its chest carved out with gore trailing down and its eyes still lifelike. Eyes that begged.
She bit her lip and closed her eyes to fight the sensation of her scorching flesh. Her husband laughed and worked faster, mistaking her pain for pleasure.
***
Money was an issue, try as her husband did to deny it. Today, she’d driven for hours that felt like minutes. Hours more indulgent than she could afford, given the exorbitant cost of gas. So now, at the end of it, she strolled in circles around a small park, keeping her head low to curtail the worst of the sights.A palm-sized red ball rolled to her feet. She raised her head and looked around, dimly acknowledging the naked men and women clamoring for her attention beyond the glass. There was no one else in the park. Where had it…
A small white dog, so covered in puffy fur she couldn’t make out its eyes, hurried over to her with its tongue out. The dog grabbed the ball in its teeth and looked up at her expectantly, wagging its tail.
She looked up from the dog and around the park again. There wasn’t a soul around.
Nervous without understanding why, she took the dog’s gift and tossed it as far as she could. The dog bounded after it, and she turned to face the glass closest to her. All the people had disappeared except for one man covered in blood but no viscera. He stared, not accusing, not begging, not in fear, but with jaded eyes and the faintest smile. Her skin began to burn as she studied the ground around him. There were no corpses. No signs of anyone else at all. Just the vast expanse of white.
The dog returned, panting. It stopped at her feet and set the ball down. Then, remarkably, the dog looked at the man outside the wall, who had sat down and pressed his hand against the glass. The dog looked from him to her and back again, before picking up the ball and ambling to the wall’s edge. The dog dropped the ball in front of the man. He smiled at the gesture though he could in no way return it.
All the while she burned, the pain spiking to unprecedented levels as her throat tightened and her nostrils clogged from the acrid scent. She was moments from doubling over, yet she could not tear her gaze away from the man and the dog. Tears welled in her eyes, the fault lying as much with the pain as the terrible hurt in her heart.
Too much. It was too much.
As her senses erupted and she began to totter, the man stood up, his eyes wide with shock and the onset of tears.
I see you, she thought. I see you.
Then she saw nothing. And felt nothing too.
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