Baby Is Going to Die Tonight by Richard Chiem
Baby Is Going to Die Tonight
She is thinking she is dead to begin with. She is listening closely on the phone for subtle details, like a change in his voice or hints of another soft voice, talking secretly in his room, because things have been feeling quite different lately. It is quite possible for him to have a secret friend.
Everyone who passes her on the street is looking down and appears dead too. It’s as though they are walking around with gauze wrapped around their faces.
Her stomach is hard and flat and empty. The receiver is warm against her ear, against the light peach hairs on her ear. Clouds move in the sky in a strange sudden pace almost consciously through the clean glass windows. There is innuendo in her posture when she idles in the wet doorway of the red brick building and crosses her legs on the cold bench in the lobby. A few light bulbs are dead now and the dress she wears smells like more than one person.
It will dawn on her soon, like slipping into a warm bath, to stop talking to him. She needs to stop contacting him. She stares for a long time at a teenage boy she does not know with painfully smart eyes; he's smoking a cigarette across the street. Her face goes expressionless and professional, somehow absentminded and dumb, something she has always wanted to feel. Light changes blue inside the lobby along the floor to the pristine ceiling.
She pokes and then stabs herself with a plastic fork in her aorta which tickles. She says, I think we may have achieved something.
He apologizes on the other end of the line and says, I’m sorry, can you repeat that. His voice is the clearest smoothest reception.
She says, I think I’m mad.
She mumbles because she is under that cloud again, in front of everyone with her cell phone in her hand, watching yellow taxis and yellow taxis in the shiny traffic erasing her senses. Her face is blank and young. She can no longer see hear or want. She laughs charmingly into the receiver, feeling dehydrated. She says, I want to be unbearable. I wish you were my boyfriend.
_____
The boy I love is more like a pink dream.
He asks her what is a pink dream and she says, Like, a pink dream is when you like someone and you play with it, but you know it may take years to happen or will never happen.
So we’re friends then, he says.
Julie bites his shoulder and says, Yes, we’re friends.
Am I a pink dream, he asks.
She says, I don’t know.
She is so beautiful, he is always afraid something will happen.
She impersonates a boy. She plays cello. She makes him suffer and leaves him, after they have set a date together, having said to have met on a train on their way to Paris.
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Richard Chiem (b.1987) is the author of two e books WHAT IF, WENDY and OH NO EVERYTHING IS WET NOW (with Ana C.). He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, elimae, and Everyday Genius. His first collection of short stories YOU PRIVATE PERSON is forthcoming from Scrambler Books (2012). He lives in Seattle, and blogs here.