Quantum nightmares, p.6
Quantum Nightmares, page 6
The thought of a gypsy curse reminded her of something. She ran out of her daughter’s room. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said over her shoulder. “We need to be gone in fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks, Ma,” screamed Bella, coordinating a halter top with something or another.
Sara skipped the last three steps and landed in dog shit, slipping, hitting her head on the bottom step. Blue and purple and pink stars flickered and blinked in her mind’s eye.
“Goddamn it, Butters,” she growled fiercely but quickly felt awful because she knew Butters couldn’t help it. The Munson family had just recently discovered their ten-year-old Shih Tzu had colon cancer, a brain tumor, heart murmurs, and spots on her liver. She started having seizures the week prior. The appointment was already made to put her down Tuesday morning.
Sara saw Butters cowering in the corner.
“It’s okay, baby girl,” she said sweetly. “I’m not mad at you.”
Sara picked herself up and realized she had slid in the mess; her pants were covered in shit. Literally. She took a deep breath, slid her pants off, held it with two fingers as if it were roadkill, then chucked them down the basement stairs. But they stuck to the wall. She laughed maniacally. Of course, it’d stick to the wall.
She slammed the door and ran to the calendar on the refrigerator. Today was circled in red with a big smiley face. Today was the one day of the year Sara looked forward to. Today was the town fair. A sudden wave of primal lust enveloped her, directly succeeded by overwhelming sadness as she noticed an ominous red x on Tuesday and the word “Butters.”
Bittersweet, indeed.
They were ten minutes late getting on the road because Bella couldn’t find her book bag, and they had to stop for gas. Sara activated her drone mode and drove on autopilot.
She had been so busy hating her life, she hadn’t realized that today was the carnival. Desire filled her body as she thought of Raul, the sexy Roman gypsy she’d been having an affair with for the past five years.
With less than one thousand people, Rolling Hills, South Dakota perfectly captured all aspects of small-town America. The town was at the tail end of a tristate tour of a traveling circus that boasted audacious claims of fifty towns and cities in two months, staying for two or three days then packing the caravan and moving to the next site. Their presence marked the beginning of summer for the residents of Rolling Hills, as they always pitched their first tents on Memorial Day weekend. Because it was the first stop, they stayed for four or five days. Which meant four or five days of orgasms for Sara—a justifiable reprieve for enduring another year with her husband who hadn’t touched her or even looked at her in years.
Every year they would come into town, her husband home on the couch drinking beer and sulking in self-pity. She would give her children some money, bid them farewell and they’d run off without even thanking her. Then she’d go to the gypsy’s tent, and there he’d be—this exotic-looking Arabian prince with his young, chiseled body and long, thick eyelashes that had caught her heart like a Venus flytrap. Having been attentionless for so long, she rather liked the attention Raul gave her body.
And boy, do I need a release, she thought.
—
Sara glanced over at Bella, her heart aching with a bittersweet mixture of maternal pride and longing. Her daughters were growing up so fast, finding their own independence, slipping away from her grasp. She sighed, pushing the thoughts of Raul and the carnival to the back of her mind as she tried to focus on the present. She knew she had to maintain the facade of a loving mother. Her heart could be elsewhere, marooned on an island of despair, sustaining off hopes and dreams and perennial visits from the Gypsy cuckold. But her mind; her mind had to stay on point.
The car continued its journey, the hum of the engine a background to Sara’s racing thoughts, as she mentally prepared herself for a day filled with mundane responsibilities and a night of forbidden pleasures.
“You okay, Ma?” Bella said somewhere in the background of her mind. “Earth to Ma. Mom!”
“What?” Sara swerved the car to the right. “Did I hit something?” She glanced in the rearview mirror.
Bella giggled. “Nooo,” she said, examining her mother. “You just had this faraway look on your face.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about putting Butters down tomorrow.” She took stock of her body.
Nervous twitches of anxiety vibrated her legs and hands long outside expected time.
Bella’s lips pursed and twisted to the left. “Ummm, that’s not the look I’m talking about.”
“What look are you talking about then?”
Bella thought about it before giggling and saying, “Longing.”
“Puh, longing? Gedafagoutahere.” Sara felt her face flush. “I haven’t longed for nothing but sleep and peace and quiet for years.”
Bella studied her mother and after realizing she didn’t care, she went back to her phone without saying anything.
“Are you and your sister coming with me to the fair tonight?” Sara asked as she plotted her escape.
“No offense, Ma, but we’re too old to be going with you.”
They pulled up to the school and joined the accordion dance of cars coming and going.
“Can you just give me the money now, and I’ll give Jake and Jen their cuts at lunch,” Bella said.
Even better, Sara thought. She was at the head of the suburban caravan now. She pulled over, rummaged through her purse, and handed Bella eighty dollars. She tried hugging Bella, who winced and recoiled.
“Really, dude,” Sara said, equal parts amused and hurt.
Bella plugged her nose and said, “You smell like shit, Ma.”
“Well, that’s just not nice at all.”
“No, dude, lowkey,” Bella said, turning her head to the side and gagging. “You got some shit on your back.”
Bella laughed and got out of the car.
“Don’t pull out,” Sara said under her breath. “Please, God. Please. Don’t pull out.”
Her eyes dropped down to the speedometer which informed her she was going 70 in a 40. A surge of anxiety shot through her stomach and rose to her chest in sputtering waves. She glanced in the rearview mirror and the sheriff’s car that was hiding under the billboard sign pulled out hot, its blue and red lights flashing on a beat to Sara’s anxiety.
“Goddamnit,” she growled. She signaled right, merging with the shoulder of the road. The tires kicking up great big billows of dust in the car’s wake. She came to a stop. She slammed her hands on the steering wheel and glanced at her disheveled look in the rearview mirror. She started playing with her hair.
The sheriff’s car pulled up right behind her. She tilted the mirror and when she saw who it was, her heart fluttered a beat. I may just get out of this with a warning yet, she thought. She pulled her breasts up, perkiness defeating age, gravity; put her game face on, determined to flirt her way out of the ticket.
Deputy Cane Rose moseyed out of the vehicle and closed the door. He put his visor hat on and made his way to the driver side window, which Sara had already lowered, saying, “If all I had to do to see you in that uniform is speed a lil, well, then—”
“License and registration, please.” All business, Deputy Rose had a determined look on his face, placid, uninterested. It wasn’t always like that, though. Once upon a time, he was madly in love with her. But that was a long time ago.
Embarrassed by his aloof response to her attempt at flirting, Sara nodded dutifully and reached into the glove compartment. Empty single shots of Captain Morgan and Smirnoff fell to the bed of the passenger side floor. Shit, she thought. She completely forgot about her cache of empties, last week’s lunch leftovers. Her registration was buried under the graveyard of empty bottles. There were at least twenty Captain Morgans and another ten or so Smirnoff vodkas on top. She cupped a handful, and they cascaded to the ground. In Sara’s mind, the noise it made when it hit the ground sounded like the click of handcuffs locking—foreboding, inevitable.
She found the registration and tried slamming the glove compartment shut, but bottles blocked the locking mechanism. She threw the door down and brought it back up in a fluid motion and it clicked shut.
“I can explain the bottles,” she said, turning toward Deputy Rose, who was leaning in the window, sniffing for alcohol on Sara’s person. But when she turned around, his face a few inches from hers, him advancing, she thought he was trying to kiss her, and she puckered her lips and leaned in to kiss him.
He pulled away, a disgusting grimace on his face. “What the fuck, Sara,” he said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I thought that … I mean you were leaning in and … I thought that … shit … I’m sorry.”
Sara had dated Deputy Cane Rose back in high school for a year before she grew bored and left him for her now-husband and Rose started dating her best friend, at the time that is. They had been married for fourteen years. Happily, it would appear. Sara was forced to watch their Hallmark-card family grow in numbers and happiness because he coached Jacob’s baseball and soccer teams. And she trolled him on every social media platform he had. He was perfect in every way, and every time Sara saw him, she slipped into a mini depression begotten by titanic regret.
“Please don’t tell Cheryl,” Sara said. She could see her reflection in the blue-tinted aviators. She looked pathetic.
Deputy Rose grimaced. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said before walking away shaking his head.
She spent the first five minutes sweeping up the empties and throwing them in a plastic bag. Ten minutes passed. She looked in the rearview mirror, wondering what was taking so long. She looked at the clock on the dash. It read 9:45. She was already forty-five minutes late to work and she still needed to get home and change clothes.
She fumbled through her purse for her phone when Deputy Rose finally emerged from the car. He had papers clutched in his hand, and Sara knew exactly what the papers were. I can’t even talk myself out of a ticket anymore, she thought. Hers was the kind of beauty that was legendary in the small town she called home. Even in her early thirties, she was stunning. She’d gone most her life using her beauty as a weapon, a utility. But now, it would appear, her beauty was no longer an asset. She didn’t quite know how she felt about that.
He walked up to the door and handed her a ticket. She glanced at it and laughed nervously. “Five hundred dollars,” she said, throwing her arms up. “I was only going thirty over the limit.”
“Forty over the limit,” he corrected her. “And you’re lucky I’m not arresting you for the empty alcohol bottles.” He handed her another piece of paper, the one that she needed to bring to court. “Now, since you were twenty-five over the limit, you must go to court on the date posted.” He pulled his lips back and added, “They’re going to suspend your license, Sara, and you’ll have to get SR22 insurance. I wrote down all the information on the back.”
“Suspend my license?” she said. “How am I supposed to get to work?” She suddenly felt nauseous at the thought of her husband having to take her to work every day.
“You can drive yourself to work,” he said. “Just have Peggy sign the paperwork and send it to the DOT. But if I catch you driving anywhere else, I’ll have to write you another ticket.”
The ticket was a magnificent cherry on a shit-sandwich of a morning. “Is everything okay?” The charge nurse glanced at her watch as if to validate that Sara was over an hour late.
—
“I just had to rush home after dropping Bells off at school and I gotta speeding ticket on the way here.” She produced the speeding ticket as proof, but the charge nurse didn’t even glance at it.
“Why’d you have to go back home?” the charge nurse asked.
“My dog has all kindsa cancers; she’s incontinent,” Sara said. “I slipped on her shit this morning and I thought it was only on my pants, but realized as I was dropping my daughter off that it was on my top as well.” After an uncomfortable pause, she added, “We’ve got an appointment to put her down tomorrow. Butters, that is. Not Bella. Could you imagine.” Sara smiled weakly then looked sullen, distraught, hoping the loss of a family dog would incite kindness.
The charge nurse’s light green top matched her light green bottoms beautifully. Her name tag was perfectly centered. Her starched pants crackled as she walked, and her hair was in a nice, neat bun. She looked prepared for a military class A inspection.
Conversely, Sara had on a wrinkled multicolored flower top and wrinkled Sponge Bob bottoms; she forgot her name tag at home in the pockets of the shit-covered pants, and her hair, frizzy and unkept, looked like she just sat in the front seat of the world’s fastest rollercoaster.
The charge nurse cleared her throat then sipped from a white coffee mug that read WORLD’S BEST BOSS in bright red letters. “How long,” she said, sipping her coffee, “have you been with us, Sara?” Another sip.
But Sara didn’t hear the question. She was busy with an internal dialogue about the pretentiousness of owning such a coffee mug when something caught her eye. Something ominous, familiar.
Behind the woman’s desk stood a large full-body mirror where Sara saw the ghastly reflection of a large eyeball staring at her. It was a hazy silhouette of sorts; translucent like how ghosts are depicted in cartoons. Aside from its apparent lack of mass, the eyeball was perfectly defined. Though the cloud eye she encountered earlier was massive, it lacked a certain degree of definition this eye had. She couldn’t be certain, but Sara sensed it was the same eye.
It was a beady little brown eye with little whiskers for eyelashes; a thin, crescent-shaped eyebrow was penciled in above the eye and the wrinkled eyelid was smothered in so much blue eyeshadow that it looked like a four-year-old playing dress up. But it wasn’t a child. It was an adult. It was a woman’s eye. Sara knew that empirically.
Aside from the physical evidence, Sara, somehow, someway, could feel a feminine energy shooting out from the mirror in daggers; a fierce motherly sort of love like a mama bear protecting her cubs from a lioness. Sara being the lioness. But that didn’t seem entirely correct. There was something missing in the hypothesis. And when the eye squinted hatefully, Sara was more able to pinpoint the source of the energy. It wasn’t motherly love. It was a jealous lover kind of feeling, primal protection; an envy as old as Cain.
“Well?” The charge nurse raised her arms at her sides as if she were receiving the holy spirit.
The disembodied eye, the woman’s eye, winked playfully, a youthful twinkle turning the otherwise hostile appendage into something benign, then it disappeared in a puff of smoke just as it had done earlier when it was a cloud eye.
Sara squirmed in her chair.
The boss cleared her throat, bringing Sara back to real time. She looked at the now-empty mirror and composed herself. “I’m sorry,” she said shakily, staring at the empty mirror. “What did you say?”
“How long have you been with us?”
Sara mulled it over for a few seconds. “Like five years,” she said. “Ish.”
The woman rocked in her chair, reached into a filing cabinet, took out a stack of counseling statements she had written for Sara over the years. “Do you know what these are?” she asked, knowing full well Sara did. Sara nodded. “These are writeups for not wearing uniformcolored top and bottoms, tardiness, too many call-offs, not wearing a name tag, messy and unpresentable hairstyle.” She nodded at Sara’s sloppy uniform. “And that’s just to name a few,” she added.
Sara sat silently, longing for tonight’s release.
The woman reached into a different drawer and retrieved another stack of papers. “Do you know what these are?” she asked, motioning to the pile of papers. Sara remained silent.
“These are applications for very willing, very competent CNAs,” she said. “One of them is my niece.”
She wants to replace me, Sara thought.
She forgot about the inexplicable events she’d experienced that day, the eye that seemed to be following her. She lost the fear and anxiety; they turned into rage. She wanted to cheetah-jump across the desk and skull-fuck her boss with a dirty plunger. But she composed herself.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Crawford,” she said in her practiced fake voice. “I’ve just been so stressed.”
“Yes, your dog’s sick. I get it. I do.” The woman looked at Sara, incredulous. “But be that as it may, this is still your final warning,” she said. “You are on probation for the next month.”
Just then, Sara heard the slightest whisper of a maddening laugh echo from the mirror.
“I mean it, Sara,” she cautioned further. “If you get even one more writeup, I’ve gotta fire you.”
Sara nodded and left the room, lost, confused.
Sara managed to escape the rest of the day without incident. She felt like there was a target on her back and very nearly quit several times but thought better of it.
She just needed to make it to tonight.
She just needed a release.
She just needed Raul.
Sara’s husband was working on his car when she pulled into the driveway. He took one glance at her, chugged his beer, then went back to refurbishing his 1979 Mustang. She struggled to get the door open with her arms full of groceries.
“It’s okay,” she screamed. “I got it.”
He answered with a grunt and a smirk. One of the bags broke when she entered the house where she saw Butters laying on the couch. “You don’t know how good you have it,” Sara said. “Wish I could lay around all day doing nothing.” Butters sighed heavily then went back to sleep.
On the fridge was a note from the kids. They had already left for the carnival and would be back at 11:00. I bet they didn’t even do their homework. She snatched the note off the fridge, set it on the table. The red mark on the calendar caught her eye. She felt better just looking at the smiley face, marveling how something so simplistically innocuous could also be so seductive, incite so much emotion, so much passion.
