Instead of stopping, we stopped thinking about it.
It's just like you told me it'd be
It's nothin' nothin' nothin'
Nothin' at all
Final Fiction Draft:
“Scrambled Eggs”
After, but slowly, she composes her disordered state of mind and walks out of the room for the last time. She struggles to shrug off the room, the hallway, the stairs. Knees betraying her, she buckles at every crack.
Henry’s apartment is three doors down. It’s not exquisite, but it sure is something. He’s simple and sweet and fully incomplete. (She’s been floating towards his room for months now.) She knocks curtly, and stumbles inside.
When she first enters the apartment, she’s reminded of another time. Of a girl she once knew who owned a beautiful, nostalgia-drenched apartment. Yet the apartment was overlooked and forgotten like a middle child in the growing shadow of their older sibling. It was forgotten because this girl drove a motorcycle. She was surprised at seeing any type of residence at all because she's one of those people one can't quite picture living anywhere, except maybe in hotel rooms. Even after the motorcycle girl took out her keys, on the verge of opening the door, she still really didn't believe this girl lived in the fancy complex. It would, after all, be completely like her to "borrow" an apartment from someone.
But as soon as she peered inside, she knew it was the girl’s apartment. The hardwood floor she sensed was there was not only invisible, but the piles of clothes on the floor were shaped into mountains and valleys, mocking any notion of a floor at all. The clothes were permanent, perennial fixtures in the room that looked like they had been there for years.
Awkwardly, she looked around the room for something, anything that reassured her that someone could actually live there. Hung stark on the bare walls, she spotted a calendar. She waded knee deep in clothes to get a closer inspection; it was four years old.
While the apartments were from different times and were obviously dissimilar, they shared more than just calendar accessories in common. There was something surprising and familiar about both of them….that she couldn’t put her finger on. She turned around in circles in Henry’s darkened room, hand and finger outstretched, unconsciously searching. But she came to the same conclusion that she always did: that this apartment complex was strange. Paint-splattered people, pasted into the decorations: replacement decorum for the lack of furniture.
Yet she’s never felt more at home. Or so she’s told.
“Are you the gal that loves motorcycles?” Henry quivers through nervous veneers that will never know a real smile.
“Henry, come on now. She doesn’t even remember her own children, let alone a motorcycle her husband owned thirty years ago,” Isabel says.
Then, out of the silence, the girl’s eyes break through the mascara-grown ivy of her lashes and she opens her mouth, having no idea what might come out. Her pupils dance and leap, pushing the swing of her former young self up, up, higher and higher, cradling its youth.
It brought her back to that swirling, cathartic time she spent the night in the tent in some old school friend’s backyard. It was raving, spitting rain that took its last wind of ravage on the little tent that could. All seven comrades had left except for her and her quite possibly narcoleptic friend.
The tent had all but completely collapsed; the roof balancing on an invisible tightrope an inch above her face. And with her narcoleptic friend swooning in her dormant unconscious, she felt completely alone. It was swollen heat, selfishly adapting to every nook and cranny of her personal space in the tent.
At any given moment, with the storm fighting and letting down on the tent’s emaciated coat above her, she felt like she could die. It was so awkward, yet realistic: it was the one sincere moment in her life she could keep, think back on, and remember as a time she had survived within her thoughts.
Unexpectedly, she’s jolted out of her memory by moonlight that is pouring and struggling to get through Henry’s sealed-off, curtain-drawn windows looming over her small frame. However, she stays completely still; looking past the curtains and the windows to the moon. Until she finds it: a small tear in the curtains, so small that she had overlooked it before that. Suddenly a brilliant light is dancing in her eyes, and she grins and purposefully draws her hand and pointer finger up to the split with tender precision- the illumination-just there, strange and familiar and consciously stretched-
“She wouldn’t remember how to brush her hair if I didn’t show her how every morning.”
Isabel’s throw-away remark fractures her thought bubbles and she quickly closes her mouth as Henry brings her to his window and murmurs, “Look how bright the stars are tonight.” She looks. The stars form a 1963 Royal Enfield Interceptor motorcycle; she’s wishing, for the hundredth time, that her head wasn’t scrambled eggs. Her eyes shrink back into their fortress and she trudges back to her room: witness to nothing.
But no one comes clapping, praising this final, sad epiphany. No one comes except Isabel, the nursing-home nurse. Isabel tucks her in her bed, puts the bed-pan in plain sight, and arranges the picture frames cradling her smiling family she hasn’t seen in years. “After my nap, I’ll tell a wonderful story, Isabel,” she swears as she slips into dormant nothingness. She stays that way for a long time, and then, she dies.
