Death, or Something Close

by Amanda Hays Blasko

We’re poor until Graham almost dies.

Like many things, it starts simply enough—we’re outside in the sun, waiting in line for the new barbeque place. The restaurant presents as a mom and pop but is actually run by a megacorp, and it’s so committed to its “small business” aesthetic that people wait in line for hours for the business to open, hoping to receive a slab of paper-wrapped meat before it runs out and the line disperses.  

We’re far back in the line because Graham drives like every curve in the road is a curb. He’s the kind of person that pulls over for patrol cars even if the lights aren’t on. The people in front of us slurp milkshakes and toss fries toward one another’s mouths. The grass beneath our feet is a field of mashed potatoes. Graham keeps picking his feet up and examining the bottoms of his shoes. He’s grown more anal with age, but I guess I have, too. I refuse to make left turns at intersections (it’s profoundly dangerous), so instead I only take right turns, which sometimes results in going in circles, except they’re actually squares.

“Could you please stop doing that?” Graham asks the French fry tossers. He keeps pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, so I know he’s been working up to this for a while.

The couple turn around. They’re both sort of fat, although I’m not sure if that’s acceptable to say (or think?), but it’s also the truth, and I don’t mean it, even in the thinking way, as derogatory.

“Fuck off, Twiggy,” the man says. He has greasy-looking toupee hair, the opposite of his partner’s long blonde hair, which is wound into two braids, the ends bound with ribbon.

I put my hand on Graham’s arm, a silent signal. He responds in kind, nodding and looking toward the ground. I do the same. We are deferring folk. The fry wasteland beneath our feet makes a riot out of my stomach—pangs of hunger followed by the intense urge to gag. The couple turns back around, and we breathe again.

Three hours later, we approach the cash register, which is tucked in a small retro bus. I don’t see how they can keep enough meat in there for even a few people.

“Ain’t none left,” the worker says, twirling her brown braid. Her lipstick is so glossy it reflects the sun.

“When did you run out?” Graham asks, the question a polite sigh. His beanie slips off the back of his head, and then off it. I rip it from the air and stuff it in the pocket of my jacket.

“Hours ago. The line’s been done for ages.” She sits under the roof of the van. She’s so pale she looks like a jellyfish, or some cave-dwelling creature.

Graham and I look at each other. Had we been standing behind that couple without realizing they weren’t in line?

No, because that would be ridiculous. Plus, there’d been people behind us in line. Or maybe I’d only thought so. We’d been subsisting on stale crackers and ketchup packets to save up for this meal, and hunger was making me dizzy, forgetful.

“What about the ends?” Graham asks. “We’re so hungry.”

“You can have the drippings and the other nasty bits,” she says. “Saves me a trip to the dumpster.”

She tosses him the bag, which he catches rather deftly.

I can smell it from here. It is the nasty bits. We walk in the direction of the car, Graham reaching into the enormous bag and grabbing small, burnt unrecognizable things from its depths. I block out the noise of him chewing roughly, like a cow with cud, or like someone choking.

As we cross the street, the nausea rears its fist, punching up through my stomach. I sprint across the road, a horn honking from somewhere behind me. Graham calls for me, but I’m heaved over in the grass of the median. Only bile comes up, but I’m able to purge other things, too.

When I glance behind me, I see the accident. Graham is reclined in the middle of the street, a small trail of something from his pants to the asphalt beneath. He looks fine besides the fact he’s lying there, not getting up. The bag of nasty bits is several feet from him, the contents ripped across the road. The air reeks.

A few feet from Graham, the offending vehicle is paused. It’s a white moving truck with a severely dented bumper.

I run to Graham. His eyes are open, and not in the dead way, which is good.

“Are you hurt?” I ask.

“Just dazed, I think,” he says as I help him stand.

The truck driver has exited the cab and is staring at us like we have three heads. He’s a young dude with a thick black beard and hair to match, and he has a bunch of pens clipped to the top of his shirt, like a server’s apron. At first, I think he drives for a corporation, but then I see the small family-business decal plastered on the side.

“Holy shit,” he says, repeating the words like a mantra.

After a pause, he tries again. “How are you okay?” he asks. “I was going 40, at least.” He stares at Graham and then turns toward his truck. When he sees the damage to the bumper, he really starts to lose his shit.

“You did that, honey?” I ask. “I always knew you had a hard head.”

Graham laughs. The truck driver sits against one of the front wheels, head between his legs. The road is completely deserted except for the three of us.

I tell the truck driver the paramedics are coming, I called them, and that he shouldn’t worry. They’ll take care of him, and not in the mob-boss kind of way. He’s kind of freaking me out, like he might be in crisis or something. I feel bad for him, only I don’t know how to help him. Sometimes, support should be left to the professionals. Or maybe it just shouldn’t be left to me.

“Look at this!” Graham says, retrieving his phone from his pants pocket. Not a scratch on it. “A modern marvel,” he adds.

The truck driver calls someone on the phone, maybe a family member, saying the dent to his bumper is more than a person should have caused. And the guy’s alive! he yells into the phone, eyes darting back up to assess Graham. Well, isn’t that a good thing? I hear the person on the other line say. The truck driver is shaking, leaning up against his truck. I think he would have preferred the opposite: an untouched vehicle and a destroyed Graham.

Graham and I stand in the median and take turns watching the man in crisis and the other cars now on the road, navigating around the truck and over the gristle, rubbernecking out their windows to stare at us. I think they’re looking for bodies. When they don’t find them, they turn to stare through their windshields and text on their phones.

The paramedics arrive and assess the truck driver. When they take a look at Graham, they rush him into the back of the ambulance. I get in back, feeling excited at going breakneck speed in a metal box. That is until Graham starts to die, and the paramedics begin to shove things into his arms and mouth and then he’s a mass of beeping colors and cords and he does not look like the person I know at all. I wonder if it’s possible the truck smacked his soul, or whatever makes him Graham, straight out of his corporeal frame. I worry the paramedics won’t be able to sift through all the pieces of him and reassemble them correctly.

What if some of Graham was left back there in the road, with the nasty bits?

The doctor at the city hospital is blunt. If the paramedics had been any slower, by even a stoplight, Graham would be dead.

“Why are you saying it like it’s my fault?” I ask the doctor. “I wasn’t driving. Does EMS not take left turns?”

He looks confused.

“I didn’t say that,” he says and looks behind him at a woman seated in a corner of the room I hadn’t noticed. She nods at the doctor in confirmation.

“Who the hell is she?” I ask.

“My aide,” he says. “She’s here for liability reasons.”

When I don’t respond, he continues. “Mr. Richmond says that, before the accident, he consumed Sweet Sweet Treat Treat’s food product, or rather its refuse, which was given to him by an employee of unit #15826 in the local area. His stomach needed to be pumped. He’s lucky he got here when he did.”

“The truck driver saved his life?” I ask.

“That’s one way to look at it,” the doctor says.

Turns out a corporation did try to kill Graham. A big one.

*

We win some money on the case. We lose some friends, too. Apparently Sweet Sweet Treat Treat is a subsidiary of an even bigger company. The parent company lays off hundreds of workers across the city, even migrates some folks to higher-tier jobs in further away localities, meaning longer commutes for our neighbors.

Our house is constantly attacked with sticks, which hurl like projectiles through the windows, shattering the glass and making our birds screech. Graham and I cling together in a closet with the birds all around us, pretending we’ve ceased to exist so people will stop noticing us. A series of thuds on the front door causes us to strip clothing from our bodies and stuff it underneath the door until the light is extinguished and we’re in the pitch dark naked.

*

We quit our jobs. Despite our lack of experience, we construct a makeshift second floor. The whole house is still only 700 square feet, so we’re constantly bumping into one another and getting mad at each other and the birds, who howl and yell our own curses back at us.

You dolts! Why don’t you contribute something?

Pay up, bitch, one of them shouts.

The worst of them all is shut the fuck up! which seems to mean something to the group because all the birds start going in unison, like a chorus of middle schoolers.

*

One night, when we’re lying in our hammocks strung from the ceiling (the original one, which is now also a floor) Graham threatens to leave.

“I’m tired of being poor,” he says. He’s in his underwear, tucked under a blanket. His red hair is dirty and in need of brushing.

“If you leave, you’ll still be poor,” I remind him. “Don’t you want to be poor together?”

“They should have given us more,” he says angrily.

“Maybe if we were rich they would have,” I say. “They love to give money to people who already have it. Especially in court.”

He climbs out of his hammock, breathing so hard I can see the indentation of his ribs and shoulder bones and all the other things buried beneath our skin that sometimes make themselves visible. The birds around us chitter.

In the end, we hadn’t actually won that much money. We’d thought Graham’s near-death experience would have been a bit more lucrative. As it happened, Graham’s life wasn’t worth much. Maybe his death would’ve been worth more.

*

We act old but we’re only in our thirties. It isn’t too late for us to have money and do something with it other than die and pass it off to someone else.

At Mart-Store, we trip into a display with a high overhead shelf containing enormous strollers tucked in boxes. The falling weight crushes the tender bones of my ankle, and Graham has sleep apnea now, although we’re not sure if those two things are connected.

We buy all the food the news tells us has salmonella, botulism, listeria and whatever else. We burn the delicate skin of our throats from vomiting. Blood sprays the bowl of the toilet. We take turns holding each other’s hair away from our faces. I rest in the bathtub, face pressed against the cool edge.

*

Most companies don’t even bother with court. They send us lifetime supplies of canned tuna fish and beg us not to post any more photos on social media. Sometimes we listen, sometimes we don’t. Graham has perfected the art of bouncing IP addresses. 

*

When I discover the cord on my Spinach computer has frayed to the wire, I bend it back and forth, shroud it in blankets and blow hot air on it. The resulting fire destroys part of the house, like an angry mouth, rendering the second floor unusable. I have a small third degree burn on my arm. They use skin from my leg to cover the wound. I ask them why there’s a hierarchy of skin, why the flesh of my leg isn’t equally as important as the skin of my arm. I suggest, instead, they take skin off my ass, or the top of my foot, but they refuse.

*

At 10 Symbols, I fall out of a rollercoaster, slipping my narrow body through the gap between the foam arm and the seat. My knee makes contact with something on the way down, maybe the tracks, but the feeling of falling is more pleasant than I would have ever imagined: colors in a stream, but you can only see so much at once, and then it’s all over and what you missed you missed.

The hospital room is cold. Graham is the only warm thing here. I’m having surgery on my legs, which are damaged in some complicated way the doctors have not explained very well to me. I’m on the news for this one—they bring the camera crew to my room. Graham has filled every inch with flowers to make me seem more likable.

“10 Symbols says it is near impossible to fall out of this rollercoaster,” the reporter starts, and I look somber in case there are multiple angles. “The event cannot be replicated by crash dummies, a Symbols spokesperson has stated.” He turns to me—he’s younger than me, just starting out in his career, and I know this is a big interview for him. Suddenly, it disturbs me how much younger he is, how old I am in comparison, how old he must find me when he looks at me. I barely understand the language of the young, the most technologically driven generation of them all, the impacts of which we probably won’t know for some time, and all the apps they use to communicate, to bond, to organize, and how companies are fucking them in ways we probably don’t know to be afraid of yet.

“Penny,” the reporter says. “We’re so glad you’re alive. How are you feeling?”

“Horrible,” I say. Graham steps forward, entering the frame to hold my hand. “I’m in so much pain. And for what?” I glance toward Graham. I try to cry but I can’t. I am in pain, though.

“We just wanted to celebrate Penny’s promotion at work,” he adds.

“Congratulations!” the young man says, and visibly pales. “On your promotion,” he clarifies. He turns from us toward the door. The cameraperson sprints into position.

“That’s right, folks—even celebrations run afoul. Sometimes the days we think will be our best are our worst. Stay tuned for more insider information from Penny Anderson and her husband Graham.” Someone yells, that’s a wrap, like this is a movie or something.

“We’re not married,” Graham says to the reporter. “Not that I would be offended to be seen as her husband. It’s just that we don’t believe in marriage. And don’t you believe in the reality of facts? Or do you not?”

“Also, could you say survivor Penny, who was nearly killed by 10 Symbols’ defective ride and its faulty safety measures?” I ask.

The young reporter looks behind him at the cameraperson. At the soundtech person. At some other person with an undefined role. No one says anything, they don’t even move. Maybe breathing is the signal. Turning back to us, the reporter shakes his head.

“Legal’s not gonna like that. Or Corporate. What can you do?” he asks, shrugging. He tails it out of the room, promising to be back soon.

*

I can’t use the wheelchair since it won’t fit through the front door. Instead, I crawl up the steps and into the house. The birds squawk, pumping their wings. If we win, we hope to repair the ceiling/the second floor. The cases are starting to get caught up in court. Apparently, corporations are actually not averse to settling in court.

I lay on the floor (the first floor) and stare up at the ceiling (the second floor). The  burned parts, like cigarette holes in a bedsheet, flitter back and forth like leaf cover.

*

10 Symbols offers us an ungodly amount of money to drop the case and instead become ambassadors of the company. They want our likenesses on advertisements, and creating custom-made social media posts that people will think are real. They even want to film a TikTok video of me rising from my wheelchair, which I haven’t needed in a few weeks. I tell them they should consider investing in some proper training for their staff on being anti-ableist and anti-racist and anti-misogynist and all the others.

“Should we be rich or have morals?” Graham asks. His beanie from the barbeque restaurant is back on his head. We’ve nailed flaps of cardboard boxes to the ceiling to cover the burns, like bandages.

“We could be both,” I say. “Is that possible? We could donate most of it.”

“After we do the ceiling,” Graham says. “And the backyard. And I need a new phone—I dropped mine in the sink on accident.”

I glare at him. “We could also move, get out of this shithole.”

He helps me into my hammock and turns on the ambient lighting. After a moment, I speak. “We can’t be ambassadors of 10 Symbols and Influencers at the same time.”

“Influencers?” he asks, climbing into his own hammock with a sleeve of crackers.

“De-corporatization Influencers,” I say. “We’re like the top ones out there.”

“Is that what we do?” he says, settling in for the night. “I thought we were just trying to survive.”

“We’re doing that, too,” I say.

We sit in silence. I’m not in pain because they’ve given me opiates. I can’t remember if I stopped feeling pain and kept taking them or if they work so well I feel nothing at all. I wonder if I can sue the hospital if I become addicted to these drugs. Did that fit with the theme of our anger?

“What if one of us dies?” I ask. “For real?”

His phone is propped up against his leg, meaning quiet hours. Which means he wants to eat his crackers and sit in his crumbs and zone out and not speak to me. I don’t mind. Everyone needs a break sometimes, especially from themselves.

“I guess the other will be grossly rich,” he says, putting his headphones in.

I stare up at the ceiling, trying to identify where the edges of cardboard and proper ceiling overlap in the dark. As I was falling from the ride, there’d been a breath of a second when I’d thought I was going to die. I’d thought—what if I can’t take this back? And the feeling that followed—satisfaction or fear, I wasn’t sure, electrified me right before I hit the ground, which felt like dying for real. Only I woke up.

 

Amanda Hays Blasko’s work has appeared in a variety of journals, including storySouth, Little Patuxent Review, The Tahoma Literary Review, and West Trade Review. Find her at https://www.amandahaysblasko.com