Lump: Part Three

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3.
"You lost?"

Kurt started. He had been zoning out over the refrigerated meat display, his attention caught on the swirls and clots of pale fat marbling the meat, hugging the deep red. He turned to see Anne. She leaned past him to grab a double pack of steaks.

“What--what are you doing here?” He was trying to be conversational, but it came out slightly accusatory. Kurt worried at the bump on his throat, but it was the cold, slippery feel of refrigerated fat that he registered instead of his own skin.

"I live around the corner.” Anne grinned. “You know that. But what are you doing here? Don’t you have that nice organic market just by you?"

“It was closed,” he lied. He had actually been intending to go there, but his thoughts had wandered. When he finally snapped out of it, he had been halfway across town--driving the shortcut to work. The way to Route 15. Trying to convince himself he just needed some things at this specific grocery store hadn’t lessened his unease at all.

Anne looked at him, and frowned. “On a Saturday?”

“Yeah. Um, weird, huh? I don’t know why.”

Anne tilted her head. He was afraid she was going to ask him something he couldn’t answer. But instead she asked, “Are you sure you’re not just stalking me?” She grinned and arched her brows.

“Oh,” Kurt said, hastily, “No, I swear.”

But he could have just been heading to Anne's. His mind latched on the possibility, clung to it a little too eagerly. He could have been driving there on auto-pilot, driving to his friend’s house and not to a crushed patch of weeds at the side of Route 15. Her place was the first place he went every weekday morning since they'd started carpooling together three years ago. And she had been on his mind a lot.

He smiled at that, and discovered Anne was smiling back.

"Well, I'm off to hunt the wild turnip. Want to come?"

Kurt nodded, suddenly feeling much more himself than he had all day.

They wandered through the produce section, and Kurt began to feel almost good; he forgot all about his uneasiness as they threatened each other with unhealthy-looking carrots and compared size of eggplants. He was working up the nerve to ask her if she wanted to stop by Starbuck’s next door for a coffee when she gasped.

“Kurt!”

“What?”

Anne’s eyes were huge. “You’re bleeding.”

Kurt glanced down and saw his fingertips. There was blood under his nails. He touched his throat, felt wet running down it. He didn’t realize he was dizzy until Anne was holding onto his elbow with a painful grip, directing him to lean against a refrigerated display of salad mixes. She produced a dingy-looking napkin from somewhere in her purse. “Sorry,” she said, as she pressed it to his throat.

“I must’ve cut myself shaving,” Kurt lied, smiling weakly. Anne lifted the napkin and frowned.

“Looks more like you scratched open a mosquito bite.”

“Oh,” Kurt said. “Yeah. I forgot about that.”

“It’s stopped, I think.” Anne’s mouth curled slightly. “So you’re one of those people, huh?”

“Huh?”

“Faints at the sight of blood.”

Kurt wasn’t, but he said, “Yeah. I guess.”

Anne’s smile faded. “You really look awful. Hey--.” She took his basket from his hand. “Maybe you should forget shopping and go home.”

“I’m okay,” he insisted. But his knees turned to water as soon as he tried to step away from the support of the salad display. Anne put both baskets into the refrigerated case and grabbed his arm.

“You are not. Let’s go. We’re walking to my place, and then you’re lying down until you look like a human being again.”

Kurt had no energy to argue.

***

Kurt thought it was a dream at first: an unfamiliar room, oppressively hot; his body leaden and sluggish; the air in his lungs thick and unbreathable.

Stumbling through the dark to the nearest window, he watched his hands struggle to let the night air in, wrestling with the uncooperative locks. His sweaty fingers slipped on the latches, his fingertips burning, and he tried to remember if he’d ever felt pain in a dream before. His throat began to hurt, then, but it was a pain that came from the outside in, burning from his jawline down to his clavicle, and inwards.

A voice came from behind him:

“Kurt? What are you doing? Kurt? Hey.”

Fingers like coals wrapped around his wrist. Kurt yelped, leaping back. The room lit. Anne was staring at him.

Kurt realized he was awake. He looked down, staring at his reddened fingertips.

“You’re freezing,” Anne said. She reached for his forehead and he jerked away, feeling the heat radiating from her skin.

“What?” she said, but he couldn’t explain why her skin burned while he felt feverish. If he was really sick and running a temperature, she had to be even worse, and she looked fine. He felt woozy; he needed fresh air. If he just had a little fresh air he’d be all right. He looked at his face, reflected against the dark outside.

He just needed to let the air in. That was all.

Kurt resumed his effort to open the window with a grunt.

“That doesn’t open,” Anne said. “Hasn’t since I moved in. Look, maybe I should call Jamie. Have him take you by Urgent Care. You really don’t look OK. Hey. Kurt. Are you listening?”

He started to tell her that he just needed a little fresh air, but got as far as “Need” before he tasted the flat, foul dryness in his mouth. Need, right, he needed to brush his teeth and he needed to open the damn window and he needed to be somewhere that wasn’t so hot. He turned around, really seeing the room for the first time. It was her living room, he recognized it now; a fat brown couch and a table he had helped her rescue from a curb, the television against the far wall, the front door next to a chair that matched the couch. He headed for the door.

Anne kept pace with him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Need,” he said, and then, “air.”

“You need a doctor,” she said. “Hey. You’re bleeding again.”

Kurt stopped with one hand wrapped around the deadbolt lock in the front door. He’d been scratching his neck with the other. The burning had become an itching, like healing frostbite.

Anne frowned. “Wasn’t that--higher?” Her voice sounded odd, too squeaky, unlike her. Kurt itched at a lump that was just above his collarbone. His mouth felt parched; as he turned towards Anne, he felt desperately, inexplicably thirsty.

Anne’s eyes widened, just the tiniest bit.

Kurt swallowed. He yanked open the front door. Anne reached for him, but he was too quick.

He heard Anne call his name, but he didn’t stop walking. He walked into the embracing dark and didn’t look back.

***

He couldn’t remember how long he’d been walking, but it must have been a long time, because he was standing outside his apartment building. Hours, he thought, staring up at the squares of light, at the darkened square that belonged to his own place. Except if it had been hours, shouldn’t most of those squares be dark, too? It should be deep into the heart of night.

Kurt couldn’t explain it.

He heard the rush of distant car tires on damp pavement, too many cars for too late an hour. If he listened too close, the sound started to turn into a soft chorus of voices, speaking words he refused to make out. Words that might have been his name, might’ve been Anne’s.

He rubbed at his throat.

At least his car was back at Anne’s place, too far to go back for, too far to go to drive himself to the place he really wanted to go, a dark shoulder on Route 15.

Kurt closed his eyes and refused to see the moonlike face that loomed in the darkness behind his eyelids. He shoved his hands into his pockets, discovered that he was lucky--he had his keys, at least. He wouldn’t have to wait out the night by the main entrance, hoping someone would turn up and let him in. At least he wasn’t cold, even though he probably ought to be--he could see his breath, lit up by the cold light of the fluorescents in the parking lot, wards against the dark.

His apartment had become an oven sometime during the day. He turned off the heat. It wasn’t enough; he went to the windows. He opened each of them, threw them open with something like triumph, one by one, each one making him feel a little better as the cold air blasted through the screen. By the last one his grunt of effort had become a little triumphant cry, a wordless hurrah. He stood in front it, separated from the night only by a thin screen, spread his arms, tilted back his head.

“Come in,” he whispered, “Come in, come in, come in.”

As if it could hear him, a sharp breeze blew in through the open window, slamming the door of his bedroom hard behind him. It blew through his hair like icy fingers, caressed over his chest, cooled his burning throat, chilled his knees and his thighs and between his toes. Kurt sighed with pleasure and closed his eyes.

“Come,” he said, but he never quite finished the word, just drew out the vowel for what seemed like forever, as if the night breeze swallowed his breath as fast as he could exhale it. It took his body a long moment to register that there was nothing left in his lungs; and then he collapsed.



Continues »

Copyright

LC Hu

"Lump"

© 2010, LC Hu
Self Published
mad.docs.of.lit(at)googlemail.com