Spectacle: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

the road. It was upside down in a field. But this didn’t make me afraid of buses. Because there was something different about crashing on land. I mean it was different from crashing to land.
    As a kid I wanted to walk a tightrope. I’d seen a circus on TV. I’d watched it with my father. I liked the tightrope walker most. I liked the thin stick he held on to. And how he stared ahead to the other side. And how he would make it clear to that other side. Or how, perhaps, he would not.
    There were photos all over of the crash. It’s not enough to say raining metal. It’s not enough to say twisted metal. Or that the people on the ground were stuck in the storm. Or that I wasn’t there, of course, in the storm. Because I was thousands of miles away, of course. I was sitting around Club Midnight. And pills were spilled out onto the floor. And a guy was writing on my arm. He wrote the first four letters of my name. I imagine he planned to write the fifth. But I said, Stop.
    There was a service in a church. I went because it was right to go. I went because everyone went. Before the service, we stood outside. Someone had something to smoke. Someone else had pills. We went to the service all messed up. I was too messed up to feel a thing. It wasn’t a big deal, being messed up. The whole world was a mess.
    Then were the times lying flat in the snow. It didn’t make sense, my lying flat. I know this now. It would not have saved me, lying flat, from a storm of metal crashing.
    To my friends I said, I’m fine. I said, I am. But they looked at me like, You’re not fine. But I am, I said. Because I was, I thought. Because I didn’t know her well enough to be anything other than fine.
    The guy was laughing at me. I was too messed up to laugh. My tongue felt covered in fur. Clouds had formed, and I fell into them, one by one. I said, My tongue. I said, My God. I didn’t mean to say this. I didn’t mean to say anything. I didn’t want a conversation. It had started to snow, and I wanted to go outside. Because the snow just seemed like more than snow. It was something about the light. I didn’t know what it was. But the guy said, Your tongue, and laughed again. And then I was falling into him. And if I must use an adjective, right now, right here, I would use beautiful.
    I know I shouldn’t have been driving. The roads were a mess. Murder, my father would have said. Murder, every time it snowed. But there I was, rising from the couch. There I was, surrounded by clouds. Next I was in the driver’s seat. And there he was beside me. And there were the holiday lights in windows. And the lit-up trees in windows. And the reflection of my car. And the reflection of us inside the car. And there was my building. There were the stairs leading to my door.
    I said I wanted to walk a tightrope. My father said, Do you want to be killed. I didn’t want to be killed. I wanted to be something else. I wanted to be between living and not living. Just for the time it would take to walk the tightrope. Just for the time it would take to make it to the other side. Or for the time it would take to fall. Over my dead body, my father said. I would go to school like everyone else. I would read and write like everyone else. I would graduate like everyone else. I would go to college. I would get a job. I would live in a house. I would have kids. And eventually I, like everyone else, would die.
    There’s nothing to say about the service. Someone spoke. Then someone else spoke. Then someone played guitar. Because she played guitar. Because it’s how she would have wanted it. That’s what everyone said. She would have wanted it that way. As if anyone ever could really know. I hardly even knew the girl. She went to my school. I sometimes smoked with her after class. I sometimes saw her in Club Midnight. But it was always a lot of us drinking. It was her and it was the guy from the couch. It was others too, and we sometimes talked. And perhaps I lit her