>Another cockroach crawls through my hair. I lift its body, watch its legs wiggle. I hate to kill anything, so I flick him into a corner of the garage and look up from the cement. Johnny, Karl, Sean, and James fold over their instruments like skinny hunchbacks, fingers fumbling. A scream of feedback reverberates.
They suck, but their focus gets to me.
***
>When Johnny first asked me to come to practice, I couldn’t understand why he wanted me there. They practiced at his place, so it wasn’t like he needed a ride. He shuttled me through his house and into the garage, then asked me to stay. I wanted to say that I had shit to do—and I did: fires to start, strip malls to burn down, gasoline in the trunk of my car, ready to go. But I couldn’t say that to him, or anyone, so I stayed.
>Tools and lawnmowers lined the walls, a moldy blanket in one corner; amps and instruments and pedals and wires clustered into a rat king in the center of the floor. The garage door didn’t even work—something about a broken spring that Johnny refused to fix. So when Johnny said, “Make yourself comfortable,” I wasn’t sure what he had in mind.
>I sat against the wall. They played a song, all heavy distortion and down tuned guitars. It sucked. Johnny’s body hooked into a C-shape, his eyes focused on the frets, on his fingers, his red-orange hair fluffing outward as he bobbed his head. I watched his face as he forgot I existed, as his body reformed itself into a house on fire: a house I could never enter. Burning buildings make terrible homes, but I’ve never wanted to live anywhere so badly.
Staring at the boys, I felt suffocated by my bones and organs and skin, claustrophobic inside myself, incapable of immersion in anything. After two songs, I had to go.
At Wendy’s, I ordered french fries and ate them in the parking lot while listening to music that didn’t suck at maximum volume. Some kids banged on my window and screamed at me to turn it down, but I just slouched further in my seat. After finishing my fries, I drove about fifty miles north, got off at a gas station, bought a cup of coffee and turned back. I drove for hours. My mind sparked hot as a trick candle, off and on and off and on and never quite cutting out.
***
The latest work, Girlfriend, by Deirdre Coyle.
joylandmagazine.com/regions/new-york/girlfriend