He takes the chair and spins it around and sits facing the backrest and says what’s up and Jenny loses her fucking mind. He walks into the bar and Jenny’s standing alone on the dancefloor. She’s wearing a puffy Houston Oilers Starter jacket and black skinny jeans and she’s got several inches of concealer makeup over her acne and eyebrow tattoo. And when he walks over with his beer bottle, when his feet shuffle rakishly into a two step, she backs away laughing, and when he goes for her elbow to draw her into a dance, she banshees violently at him and thrashes her long silly arms and knocks the beer out of his hand and the beer shatters against the checkered tiles. They’ve never met before this moment, her eyes big and hilarious. O fuck! she screams. We’ve become our goddamn parents! She dials his number and slams down the phone. It’s an old black rotary and its bell rings and ings and ings. She poises above him, her defibrillator paddles outstretched. Her nose folds against the windowpane. Her tongue smooshes against the glass. Now his bass is slung low. Now he’s wearing a tiger-skin jacket and his pompadour’s askew, the feedback from his Marshall stacks roiling about them. A sweaty heartbreaker curl hangs between his lost brown eyes and he’s aggressively chewing some bubblegum. Now he’s stomping on his bass pedal. Now he’s pulling off his guitar and grabbing what’s left of his pint. The suds make a skull in his beer. And Jenny’s agog. Jenny’s fucking berserk. She goes. At the bottom of the stage she screams. She pounds her fists against the security rail. She grabs the broke-ass fry cook to her right, still reeking of burnt oil. She squeezes his neck too tight and he yelps and tries to shrink away. It’s super rare to die by a shark attack, she screams digging in her nails, or by lightning or by, like, a black widow bite. She screams from the fire escape. She screams from the patrol car. She screams through the intercom. She racks a shotgun, the bird-haunted rafters. But if you add all those numbers together you have a pretty good chance of dying a horrible fucked-up death. What’s that? he yells back from the stage. You have a pretty good chance! she echoes. Of dying a horrible fucked-up death! Her eyes charged, her face stretched in ecstasy. Isn’t that crazy! Now he’s loading his gear into the back of a van, and through the crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk, Jenny hops. Jenny laughs. Jenny rips her fucking hair out just like gagghh, you know? Now he’s shelving books in the big glass library and she’s leaning over his cart and all around them she sees babies she sees infants she sees toddlers so cute they hurt her fucking mind. She sees terrible celestial light spilling out of their tiny squinching eyes. She sees all of humanity tomato, tomahto collapsed into those demonic fucking gazes. Now she’s talking about how weird death is like, you know, in the classical definition of the word weird. Like how it’s this big alien thing she’s never consented to and she reserves the goddamn right to be a coward during it. Then he’s stretched out on a lawn chair and she’s curled up right beside him. Some crucial element in the balmy air slowly vanishes so the atmosphere becomes toxic. Nearby several grackles flinch and bate their wings and waddle away. Now she’s scream-whispering death-metal lyrics. Now she’s scream-whispering Twisted Sister. Now she’s eviscerating her fucking brain like a spider pulling out its yarn. Now she’s got you fucking cornered, son. Now she’s got you fucking pegged. Now she’s prattling on and on. She clears her throat. She says it’s like when somebody wants to show you a video on their phone and they swear it’s the funniest thing you’ll ever see and their face is all stricken with joy and anticipation and they keep glancing at you to see if you feel the same which you don’t because it’s not your type of humor and the video just keeps going on and on and they keep waiting for you to respond (your mouth gag loosening, your eyes wild, your palm pressed to the talk part of your cellphone, your grocery runner’s tiny muffled laughter) and all you can do is come up with a pinched little smile and they scream, this is funny! What’s your problem! This is comedy! Now the buzzards wheel slowly above them, their bloated bodies in tight jeans. It’s almost a hundred and ten degrees outside. Less under the tarp. Like a deer in headlights, the look she gets at the oddest moments. How can you ever love a person like that? What do you think of this shirt? she asks. Alligators croaking at the moon. Her Instagram’s fucking Walmart. Her mullet’s coronated with wildflowers. Her mind’s a Molotov is fucking burning is fucking unsalvageable. It’s like a big acid falls on her beaming face and the acid melts off her skin and beneath it are all these animatronics and gears and throbbing bladders loaded with blood and glitter and gore that explode all at once. And there you are. Looking right at her. This is called true love, baby. It’s all you ever wanted and more. And all that shit suddenly comes at you and it gets in your eyes and mouth and nose. And it’s so fucking disgusting and so fucking wrong lol. But that’s what you get for playing, my little cabbage. That’s what you get for being here <3.
Brent Joseph Johnson was born and raised in rural Kansas. He was most recently the English editor for Heritage Magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. His writing has also appeared in the Tampa Review, storySouth, and Heavy Feather Review. He now lives in South Austin.
