the dust and the screaming or the ghost of friday

a short (very short) story on the subject of appendicitis

by genevieve m. oliver

Leon’s appendix exploded when he was seventeen. I drove him to the hospital, keeping my eyes out of the rearview mirror, my best friend sobbing in the backseat, writing on ripped black leather. The sky had been blue ninth period, the clouds gathered now in an apocalyptic fashion. I know Leon saw his world end in this incredible sudden darkness, perhaps he saw God. It was the day of the junior prom. When they told me he was dead I cried and my eye makeup made my tears black and I cried black circles onto my dress like some emo music video.

“There was nothing we could do.”

“We’re sorry.”

I wanted to tell them that he was half-dead anyway, a shell of himself, that his life was a virgin-suicides, an Augusten Burroughs novel, a lifetime-channel thank-God-this-is-not-your-child special. The boy had terrible karma. His life was a misfortune, an accident from the beginning, mistake after mistake after mistake and it killed him, it suffocated him and hung him and stabbed him in the back and shot him ten times. He owned a black cat – Goldaline – and he walked under ladders. He did not believe in superstition but it seemed to believe very strongly in him.

We lived in a horrible place, south Waterbury, Connecticut. We climbed on weekends up to Holyland and smoked and drank whatever we could take from our parents and put in water bottles and I took photographs of him and of everything. I see better through a camera, my dad’s camera, an age-old Nikon that was older than me.

Once he was gone, I went up to his bedroom, climbing the tree and pulling myself up through his window in the way he used to climb out at midnight and we’d bike to shows or parties. He lived in a blue-wallpapered hell. His clothes on the floor made me tear up, the smell of his shampoo in everything. “Citra-shine,” he’d said to me when I laughed at him. “So good, Friday. So good.” His black jeans, his band t-shirts, green Converse, Ray-Bans with one lens cracked from when we hit a tree on my bike, drunk at 3am. The ghost of Leon wore a Radiohead t-shirt and dirty Vans. “Friday.” The last words he spoke to me, that apocalypse-day, the end of the world. “Oh, Jesus, Friday. Something’s wrong with me.” The ghost of Leon fell down his front stairs and stumbled into my car, clutching at something inside him, screaming in my back seat.

I read his writing.

He told me never to read it. “Over my dead body,” He said, smacking my hand with a balsa-wood wing detached from a model airplane. I showed him my photography, although it was mostly of him walking under ladders at Holyland and holding Goldaline and asleep on the beach in the fall, overcast black-and-white days, orange-leaf days, pale hairs on his arms standing goosebumped and upright. He wrote about those kids of days, he wrote about us on the hill with a pack of cigarettes, about that time in June we were up at Holyland and heard gunshots and hid in the miniature houses in Bethlehem village, gasping and holding each other as four men went by all in black suits, and the next day they said that the mayor’s son had gone missing. When you look at a thing and you cannot find words to describe it, Leon found the words and he wrote them. I read his notebooks, all of them – seven – all the way through in the crawlspace in his closet, the laundry-detergent slash citrus smell of him like perfume in the air.

I slept there that night, in his bed. His parents were gone somewhere, I never knew where they had gone, and they never came back. I threw three of his blazers over me like blankets. In the morning I woke up, someone had covered me with a sheet and tucked my hair behind my ears. I stood up and I saw him standing on the windowsill, he was very transparent. I saw the sharp angles of the bones in his face, the ghost of Leon in the dirty Vans he lived in and he died in. The morning sun was a bright burst through his torso. Goldaline and I took two steps toward him, he looked back at us once; a girl and a black cat. He smiled at us, I saw the flash of translucent teeth, but he jumped out onto the branch below his window, cat-nimble, balancing with transparent, skinny arms, and then he leapt. I never saw him again.

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"the dust and the screaming. the yuppies networking. the panic the vomit the panic the vomit. god loves his children."
i did not write that.