Mundane Reality
That time I showed my breasts to a stranger
Escaping the Singularity, May 2019
The tears are still damp on my face as I near the end of our road, hot tears, angry tears. Where am I going? I cross the railroad tracks and head right, towards Devil’s Bones - I won’t go there again, not this time, but I still feel drawn that way. I can get anywhere I might need to go that way.
I trudge down the road, ignoring the passing vehicles, thinking. I could go to Coldwater, but I’m not sure that would do me much good. I could go to M and the Alien’s house — the thought is compelling, but somehow it just doesn’t feel quite right. One foot in front of the other, down a now-familiar path, the neurons in my brain in complete disorder. Where am I going?
I have no phone. I have no money. I don’t even have a bottle of water. I had thrown a few clothes in a bag but I don’t have them now either. The baby would be fine at home, I knew — it was much too hot to take her.
I don’t exactly arrive at a conclusion; the conclusion forces itself on me, almost like an intruder — you’re going to the Wolf’s house. I still think he’s a sheep at this point, of course. It won’t be until the ordeal is over and we are driving home that I really see him for the Wolf that he has allowed himself to become.
Step after step. I have a long way to go. The only thing in my possession are the shorts and striped shirt I put on this morning, the key ring on my belt loop that no longer has any keys on it. Good thing I put on a bra.
I pace myself. I have a long way to go.
I am not even outside town limits when an old Ford truck with a dent in the side pulls up beside me. Odd, I will later think — I have walked this way many times and no one has ever stopped me before. The man driving the Ford is old, overweight, not really breathing properly.
“Do you need a ride?” he calls in a raspy, wobbly voice, a voice that sounds like a buoy being tossed around in choppy waves, weak. I look at the old man warily. I can run away from this guy if I have to.
At least I know where I’m going.
“Sure,” I say. I climb into his truck, random newspapers and empty styrofoam coffee cups and a couple of small power tools I’m sure he has never used laying on the floorboard. I shut the door. “Thank you.”
He pulls back onto the road. “Which way are you headed?” he asks in that unsteady voice.
“To my father-in-law’s house,” I say, and tell him where it is.
“That’s a long way to go.” (I wish I could write the way he talked, I wish you could hear it.)
“It’s about a two-hour drive,” I answer.
The old man is quiet for a minute, and I look out the window as we pass Dog Creek. Usually, when I walk out, this is as far as I go (except that one time I started toward Devil’s Bones too late in the evening; I made it halfway to the old school then before I got the text that turned me back around. Leave her alone, Snake, she’s a married woman.).
“I’m going to take you to my house and get you a drink of water,” the old man says, “and then I’ll carry you on a way.” I can’t decide if he’s a fatherly Santa Claus type or just creepy.
His house is a nondescript brick ranch right off the road. (I passed his house that night I went walking down this way, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it then, of course.) I follow him in — the kitchen is scrupulously clean, and I feel like a hobo by comparison. My shirt has paint on it and my shorts have holes in them. It’s amazing my shoes are still together, they’re so old. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere when I put them on this morning.
There’s a door that looks like it might lead to a basement, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m about to end up at the bottom of it, where nobody knows. A deep pit, rats for company, moldy crusts for dinner, daily torturing. Gee, I hope not.
The old man gives me a glass of water, watches me drink it for a moment (did he poison this? It tastes like regular water), then asks me what happened.
I don’t really tell him what happened. I deflect the question by telling him that my husband is a control freak.
“Were you unfaithful?” he asks after a moment’s pause. Not actually his business, but I don’t think of that now.
“No!” I say. “He thinks I’m in love with someone else, but I’m not.” I can’t really think of that right now.
The water isn’t poisoned, and he offers me a Dr. Pepper before we go back outside. I don’t drink soda but I take it. He also hands me a ten dollar bill, which I pocket. I’ll take what I can get, I guess, in this situation.
The old man drives me all the way to a gas station at about the halfway point. His driving is a little alarming, not too fast, but wobbly, like his voice. Maybe ten minutes before we get there, he says, “I was hoping you would show me something.”
“What do you mean?”
He gestures at me. “Your body.”
I feel this weird jolt — oh, that — and look out the window. Duh. Here I am wondering if he wants to kill me, if he’s going to drop me off at some accomplice’s house to hack me into pieces and sell my body parts on the black market, but the reality is far more mundane — and, somehow, more disconcerting. The old man wants to see a pretty girl’s tits.
“There’s not much to see,” I mumble. God damn the blush that spreads across my skin, like a bloodstain.
“I don’t believe that,” he answers. I say nothing back. “You don’t have to,” he adds after a while.
By the time we get to the gas station, I’ve talked myself into it. He just saved me like four hours of walking in the hot sun. He’s pretty harmless. He probably hasn’t seen a decent set of tits in forty years.
He turns the truck off and just sits there. I sit awkwardly for a moment. I could jump out and run off right now, but I feel like it’s something I ought to do. (Even now, I can’t quite decide if it was something I chose to do or felt I had no choice but to do.) So I pull down the neck of my shirt and the sports bra I’m wearing, both already stretched from my having nursed two babies in them. Atlas is going to be so mad at me.
The old man’s eyes practically bug out.
“They’re beautiful,” he says. Who is he to say they’re beautiful?
“They’ve fed a lot of babies,” I answer. He reaches over and sort of jiggles the left one. I let him look for a minute, then pull my shirt and bra back into place.
“And the bottom?” he asks. I can’t even look at him as I shake my head. No way. He says something else, but I can’t understand him — my brain, I realize, is no longer computing it.
“I have to go,” I say, and I jump out of the truck before he can say anything else.
I take a huge breath and put on my armor as I walk into the gas station. I don’t watch the old man pull away. I’m a fucking tough guy; leave me alone, mother fuckers. “There are five million, four hundred seventy-six thousand, seventy-eight hours left until the Apocalypse,” reads a sign on the door. The Apocalypse is now, I think. A man standing in line looks at me with something like contempt on his face. Must’ve seen me bare my breasts for a stranger.
I make a contemptuous face back and decide I don’t care. I’ve had worse.