Black hair, black fishnets and a black dress, between her thin fingers a cigarette was as burnt as the evening. A street lamp and a neon sign in the distance combined to give her pale skin a faint greenish cast. Her eyes, two pools of liquid night, searched the damp streets for anything of interest, only to find the same blandness she had tried to leave behind in the club. Men, rolled off an assembly line with mechanical precision, escorting women from the same cookie cutter trying to distinguish themselves with a different color of candied glitter. The crowd filtered out of the club into a fleet of imported sports cars that sped off belching poison and pretense.
Turning away, “there has to be more,” some distant voice whispered in her mind. She put the cigarette, almost forgotten, to her mouth and drew as much smoke as she could, leaving a maroon impression of her cool lips on the filter. She flicked the butt to the pavement sending it skipping on the damp street like a molten rock across a midnight pond.
A bird lay among the crushed beer cans, shreds of plastic and clumps of rancid food spilling out of the dumpster behind the club. On its back, its legs in the air, its head turned to the side so one eye, black as hers, stared somewhere beyond the thick clouds above, into eternity. “Scott,” the voice suggested to only her.
She was there the moment he died, in the hospital, his face beaten beyond recognition, swollen and numb. She was looking into his blue eyes when something seemed to evaporate from them, leaving them to stare, forever, into a place where eternity collapses into a flicker. She didn’t cry, only looked, numbly, as if something had evaporated from herself at the same moment as it had from Scott.
She wondered if that’s when the emptiness started. That blackness inside her that devoured any light cast into it. It seemed like it had always been there. She couldn’t even think about it long, as if it fed on her attention. Did everyone have it? Did they think their expensive cars and artificial lives were shrinking the emptiness?
The void demanded another cigarette and she complied, feeding it, and it strengthened. When did it end?
In the distance a grain elevator sat deep in a field off the shores of the city. Train tracks glanced alongside it like arteries. Red lights throbbed along the contours like faint hearts. She would go there after work, where it happened. How it happened was a secret of the wet, rusted metal and cold concrete. It called to her in some unspoken way, whispering some alien language deep in a place known only to dreams. The answer of Scott’s death was locked in that place.
She studied the elevator and it stared, not back, but past, beyond the clouds, beyond eternity. Forever empty, but with no concern.
The emptiness hadn’t always been there, she remembered. The day she met Scott, picking dandelions, she never thought to ask if there was more.
The red door of the club swung open and Anthony peered to the corner of the building, “Hey, I ain’t payin’ you to stand out here all night smokin’! Get in here and clean up!”
She didn’t respond, only watched as the head popped back inside and the door closed, like some ridiculous cuckoo clock.
Lisa glanced back at the bird—at Scott—one last time, with layers of dead emotion encasing her mind like a cyst. Shaking, she fumbled through her black purse and found a bottle which gladly gave her two pills. She chewed the oxycontins and a tear formed from somewhere in her black eyes, escaping down her cheek, trailing mascara, a streak of liquid night.