Disintegration Read Free

lights and rearview mirrors are for suckers.
    My spine crackles with electricity. Palms sweaty, I wipe them on my pants. A twinge flutters in my stomach, and as he guns it wide, I floor it straight ahead. I find a gap in the middle lane, and cut over. He’s flying down the right lane, the exit lane, but he’s not exiting.
    Two cars in front of me, one car, then I’m clear. I’m still on his left, in his blind spot, off the left rear quarter panel. We swerve over at the same time, me to the right, and him to the left. He sees me too late to do anything but look up. And in this game of chicken, I’m not backing off. In fact, I’m overcompensating, I keep going to the right, my face filled with white teeth, a grin as wide as my head.
    We connect, metal on metal shrieking, sparks flying, and he tries to pull it to the right. I keep coming with him. My head is filled with cotton candy. I’m bending him over and fucking him in the ass. I’m salivating as I push his Berliner into the guardrail, his eyes wide, mouth agape and I’m laughing for the first time since…
    Well…
    Since it all happened.
    I keep coming, I accelerate, and push against the front of his car until it wedges between the van and the metal rail. Rushing up to us is a triangle of metal that separates the exit from the highway, and we’re not going to stop in time. With a bone-rattling finality we hit.
    I am rocked to the core of my frame. I glance over at him and he’s as pale as my inner thighs. Steam rises from the hood of his car, mangled metal pushing up into the air. His car slid up a bit past mine, and I get out of the van, covered in bits of broken glass and beer. Wandering over to him, my vision is a film of strawberry, the wind from the passing cars fluttering across my skin, horns and great groaning rushes of metal and air. His door is open and he’s trying to get out. He looks up at me, a gouge across his forehead, blood dripping down into his eyes. He can hardly see. I lean into the car.
    “It’s okay man, just hold on, I gotcha.”
    “What the fuck?…Oh man, my arm, I think it’s broken…. Oh, my baby, my car…”
    I pull him out by the neck, the head, the shoulders.
    “Ah shit, man that hurts, hold on….”
    I hold him up and when he raises his eyes I punch him in the face.
    “You stupid motherfucker,” I say.
    I hold his blue-striped button-down in my left fist and pummel him. As I ram my fist into his nose, it cracks—great squirts of hot liquid hitting my chest, again and again, until his face is gone. He goes limp, and filled with glee I drop him in the dirt, a bundle of bent limbs. I lean over him and whisper.
    “That’s for driving like a dick.”
    I stand up and look around. It feels like twenty minutes, but it’s more like twenty seconds. I run back over to the van, jump in, and back it up just enough to get around his broken beauty and head off down the exit, clipping the right rear taillight for good measure.
    Somehow the apartment appears. I park the van on a side street, the damaged side toward the sidewalk. I grab a screwdriver out of the back. Coated in sweat, eyes glazed over, I take off the license plates, and switch them with a white van up the street. Russo Flowers. And kick in his front left taillight. Funny how many white vans are out there just waiting to be used.
    Stumbling into my new hideout, I collapse in the middle of the floor. I giggle uncontrollably and pass out in a puddle of my own urine. And sleep like a baby.

Chapter 9
    My first taste, that’s what it was. I stand in the shower, eyes closed, in the dark. The memory of that day flitters across my eyelids, and I lean against the white tile and let the hot water beat down on my back. I haven’t opened the envelope yet, but I know what it will say.
    A glimmer of light seeps under the bathroom door from the kitchen. Shapes and figures skitter across my flesh. A band of black rings wraps around my left biceps. An orange koi fish curls around my