The Last Tomorrow Read Free Page A

through it, lifting a makeshift pistol and aiming it at his sleeping stepfather’s left
temple.
    His stepfather: sprawled out on the couch, the old sagging couch with its itchy upholstery, one arm flopped over his fat belly, the other hanging down, knuckles on the carpet, palm open like
he’s expecting silver. Shallow nasal snores as he inhales through his nostrils are followed by quiet exhalations through his open mouth like wind through a canyon but distant.
    Except for these sounds, silence.
    All other noises have been erased. In their place, a strange calm.
    But something’s coming. Like a train you sense even before you can hear it, the vibrations on your skin, something approaches.
    It’s happening. He doesn’t even feel like he’s doing it. It feels as though he’s a mere puppet and someone else is controlling him. Someone else is pulling the strings,
but it’s happening, and soon it’ll be finished.
    Sandy watches himself raise the gun. Watches himself pull back on the washer. Watches the rubber band stretch. Watches the color change slightly, turning a lighter shade of beige as the rubber
thins and grows taut.
    He watches himself let it go.
    There’s nothing to it. The fingers separate by mere millimeters and the metal washer jumps from between them.
    The gun makes a muted popping sound. The empty shell shoots out the back of the gun and thwacks Sandy in the neck. His stepfather’s head snaps to the right. Then he sits up, his stepfather
sits up, wobbling drunkenly, reminding Sandy of a buoy on the water, bobbing . . . bobbing . . . bobbing.
    With the sound of the shot Sandy seems to have been slammed back into himself, and now here he is again – hi, old friend, it’s been too long – standing only feet from his
stepfather, and his first thought is that it didn’t work. The gun didn’t work correctly. If it had worked correctly his stepfather would be dead. But he’s not dead. He’s
sitting on the couch, he’s lifting his head, he’s looking at Sandy. He’s saying, ‘What – what happened?’
    Blood trickles down the side of his face.
    Sandy opens his mouth to respond, but there are no words.
    2
    He looks at his stepfather. His stepfather looks back. The gun hangs from Sandy’s small fist. Blood trickles down the side of his stepfather’s face. His left eye
fills with blood. The hole in his temple is black. You could easily plug it with a pencil eraser. There you go, sir, all fixed up, see the girl at the front desk about the bill. His stepfather
blinks. A tear of blood rolls down his cheek from his left eye.
    He repeats his earlier question: ‘What . . . happened?’
    Sandy can only stare.
    ‘Oh, God,’ his stepfather says.
    He leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, looking down at the carpet between his feet. His hair hangs in sweaty clumps. There’s a bald spot at the crown of his head, a semi-circle
of shiny skin about as big around as a silver dollar, and a red pimple just inside the hairline. Blood drips from the side of his face and onto his calf. Blood drips onto the carpet. He
doesn’t seem to notice.
    ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘I must’ve drunk more . . . more than I . . . more than I . . .’
    He spits between his feet. A long string of saliva stretches almost a full foot before snapping and falling to the floor.
    ‘I think I might be sick,’ he says.
    Sandy puts a second bullet into the gun, forcing himself to stay where he is and do this. His heart pounds in his chest and he wishes already, with it still unfinished, that he had listened to
his doubts. He never should have done this.
    He wants to turn and run. He could run away and never come back. If he did that he wouldn’t have to finish this. He could just go away and live the life of a hobo and he would never have
to see Neil again. He wouldn’t have to finish this and he wouldn’t have to see Neil either. That’s what he should have done in the first place. Some older hobo would teach him
about