anywhere else but here
a short story
I.
I guess I’m finally going to write about it.
If I stare at this empty Google Doc long enough, it’ll spring forth from the deepest recesses of my increasingly candied heart, splattering indiscriminately onto the screen before me. Spin Art: Trauma Edition. And when I’ve finally written about it, well, hell, that’ll put this whole damn thing to bed, won’t it? That’ll be that on the matter, no question about it, and I suppose we can all just pick up from there and move on.
I'm Truman West, by the way. Yes, that Truman West. The dweebian goob from Wailing Winds who swore he saw a werewolf or lycanthrope or whatever we’re calling them now. But that was 10 years ago. The abundance of present-day dweebian goobery aside, I would hope that description no longer applies.
10 years. Jesus Christ. Anyway, that’s where my head was at, if not every part of me, when I checked into the lone hotel in town on the hottest December day in Alabama history. I could have stayed with my parents but The Paper paid for the room so why not. Yes, this is my hometown. But it’s also, simply, where I used to live. An assignment’s an assignment.
“How can I help you today, sir?”
As expected, I’d been back in town less than five minutes and was already face to face with another Wailing Winds High alum. Bobby Wyman, no doubt once the prickiest prick to have ever pricked, and I say that as someone well-versed in prickishness, was now, apparently, a chipper hotel manager.
“Reservation,” I mumbled, careful to keep my head down, hoping like hell Bobby recognized neither my voice nor my name.
“Well, I’ll be dogged.”
Too late.
“The man himself! How the hell are ya, Truman?”
“Good, good,” I lied, pointing my head sharper toward the ground. “Here for The Paper.”
“Of course. We have you in 105, just down the hall.”
I grabbed the key and bolted toward the room. Steps into my journey, I again heard Bobby’s voice, somehow more chipper than before. Ecstatic, even.
“I’m glad you’re finally doing it.”
I offered a halfhearted nod, unsure what was expected of me. Bobby let loose a smile that showed he may have buried that old prickishness deep enough to suffocate it.
“Writing about it, I mean. We all are. Been a long time now.”
I repeated the nod, confused as I was at the new spin of the old world around me.
He meant no harm—the pitifully nostalgic, after all, rarely do—but the sting led to stung all the same. This is me coming clean. This is the proverbial check engine light turning on. This is me writing about it, finally, after all this sweet crushing time. And what a fucking crush it’s been. And my god, how it’s all accelerating so fast now. So fast you wouldn’t believe it. 10 years.
Bobby said there’s a great new bar a few blocks from the hotel called the Toking Goose, a name that ensures my personal diveyness requirements will be met.
Time for a drink.
II.
I dreamed I was floating down a river atop a plastic blow-up swan, my face hidden under one of those floppy sun hats. I watched myself like a movie, counting drags from a cigarette that had long ago lost its flame. Still, I knew it had once burned like a thousand suns damn near the center of my heart. That much I knew for certain.
I woke up scrambling for sunglasses and Advil, which is to say, yes, Bobby was right about the Toking Goose. I even met someone, a blissed-out bartender and bonafide believer named Sadie.
“Truman. Always loved that name,” this someone said after glancing at my ID. “What can I get for you?”
As I ordered my first of many whiskey and Diet Cokes, I spotted a half-assembled drumset in the corner of the bar.
“Who’s playing?” I asked, though I was confident I already knew the answer: Jenny Mosh Fan Club, longtime champions of the regional cover band circuit. Sure enough, Sadie confirmed this week’s house band was one and the same. She advised against getting my hopes up, as an “out-of-towner” like myself could do much better. I should have explained that I was actually from here but I liked the thought of that not being true. I liked being mistaken as a tourist, no matter how fleeting the escape.
“Say, ain’t you the wolf boy?”
I wasn’t sure what to say, exactly, so I let my body take over, flipping into an autopilot mode I developed all those years ago when I first started my eternal sprint away. From the sighting, what happened after. All of it.
“Been a long time now. I’m not sure what else there is to say. And whatever there is to say, I’d rather not be the one saying it.”
Sadie leaned down, turning her head toward the floor so anyone who might be looking on wouldn’t be able to read her lips.
“So it really is you.”
She trailed off for a bit before returning to a whisper.
“I believed you then, I believe you now, and I would believe you again.”
Given that I am woefully human, it was at precisely this moment that I began to fall.
III.
While shouting over the dueling cacophony of Jenny Mosh Fan Club and the sleepless butterflies clamoring for real estate in my stomach, I fear I may have ensured my own conviction in a crime of which everyone is guilty (love). This incrimination began, as it so often does, with a question.
“What’s your favorite song?”
Sadie didn’t hear me at first, my shout having adopted a newfound shyness, convinced as I was that to ask such a question was to willingly tiptoe through fire. I asked again, this time rattling off a monologue, of sorts, that only underscored my acute ridiculousness.
“The one that burrows deeper into your heart each time you hear it. The one built from the bones of all your favorite skeletons, clacking like drums to the beat of some new revelation. Because a favorite song is as much a place as it is a loosely arranged sequence of sounds. It’s home.”
I was sure I had made little to no sense. I was wrong.
“Hold that thought,” Sadie said as she walked over to the band, whispering something indecipherable to the frontman. We traded smiles just as JMFC ripped into Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee,” thus answering the question on her—and let’s face it, my—behalf.
Time for hair twirls and locked eyes and saying too much but worrying you didn’t say anywhere near enough. Time to accept the reality of the fall and enjoy the breeze on the way down.
“I’m gonna take care of your little problem for you,” Sadie said, her hands brushing against mine. “The whole werewolf thing, I mean. I’m on it.”
It was certainly the most romantic slice of nonsense I’d ever been served, if not the most delightfully unhinged. A joke, no doubt. But a good one. A comforting one. One that asks, in a private whisper that only you and those sleepless butterflies can hear, How could you not fall?
“I’m serious. I have a whole plan already in motion. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that you won’t have to worry about that motherfucker ever again.”
I did everything in my power to refrain from singing along to the band’s sporadically faithful rendition of “Chattahoochee” but such efforts proved futile by the end of the second chorus, at which point I stood atop a wobble-prone table and belted with enough earnestness to power Wailing Winds for centuries. I then stomped onto a pitcher of Miller High Life, shattering the glass and soaking my boots with the stench of beer.
For I am the wolf boy.
IV.
This is me, blasted, begging anyone who will listen to consider taking part in an undeniably profitable act of generosity. Saying things like, “I’ll Venmo you five dollars for one cigarette.” Meaning things like, “I’ll do anything to avoid writing about the one thing I’m singularly qualified to write about.”
Or rather, that was me until my marathon of gleefully ingested poisons began to wage full-on war in my bloodstream, making further embarrassments cumbersome. Accepting my body’s well-earned status as merely a battleground for scorched-earth warfare, I tied a bow on the evening by stumbling out the back door of the Toking Goose and into the night.
At this point, Sadie, a wiser drinker than myself, had long ago made her own exit, so I was surprised to find her standing near the dumpster, the glow of a cigarette burning orange against the dark. Toasted enough by now that I didn’t so much want one as desperately need it, I made my way over to find that she had already pulled another cigarette from the pack in her back pocket. She did not look at me.
“I’m gonna go ahead and assume you need me to light that too.”
Sadie kept her eyes on the ground as she pulled at my sleeve and pointed to what was unquestionably the dead body of something not quite human, not quite canine. Something once so wild, thrashing out at the world that made it, now crumpled up next to a dumpster behind a bar that serves fried hot dogs and pickle-flavored vodka.
“Told ya,” Sadie said, her eyes burning brighter than our cigarettes. “I’m a woman of my word.”
V.
10, by the way. That’s how many times I tried to pull from an unsmokable cigarette in my floppy hat dream. I know, I know. It has to mean something, right? As of this writing, I’m inclined to vehemently disagree with that. Straight gobbledygook. But get a few more whiskey and Diet Cokes in me and I imagine I’ll be slurring my way through a different tune.
Time for yet another drink, yes. But also time to have those butterflies sign a short-term lease with the option to extend. Time to realize, though I’ll just as soon forget, that this is quite literally all there is.