WORD COUNT: 1,920
CHARACTER(S) INCLUDED: Laurel ( mentioned ), Bishop ( mentioned )
SUMMARY: Angel is too tired from her night shift at the Garbage Plate to be dealing with her boyfriend’s bullshit. Ghosts don’t make it any easier.
TRIGGERS: binge-drinking, emotional abuse, mentions of death & alcoholism
NOTES: The ghost story from my app! Gives insight into the toxic dynamic between Angel & her boyfriend.
The crescent moon and a chorus of cicadas are Angel’s only company as she walks home after her night shift at Garbage Plate. As much as she liked to crawl into bed and sleep the day away, she has to contend with her opening shift at Lollygag in just a few short hours. The thick stench of grease is stuck to her skin; she debates on whether to waste precious time showering or take all the sleep she can get. Rest is precious, even if she’d be responsible for stinking up the truck. Angel draws up a mental image of this week’s schedule, trying to remember who she’s opening with tomorrow morning — er, today, technically. Laurel. A blessing, because at least Angel can count on the blonde to make the shift go by quickly. But her friend definitely wouldn’t hesitate to say something about how bad she smells. A shower it is, then, if only to save Laurel from a tortuously stinky shift.
Pain pounds in her feet with each tired step and weariness sinks into her bones, but Angel’s grip on the hot pink bottle of pepper spray remains vigilantly tight. Better safe than sorry. It’s not that Angel makes a habit of walking alone late at night, but Bryan said he needed their car that evening for… something. Angel doesn’t remember questioning him about it, but she knows he was probably shooting the shit with some of his dead-beat buddies from high school.
Some (Bishop) would argue that Bryan was also a deadbeat, but Angel would argue that at least Bryan was trying to get a job. It didn’t help that someone (also Bishop) had taken it upon themselves to beat the living crap out of Bryan. How was he supposed to show up for a job interview with a black eye? As a result, Angel’s been doing what she can to make things easier for him, since it was her (ex?) friend responsible for all the trouble. And in Bryan’s eyes, that meant she was responsible. So he wanted the car for the evening? Fine, he could have it. As long as it meant Angel didn’t have to put up with another drawn-out argument about that batshit psychopath.
The car is in their driveway, thankfully, but the living room light is still on. Angel finds herself torn between feeling relieved that he’s home and worried about why he’s still up so late. Coming up to the worn-down old house she shares with Bryan always leaves Angel feeling dejected, like someone is slowly squeezing all the air out of her. It’s far from the idyllic family home she envisioned they’d share in their teenage years, back when they had the whole world ahead of them. He called it a “fixer-upper” when he first convinced her to buy it with him, promising that he’d transform it into the house of their dreams. “A castle fit for the Prom Queen.” Several years later, and the only thing that’s been “repaired” was a leak in the roof, thanks to Bryan’s ingenious use of duct tape.
It takes her a while to open the front door; a busted front lock is just another thing on the long list Bryan keeps promising to repair. When she finally gets it open, she fills her voice with all the leftover cheer she can muster to sing out, “Honey, I’m home.” The greeting is a long-running joke between the two; Bryan used to blast the Shania Twain song every time he picked her up from one of her part-time jobs in high school. They hadn’t sung together in a long time, but hopefully Bryan was in a good enough mood to reply off-key, “And I had a hard day.”
“—the fuck took you so long?” a grouchy voice calls from the living room. Angel visibly deflates, and immediately feels twice as tired. She hears the way Bryan slurs his words before she notices the empty beer bottles littering the kitchen. He didn’t usually binge-drink, knowing how sensitive she was about it due to her father, but the fight with Bishop has left Bryan acting more destructive than usual. It’s not a good look on him.
Angel doesn’t know if he’s serious with his question or looking to pick another fight. She’s not in the mood either way, too tired and too disappointed to get into it with him. “I, uh, had to walk home,” she says flatly. She doesn’t tell Bryan about how she didn’t want to trouble her coworkers for a ride, slightly embarrassed for them to see just how rundown her home is.
“You couldn’t have called me for a ride?” He stumbles out of the living room as he says that, tripping over his own unsteady feet. Angel flinches at the sight, ugly childhood memories of her father blooming in her mind without her permission. Angel hates it when Bryan gets like this, and he knows it. He of all people knows how her mother was the casualty of a drunk driver, how her father was always too drunk to properly parent her. It’s cruel of him to greet her like this, to act as though this behavior is any way appropriate. Either he’s too upset with himself to care or just that angry with her.
You’re in no shape to give anyone a ride, is what she wants to say, with all the hurt and anger festering deep within her fractured heart. But she has no energy to lash out at him, knowing that in his own way, he’s hurting, too. It’s hard to look at his face, all bruised and swollen — no doubt his pride hurts even more.
So she schools her face, and tries to keep the ice out of her voice when she responds, “I hope you didn’t drive home like this.” The thought of it makes her hands shake, house keys rattling despite her efforts to keep her cool. Not that Bryan would ever do that, but seeing him like this makes her think the worst. He reminds her too much of her father.
Bryan looks repulsed that she’d even suggest the idea, as if it’s the last thing he’d ever do — even if he just drunkenly offered her a ride. “Are you fucking kidding me right now, Ang? Is that really what you think of me?”
Immediately, she realizes her mistake. The last thing she wanted to do was pile on him even more. “No, I just—”
But it’s too late. His rage gets the better of him, and he goes off at her and her daddy issues and her “weird thing” about alcohol. How all he wanted to do was relax after a stressful day, and she comes home late accusing him of heinous things. He reminds her too much of her father like this, and Angel hates herself for making the comparison. She hates herself even more for feeling like the lost little girl she once was, alone in grieving her mother and taking care of a father who lost all his cares with his wife.
She needs to get far away from Bryan and all the toxicity he breeds. But he keeps blocking her path to their bedroom no matter how many times she tries to walk away from him. It doesn’t occur to her to go out the front door and just leave. After all, where would she go at this hour? How would she explain the mess she got herself in?
I’m trapped, is all she can think as Bryan goes from disparaging her to asking her for her tips from that night. But he doesn’t settle down even after she empties her apron pocket of all the loose change and crumbled bills she has to offer. He begins accusing her of pocketing money without him knowing, and that’s the straw that finally breaks Angel’s back. She starts hoarsely shouting back about how it’s her tips and so what if she wanted to set aside some of it for her meager college fund? And then he gets on her for hiding things from him, and she accuses him of hiding his drinking from her, and that’s when shit hits the fan.
The argument has gotten so heated that neither one of them notices the sudden chill in the air, a blanket of frost covering the room. Then without warning, one of Bryan’s empty glass bottles flies from the living room and shatters against the wall in the kitchen, on the complete opposite side of the house. It’s the unexpected explosion of glass that finally shocks the two of them into silence.
Angel is left frozen in fear, paralyzed by the knowledge that they are not alone. It’s as though a spell has been put on the house, the air thick with something so otherworldly that it’s hard for her to breathe. But Bryan, predictable as ever, merely leers at the mess and grumbles, “Go clean that shit up.”
He finally trudges back to the worn-down living room couch, repelled by the mess. It’s as though he doesn’t mind the company of any restless spirits so long as they don’t get in the way of his plans to drink the night away. Meanwhile, Angel gapes at the wreckage, as if waiting for something else to come of it. But after several long moments, the spell breaks on its own. The air relaxes, and she finds herself gasping for breath.
No one’s ever thrown a beer bottle at her, but her father had accidentally broken plenty of them in drunken stupors. There’s a scar on Angel’s palm from one of the times when she got cut trying to clumsily pick up the glass. As she cleans up the mess in the kitchen, she doesn’t wonder about how the bottle propelled itself against the wall. Her fatigued mind wanders to dark corners she tried to abandon years ago, but never could. Despite everything that’s happened, all she can think about is her father, with nothing but liquor for company. Wondering if he even notices that no one’s cleaning up his messes anymore.
She wraps herself in blankets when she finally crawls into bed, unable to shake off the chill. She doesn’t sleep at all.
-------------------------------------------------
“You must’ve just knocked the bottle over,” Bryan tells her the next day when she brings it up. The argument is long from settled, but they’d both silently agreed to move past it like they always do. Rehashing it out would just lead to another and besides, it was just one stupid argument. There will be plenty more to look forward to in the future.
“It flew from the living room.” She wants to question just how drunk he was that night, to think she knocked it over. But that would just piss him off again, and the last thing she wants to do is sour his mood when he’s been so sweet to her today.
The two of them are Screamer natives, born and raised, and no stranger to every spooky legend lurking in the town’s history. Angel never thought much of it — every place had its quirks, and she was always too consumed with her father’s demons to deal with any others. But still, Angel couldn’t deny there was something haunting about their little small town.
“Flew?” He stares at her as if her mind just fell out of her pretty little head. “Babe, bottles don’t fly. You take one down, pass it around—”
“Oh, shut up.” And then he kisses her, decidedly ending the discussion for good. It’s always his call, even if she wants to analyze the possible paranormal activity even further. So she doesn’t bring it up again, too exhausted by life to be concerned with the supposed spirits of the dead. And with enough time and no more supernatural interruptions, she begins to remember it the way Bryan told her to. Maybe she did knock over the bottle without realizing it.
After all, wasn’t it usually her fault?
