The Aftertaste of Scott Murphy
‘I am made of fleeting moments and Ganja,’ she whispered to herself as she turned her teary eyes to the horizon, cigarette dangling in one hand. How long had she been shaking? Was it from the pain or the cold? She didn’t feel cold anymore; but someone once told her that wasn’t a good sign. She was too far gone to remember who. Or maybe she still saw his face every time she closed her eyes, and her weed was lying to her again.
His shirt still covered her back, warm like the arms she thought she would wake up in forever. But he had other plans. Other girls. Another life. They always had another life. And maybe that wasn’t what she wanted to think of as she paced back and forth on that balcony, listening to the constant honking and screech of tires below. But she kept seeing his face, even when he wasn’t there. In the mirror. Outside the window of her truck, begging her back to that bar on the other side of town, the one with the chicken no one ever ordered and the bouncer who smiled at her. The one that played the same five songs over and over, all night long. With boys that slipped roaches in your whiskey sour the second they told you they loved you.
If she was in her right mind, she would light those memories up, watch them burn like the wildfire that was her life, that town she’d fled, that car her daddy bought her that might as well have killed her when it had the chance. She would cling to that sliver of sanity like she needed it to survive. But that would mean erasing him from her past, her present. Her future. Eradicating his fingertips memorizing every dip and curve of her body, running her all over town, all through her head until she might as well just lose her mind.
His words come back to her when the sun peeks through her blinds in the morning, or when she goes to the corner-store and sees their old clique strutting through each aisle, everyone ignoring her existence like she wishes she could ignore theirs. Like she wishes she could pack up every memory into a cardboard box and set it ablaze. But she can still smell the sweetness of his skin, remember every inch of family’s house and the turns he took the night he took her down to the water, when another girl was still on his mind. Before waiting for midnights. Before Sundays. Before identical shirts lined their backs and it wasn’t on purpose.
‘One day, I’ll leave her and we can be together.’
‘Oh… I don’t actually like you like that. I just… I just like hanging out together.’
‘One day, I’ll bring you home. So they can know you, too.’
One lie heaped onto another until he was drowning in them. Wasn’t that what he was best at? The game, the thrill of letting his prize of the day think they might finally turn into something? But it only hurt the girls in the long run. He’d built that armor so tight around his soul that it made him almost impenetrable, cold. Heartless. A shell of a man (because everyone knew he was never a man to begin with) wandering from city to city, trying to find another yearning soul to drown in the hope that one day, he’ll say those three words. But he won’t. He can’t. He doesn’t know how.
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