I Am Coming to Asheville to Kill You
Photo credit: Cody Scott Milewski | Unsplash
The gun was in the passenger seat where I used to sit. It was rattling and the windows were rattling too because they were half-open. The gas tank was almost empty again, which seemed impossible. But the truth is, I’ve gotten poor at keeping track of time. The more I try, the more rows of teeth it grows. Some say this is normal but it doesn’t feel normal.
The leaves were turning; it might've been fall, they were all turning red. It was like being funneled through a massive, inflamed throat. The leaves blurred together until they were a stroke of neon color. The steering wheel and smoke-stained seats trembled beneath me, like they were scared. I was wearing the brown top we both like. The smell of smoke and cheap liquor from the previous night still clung to me.
I had found myself at a party and I met a man. I met a man and he had your voice. We were in his bedroom with wooden walls and it felt like we were toys inside a dollhouse. The man only drank Redbull and he didn’t smoke and he had a galaxy bucket hat on his head.
Are you feeling it? I’m really feeling it.
Every man has your voice. It was too hot in the room. The backs of my knees were sweating. When the man lifted his nose from the glass coffee table for the second time, it was bleeding. Blood isn’t really red when it’s inside us. It’s another color entirely. The color of blood is brown but it could be blue.
He took out his credit card and cut himself some more from the pile. It was mine, but I didn’t do any. I don’t do stuff like that anymore. I felt a little lonely.
His hamster was in a metal cage on top of his messy dresser and it was sleeping. He put his hand on my thigh and tightened it because I guess I was trying to move away. Pinned on the couch, I could see the hamster’s little body twitching over his slick shoulder and I wondered what animals dream about? Do you think they dream about things they want? Or in color? We talked about that once at the zoo and you said you thought they dreamed about heaven. That’s when I realized you believed in God, and I thought maybe I should get around to doing that too. Not to say that believing in something good makes you good. Not to say it can save you.
When I left his wooden bedroom, my bra was on inside out. I didn’t enjoy myself. When I got home, I took a thirty minute shower. Then I put on our favorite brown top.
The gun I got from a friend of ours. He kept it in a tie-dyed Grateful Dead tote bag and told me he was doing Tai Chi at the community center on Mondays and Wednesdays at six am and I should really consider going with him. He said he was almost ready to start getting sober. He said he thought he’d start with cutting out the hard stuff, then move on to alcohol, and then weed. Nicotine last. He said he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to kick that one. He took me out to his backyard, where giant blankets of kudzu coated all the electric wires and rusting cars and we shot at glass Cheerwine bottles. Aiming was easy. The hardest part was not feeling guilty. He asked where I kept the guilt. Apparently he kept his in a golden suitcase. I could not think of an answer.
I had to pee so I pulled over at the rest stop we used to go to. The Confederate flag between Winston-Salem and Asheville was at half-mast, for reasons unknown. The gun tapped against the back of my thigh, hanging inside my jean pocket.
The last time we were here, you had a water bottle filled with something you wouldn’t share. I kept asking you to let me drive, but you wouldn’t. Finally, you said we could pull over for a few minutes so we did. You walked out a few paces into the field peppered with quaking aspen trees and fell to your knees. Quaking aspens are notable in that their bark grows patterns that look like eyes. There seemed to be thousands of them watching you. Observing the sweat pinned hairs on the back of your neck. The way your shirt rode up slightly, exposing the band of your boxers. Maybe I should’ve put my hand on your back and told you everything would be okay. Maybe I should’ve held you or asked you why you were crying. But I didn’t. I was scared.
Up until that point, I felt like I was approaching you on the back of a white horse. Every second I could see another detail, another scar, another faded tattoo. On balmy summer mornings, our naked bodies seemed to merge together. Physical boundaries washed away with sweat and shared body wash. That day at the rest stop, I realized somehow I’d gotten so close to you that I passed through the other side. A red curtain fell over your back. It never lifted.
That day I walked around with my feet cold in my boots, wishing I could talk to you when you were standing beside me. You bought a new brand of cologne, started making jokes about me being fat again, and left late at night. The thing is, I’m not an angry person. I never felt angry about any of that at all. I decided I would kill you when you fell to your knees surrounded by quaking aspens. Trees fall but they don’t really fall unless someone else was there to see it.
The rest stop bathroom smelled like cleaning supplies and cheap body spray. I locked the end stall and sat on the toilet seat with my jeans still on. The stalls were red. The gun had traveled from outside my pocket to my hands. My chin rested gently on the barrel. AC hummed, deafening. Maybe it was actually summer. Could that be possible?
You would probably like to die in the mountains. Or maybe the river with the rope swing, the jazz bar, your mother’s house, covered in windchimes. I imagined shooting the gun and all of the chimes going off at once, a wave of music washing over us. The image of your body falling felt anticlimactic. Just a muffled thump onto a blanket of moss.
But no, the top of the mountain would be best. You could see the clear expanse of the sky and the mountains and how, if you squint, they look like massive tsunami waves, which you taught me to do. You would even cup your hands around my ears so I could hear the ocean. You could also see the city lights far away and the park where you used to climb trees, and the big Ingles warehouse. The air would be sweet and clean and the birds would sing you sweet songs from childhood. Yes, you would be happiest there.
When I left the bathroom I was feeling a little sick, so I threw up behind some trash cans and then got back in the car. Usually, you were in charge of the driving. It’s hard for me to pay attention for that long, my mind tends to wander. I think about my organs and your organs and how we both still have so much in common. Or Kafka’s love-doomed letters or the first dog they sent to space or the man I met at the gas station with a parrot and one eye. This is the way I lose track of myself and everything around me.
The accident wasn’t really my fault. Legally at least. The minivan merged right into me. Boom. When things like that happen, you realize time stretches out like a cat on a windowsill. You can see all the fibers of it, unspooling.
The thing nobody tells you about a car crash is that they’re loud, which seems obvious but the sound of metal grinding together is deafening. The burning rubber blasts your sinuses and eyes until they drip for days afterwards. There’s another thing they don’t say, which is that the music you were playing doesn’t stop. I was upside down, forcing my lungs open and closed and the rosary hanging from my rearview was on the ceiling. There was a lot of blood rushing to my head and some stupid Top 100 Hits song was blasting on the radio, something you would’ve made fun of me for listening to. There was still a mint in my mouth but it had gone stale. The gun was on the ceiling and it was pointed at my neck.
The first thing I did after forcing myself out of the mangled window was turn the radio off. Then I shoved the gun into my waistband. My arms were wet with blood and shimmering from what I later learned were pieces of broken glass. I was laughing, thinking about how we watched the movie Twilight together a long time ago and how the vampire Edward glitters in the sunlight or something like that, and now I was doing the same.
The sky was so blue it hurt. There I was, laughing at my stupid car, turned over like a beetle on its back. It felt like we were laughing together. The other week, I saw a man at the bank wearing his pants inside out and I knew you would’ve found it funny.
The minivan was further along the road, steaming on the asphalt. The doors were jammed shut and wouldn’t move no matter how hard I yanked. The metal was so hot I could only touch it for a few seconds, even with my brown top wrapped around my hands. The top was a dark enough brown that the blood would probably wash right out. After giving that up, I moved to the driver’s seat to bang on the windows.
But the driver's head was backwards. My hands went still, half-bent, like broken bird wings. My eyes couldn’t seem to move. Time was being odd again. There were light-blue flowers at my feet. Maybe it was spring? The driver was wearing these tiny hoop earrings and the light was reflecting off them. She had a tattoo behind her ear but I couldn’t see what it was. When they conducted the autopsy, they found her blood-alcohol content was three times the legal limit. She probably was too drunk to feel guilty, not that feeling guilty helps anything.
There was someone moving in the backseat. A little boy, with wet eyes shining like coins. He pressed his little pink hands on the glass in the backseat. There were stickers on the inside of the windows. He was banging on the door and I told him to stay calm, that we would pull together and the door would open. I was sure it wouldn't, but it did. He slid out of the car and into my arms, face down. He couldn’t have been older than five. His hair was damp and smelled like coconut conditioner.
A few others were starting to pull over and stare, their mouths gaping like fish. The gun was heavy in my waistband and I threw it inside the minivan. She was dead. It didn’t matter. The smoke was starting to choke me and I heard the sirens. The kid was gripping a clump of my hair and I couldn’t tell how hurt he was and didn’t want to look.
Everything’s going to be okay. I said. I put my hand on his back.
When the medics arrived they took him away, but they had to unclench his hand from my braid, which was now sticky and matted. He was still reaching out to me so I gave him my brown top to hold. He used it to cover his face.
Meanwhile, a police officer pulled me to the side and told me I was going to hate him, but my tags had expired. He had to give me a ticket. I reminded him that my car was totaled and he shrugged and looked bashful, chewing on a fingernail.
It’s whether you pay a fine now, or get in a lot more trouble later.
He used the word whether wrong, which is something you used to do. It was like your crooked teeth or the heart-shaped mole on your back. It was something that you weren’t aware of, that only revealed itself to me.
It’s either. Not whether. I told the police officer.
The kid’s legs were being unfolded onto a gurney. He was still holding my brown top and he looked at me and asked if his mommy was going to be okay.
At the hospital, a nurse picked about a thousand pieces of glass out of my arm with tweezers. Tears were on my face and I wiped them off but they just kept coming. She gave me some medicine–just Advil, because of my medical history. I said that was fine. One of her hands was on the small of my back and it made me realize how long it had been since someone had touched me. The tears wouldn’t stop so she got me a napkin and wiped them off because my hands were covered in gauze. She would pick out some glass, then wipe my tears. Pick some glass, wipe my tears. I asked how long it would take for the Advil to kick in. She said it would take a little time but I would feel better eventually.
Editor’s Note
Before you start reading Pearl Reagler’s “I Am Coming to Asheville to Kill You” take a deep breath. Because you’re going 2,300 words without another one. The scenes flow rapidly one into the next, interspersed with snatches of memory. We’re inside the mind of a character wracked by lovelorn obsession and driven to redeem her lost past. She does find a kind of redemption on the road to Asheville, but not in the way that she (or we) ever expected.
Josh Boldt, Editor
Story Track
“Some things are hard to let go / Some things are never enough.” So says Tom Petty in “Love is a Long Road.” I believe the narrator in Pearl Reagler’s “I Am Coming to Asheville to Kill You” would agree. She drives the highway to Asheville with a single-minded obsession hoping for “one more chance / to try and save [her] soul.” But, as she soon learns, things rarely turn out as planned and “love is a long, long road.”