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END OF THE ROAD By: MK Wolfe

Friday, March 27th, 2009

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I kicked the stupid juke but it went on playing some sappy song about an earth angel. I musta dropped ten quarters in, but it wouldn’t play my song. Earth Angel, huh? “That’s a laugh,” I thought to myself. “Ain’t no angels here at End of the Road.”

I looked around. What a dump. Half-drunk beers littered the tabletops, the glasses clouded with gray fingersmears. The neon over the bar blinked and fizzled; made me sick to look at it. And there was Jake, just slingin’ drinks and ignoring me, like I was invisible or somethin’. He’s still royally pissed, I guess. When he found the wedding ring that jerk-off Stan forgot to put back on after we did it, he looked like I’d stuck him in the chest with an ice pick. “Christ, Jake,” I told him, “you’re only my boyfriend. It ain’t like we’s married or nothing.”

Somewhere a phone was ringing, but nobody would pick it up; it was driving me buggy. Well, screw Jake if he couldn’t take a little innocent banging. Wasn’t the first time, and won’t be the last.

I drifted out the door, just to get away from the damn racket, and this big bruiser pulls up on his hog. He’s wearing one of those leather jackets with the skull painted on, big tough guy. Well, he gets off, all that leather creaking like an old couch, and then he walks right into me, practically knocks me over!

“Hey, what the hell am I, chopped liver?” I screamed after him, but he just pretended he didn’t hear and hauled open the door to the End and disappeared. “Crap,” I thought, “I can still hear that phone. Why don’t they pick it up?”

I stood there for a minute, looking at the sky. “Why does Jake have to be so pissed? It’s Friday night, for Chrissake!” Well, the moon didn’t give a rat’s ass about my troubles, so I decided just to walk on home.

I started down Route 8 and it was weird, ‘cause it was so quiet I could still hear that phone ringing. Only it wasn’t coming from behind me, back at the End. It sounded like it was in front of me. Coming from the mill. I couldn’t even hear my footsteps on the road. Just that sound. Riiing, riiing.

I came ‘round the corner they call Deadman’s Curve (on account of so many drunks taking it way too fast) and saw the mill there across the weedy lot. It looked huge and dark, and, I know this sounds nuts, but kinda hungry, too. Like it was crouching. Waiting. And damn if the sound of that phone wasn’t coming from somewhere’s inside.

Gelson’s Mill had been out of there for nigh on twenty-five years, but someone was still calling. What a hoot. I decided, “What the hell, let’s find out who’s on the horn.”

I made my way across the weed-a-thon some uptight management-type probably once called a ‘lawn’, with that incessant riiiing, riiing of a phone echoing somewhere’s inside. I pushed in the door to the front area, and the moonlight spilled in, making these shadows in the archway to the main part of the plant. I knew where that archway led. I’d been here before. In fact, this is where I done it the first time with Jake. Inside, on the floor of the abandoned mill, on a cheap K-mart blanket. How romantic it all was! What a glorious first date! What a bunch of bull!

The phone was in there, somewhere. Now I was getting sick of this stupid game, so I just waltzed right into the plant and took a look around. Enough moonlight was getting in the broken windows that I could see all right, but there were weird shadows all over the place. And someone was in here with me. I could feel it.

The sound of the phone was coming from the left, behind some big oil-clotted machine. There was all kinds of stuff here, catwalks and channels in the floor, so you really had to watch where you were going. I said, to hell with whoever’s here, I’m answering that damn phone.

I moved off to the left and came around the big machine, and that’s when I saw it. There, in an open space behind all the mill works, was a blanket. It was sitting just as pert as you please in a patch of white moonlight. And there was a phone in the middle. Jangling away, just scraping at my last nerve ending. I didn’t care that there was no cord to the phone - hell, maybe it was one of those cordless things they got nowadays. I strode right over to it and picked it up.

“Hello?” I said. Just “hello” like it was an ordinary phone call on an ordinary day. The person on the other end breathed for a minute. I waited. Then she spoke.

“Wake up, sister,” she said. “Look around.” Only it wasn’t a she. It was me.

I looked around, just like me had asked me to, and then I saw it. Leaning up against that steel thing. Sitting in a puddle of black ink, only it wasn’t ink, if you know what I mean. There I was, well, part of me anyway. The top part. I guess Jake had decided he would do away with the bottom half. The naughty half. What he did with it, I can’t imagine. But he left the nice part sitting up, hands folded neatly in a lap that no longer existed. He cared enough to do that much.

I turned back and spoke into the phone, spoke to me a little sadly, a little ruefully maybe. “I guess I’m chopped liver after all,” I said.