The passenger mirror framed my skeleton face while we sped down the road away from the empty parking lot and the newly built homes. Away from the dead.
The truth is, everyone has an opinion on how this city should be run, someone on the radio said.
Streetlights passed overhead, strobing the car light and dark. From the backseat, the glint of the birdwatcher’s gun shone on and off against his lap.
But everyone’s too selfish to do BLEEP about it.
“Where to?” the driver asked, turning the volume down. “Where’s this new art stash?”
I didn’t have an answer, not that it really mattered. The clock said it was 9:43 PM, and time was up either way.
“We should head back into town and pick up the SUV first,” the birdwatcher said. The backseat creaked as he leaned forward. “We’ll need the space if we’re transporting paintings.”
Through the window, the suburban houses turned into small shops. It was the same direction we had come earlier. One long trip back to zero. At what point was my life supposed to flash before my eyes?
“You know, for as reckless as he was,” the driver said to his partner, “that idiot had some good ideas. Why should we do all this running around if we could just get some deadbeat junkies to do it for us?”
Outside, the small shops turned into tall buildings, and we were probably close to that hotel. The one with the red snapper. The one hosting Verona’s memorial.
My skeleton face turned into a ghost’s face as it reflected off the passenger’s window. The harder I started, the more it slipped away. Behind it, some digital billboard rolled through a series of signs.
Shouldn’t you…
It flashed.
…be focused on…
Flash.
…where you’re going?
Flash.
The last display showed a cartoon picture of a car smashed against the side of the billboard. Smoke rose from its fake, crumpled engine, and below it was the number for some injury law commercial.
We think you have a chance!
“You’re starting to sound as stupid as he was,” the birdwatcher told his partner.
After passing the billboard, the driver took a turn and sped through a yellow light. There it was, just down on the corner. The Bighorn Hotel. Dozens of people—silhouettes—mingled back and forth behind the hotel’s floor to ceiling windows like a swarm of locusts. Tiny squares of canvas rested on easels propped up against the glass.
“Come on,” the driver said. “These people, they can’t think for themselves. They’re animals. Why shouldn’t we make them do our dirty work?”
I grabbed the driver’s hands, pinning them to the wheel.
“What the fuck,” he yelled.
He tried slipping them out of his gloves, but before he could do anything, before the birdwatcher in the back could do anything, I yanked.
I yanked the car straight into the hotel.
She pressed a button that turned on the hazard lights, Verona did. “Animals can’t be moved,” she said from the driver’s seat. “That’s what those German Expressionists forgot.”
Airbags hung limp from the dashboard and blue smoke fogged the car’s interior. It clung to the back of my throat like burnt barbecue, and my ribs hurt. My heart hurt.
“The Expressionists,” Verona continued. “They thought we were all just animals, but do you know what they failed to consider?” She shifted the gear into park. “What they failed to consider was the very thing that made them want to paint in the first place.”
Tendrils of smoke rose against the windshield. Dust and glass and broken paintings covered the window, hiding us from what had to be the ballroom floor. One of the torn canvas images looked like a deer—a water colored, photo-realistic deer.
“Animals can’t be moved,” Verona said. “But people can.”
The painting slid from the glass, to a crumpled hood, and out of sight. The light from the ballroom illuminated a gun laying against the corner of the dashboard.
“So back when you asked me when I first realized I loved to paint,” Verona said as she unbuckled her seat belt. “I wasn’t fully honest.”
Out in the ballroom, people were running back and forth, their shadows strobing against the weapon on the dashboard. Light to dark to light.
Verona said, “I realized I loved to paint when I discovered I could move others the same way those artists had moved me.”
The people outside yelled, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Verona twisted the keys in the ignition, pulling them free.
“Art is a road sign,” she said. “Something that points people in different directions—to places they haven’t been before.”
Even though the driver’s side window was shattered and bent, Verona had no trouble opening it. She stepped out, but before she walked away, before she left me here in this crashed car, she leaned back in.
“Hopefully, it all leads somewhere good,” she said, kissing me.
I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t even breathe. As she turned and walked into the ballroom, disappearing into her own memorial, something held me back.
Someone was gripping my neck.
“Why…won’t you fucking die?” a voice spat into my ear.
I blinked and struggled in my seat. This voice, this person, they had their arm around my neck, crunching my Adam’s apple into my throat. The birdwatcher.
I tried screaming, but Verona was gone. Even the man with the black gloves was gone. Instead, of sitting behind the wheel, he was crawling away from the car, across the ballroom floor. A streak of red smeared across torn canvas and cracked marble.
My feet kicked uselessly at the glove compartment, and everything got quieter like I was being dragged deeper and deeper into an ocean. The veins in my eyes bulged, and I tried wrapping my fingers around the birdwatcher's arm, but they kept slipping away from the sweat.
Shadows ran past me, back and forth. Light to dark.
I dug my uncut, jagged nails into his skin. My finger’s didn’t slip this time as I peeled back his hand as far as I could. The muscles in my neck stretched to the point of snapping as I passed my teeth over his thumb. Lips to knuckle.
I bit down. Hard. He tasted like sweat and lotion, as I slid my jaw side to side.
Dark to light.
He yelped, pulled his arm away, and the world flashed back on. The screaming. The sirens. The airbags and smoke. The gun. Before I could be dragged away again, I grabbed the weapon from the dashboard and unloaded it into the backseat.
“I think I’m going to vomit,” someone cried.
“Not on me,” another person said. “My outfit is already ruined enough as it is.”
Cuffs bit into my wrist as I sat up straight in some metal fold out chair they had in the back of the ballroom. A cop stood over me, making sure I didn’t go anywhere while other cops herded the memorial show attendees in our direction—away from the mess. Kirchbaum was there, running back and forth like a manic bat.
“Over here,” he motioned at an EMT wearing some starched, blue polo shirt and carrying some giant toolbox. “I haven’t been able to get a pulse.”
The EMT jogged around to the driver’s side of the dark sedan where the man with the black gloves lay. He placed his box on the ground to rummage through, and I didn’t understand how he managed to keep his shirt so clean.
“I am literally traumatized,” another guy in the crowd said. The girl next to him shook violently, sucking gulps of breath into her paper bag neck.
“Is he, like, dead?” she asked the guy. “Like dead dead? He’s laying on my painting.”
Ripped canvas and broken frames surrounded the body and the smashed up car. A few pictures still stood on their easels. A cartoon roadrunner in one. Some kind of hawk in another. Someone in the crowd hit an easel with their shoulder as they walked past, and a water-colored chicken fell at my feet.
“Finally.” Kirchbaum’s voice echoed against the high ceilings as he sped walked towards the ballroom entrance. Someone in a crisp, white jumpsuit appeared from the lobby, carrying a stretcher.
“You know, that’s a my dad,” some girl with a backless dress said to one of the officers. As she pointed at Kirchbaum the giant tarantula tattoo she had on her shoulder rippled. “I think he’d be ok if you let me go. I a have a date soon.”
The person in the jumpsuit rolled their stretcher over more broken paintings. A bright orange bear with, what looked like, real pieces of fur glued on. A neon pink pig with angel wings. Once they got to the car and opened the backdoor, Kirchbaum turned his head like was going to throw up.
“No!” the girl with the paper bag neck cried. “It’s ruined.”
The man in the blue shirt—the EMT—had rolled the driver’s body over, revealing a large, crumpled drawing. The girl went to run across the room, but an officer grabbed her arm. Kirchbaum noticed the commotion and rubbed his eye sockets deep and hard. He walked over to pick up the painting and propped it against the hood of the car.
“Honestly, I feel fine,” Kirchbaum’s daughter continued with the cop she had been talking to. “None of us are hurt. I don’t see why you just can’t let me go.”
It was a giant fox with a snake in its mouth, the painting resting against the car. The reptile formed a figure eight, swallowing its own tail, and I couldn’t remember the last time I ate, or if I ever wanted to eat again. My lips still tasted like sweat and lotion.
The EMT working on the driver pulled his stethoscope from his ears. He looked up at Kirchbaum and shook his head. Kirchbaum let out a long sigh before making his way towards the crowd.
“Dad. Hey, dad,” Kirchbaum’s daughter shouted, but he walked straight past her.
“You,” he said, finger pointed at me, “let’s go figure out what to do with you.”
Some kid in a satin shirt elbowed the person next to him. “Do you think they’re going to tow my car? My meter’s about to expire.”
Kirchbaum led me past his daughter, past the kid in the satin shirt, past the girl with the paper bag neck, past her friend.
A glowing red Exit sign hovered over the entryway that separated the ballroom from the lobby. Beside the open doors, a life sized portrait leaned on a table. Not a painting. A picture. A picture of Verona. Her bright face shined through, untouched despite the rest of the chaos.
As we walked past, light glinted off the glass pane, or maybe it was a wink.
My lips curled upward as Kirchbaum forced me through the hotel lobby and into the world outside.