The Juggler And His Rose

              Stan stood frozen, contemplating what was real and what was taking form in his tunnel vision of sight. The strange, distorted head mounting the amorphous shape came out of nowhere. It stood menacingly quiet while it kept hold of Tammy’s squirming body that let out cries sounding like that of a burning victim’s last gulp of air. Somehow he knew he should have listened, but kept on his stubborn ways. After all, what had listening done for him thus far, besides cause him complete and utter misery?

The rain dribbled off his studded crimson leather jacket and pushed his pompadour flat on his head, letting the greasy, bloody, black strands fall just over his dilated, scrunched, green eyes. He knew his moment would come, though not in this way, to test his faithfulness. His lonely nights of studying for classes he had no money for after his father had been killed in a bar shootout, after his bankrupt mother had been laid off regardless of her teaching degree and slipped into a coma once life had finally seemed stable again due to his father’s small fortune, after all the days and nights of working graveyard shifts and selling pot and making deals for people of the lowest scum that even the fallen angel would have hesitated associating with, had led to this moment. Had it not been for that stormy Oakland day, he never would have decided to see a movie that Saturday night with his buddies where he met the dangling beauty in front of him now. It was the midnight premier, and he was sure almost everyone from his school was there to see it:
Voices of Fate.
It was
a horror film about a young man who evaded the troubles of his past by using drugs and eventually found out that what he was seeing while he was high manifested itself in real life. After the film, he and his buddies laughed hysterically about the whole thing and how corny the production was--from the graphics to the plot. Stan and his friends took sips of their alcohol-spiked cream-sodas, joking about how scared the other was. They pushed each other around and talked about the party plans they had that night, who they were going to sleep with, and hyped each other up like a pack of wild sea lions on a cool, sunny summer day in California. Stan took a step outside of the bustling theater of tattoos and whiskey breath to have a smoke. This is when he saw her, a beautiful blond girl, just the type he had fantasized of his whole life. She did not see him at first, as she had just tossed her friend’s phone on the ground and was caressing her with a somber look on her face. She rocked her standing friend back and forth while glaring at the floor right in front of her, her face changing shades from pale white to crimson red until she slowly looked up and made eye contact with him. Stan stood stiff with his cigarette half raised, mouth stuck half open as his gaze met hers. Her beautiful face combined with her sparkling eye contact and softening expression had transformed her angry look into a greeting, like a rose that had just bloomed, exfoliating the outer beauty but leaving the hidden thorns for something or someone bold enough to dare take it. Stan walked to her and sparked a conversation, eventually leaving home with her that same night in her car. The thoughts of him with her, all the times they played chess and watched movies in the clean basement of her wealthy parents’ house, all the times they kissed on the custom glass and marble rooftop of her parents’ mansion that overlooked the whole Bay and the glamour of the Golden Gate Bridge including the beautiful ocean and cool breeze that brought feelings of bliss to his mind and made him forget played through his head as he watched the thing in front of him holding his whole future in his hands. The creature opened its oblong mouth and started screaming something very fast that sent shivers down every square-inch of Stan’s body. It repeated it several times until he understood what the horrifying question was that the silhouette was making out: “Why did you do it, Stan?” The blanket of black rain-speckled cloak hiding the ghoul’s stretched out head while confining the girl suddenly shifted form. The ball of black turned into his baby blue dressed priest in his full apparel with a maddening expression of hate. In a blink of an eye, the shape-shifting creature vanished before him and his girlfriend, leaving her face down in the mud and him on his back in a delusional daze. The acid he took just minutes before his girl had taken off into the redwood trees with his phone in her hand was in full force, and he was bewildered as to what had just happened. Tammy got up and, covered in mud and breathing heavily, took off running without a word or even looking back. The blood was washed off of Stan’s head as he lay on his back in the rain, exhausted from pushing through a thornbush patch he had brushed against in his attempts to catch up. The rain only got heavier, and the woods started to get slightly foggy at the tops of the trees. Stan lifted his head up and saw no one around him. He didn’t know if he was in a dream or tripping on drugs. He reached out for a tree to help himself up, but had instead grabbed a leg of the girl who had texted him just minutes before Tammy had picked his phone up from the living room couch. The girl lifted him up by his shirt collar with a single hand and effortlessly threw him into the sky with a force so powerful that he felt the friction of the air burning his skin as everything went blurrier the higher and higher away he flew from Earth. He suddenly felt himself unable to breathe as he entered the black abyss of space, before he fell unconscious. He woke up seconds later to a bright light in his eyes on his girlfriend’s couch.

Tammy was waving the light in his eyes to see how dilated his pupils were. He checked his phone: no text messages. He realized that it was all a bad dream. The clock on his nightstand said that it was midnight. “What did you see this time?” asked Tammy. She turned off the light and got in the bed with him. “You really need to lay off the acid.” “I dreamt that you turned into a zombie and bit me!” Stan casually fibbed. The sweat was finally beginning to cool on his brow. He had this dream for the third night in a row. He went into the bathroom, locked the door, turned on the fan, and grabbed his hidden cell phone from underneath the floorboards. The paranoia was building up. He turned on the shower and sent some emojis before he got in. He reflected on everything that had happened in the last few years, and how it had affected his life. If he had learned anything in his life, it was that the strong live on, while the weak and limiting die off. Maybe he didn’t deserve Tammy. Maybe he did. He hadn’t gone to church since he met her six months ago, and the only reason he went was for the help that he received from his fellow churchgoers, like free welfare. He was conceited, he knew, but he couldn’t put his finger on why he was repeatedly seeing the same priest in his dreams. He didn’t care about morals.

Was there really a right or wrong after all, and if there was, was he doomed? Stan knew he was too far in for forgiveness either way. At least he thought he was. Life just wasn’t fun if he wasn’t doing something he wanted, or wrong, according to the church. And why would he want to go somewhere after he was dead if it wasn’t fun after all? At least he could be himself in hell. The girl’s boyfriend he reluctantly had to kill for his coke money in hard times wasn’t his fault anyhow, after he tried to stab him with a knife. That was all behind him now, however. He couldn’t understand why everyone in his church had taken such offense to killing. He understood that he was probably a psychopath, but he couldn’t help the fact that he didn’t feel the same way everyone else did about sensitive subjects. He was justified in his own thoughts by the fact that everything he did was to make his life better. “After all, isn’t that what god wants for me?” he would whisper to himself while zoning out in the middle of mass. ‘Had not the wars with the Lamanites ended in exhaustive bloodshed?’ he thought to himself whenever he was there. He thought about repenting for his sins every time he sat on the baby blue suede seats and listened to the same priest every Sunday, the same one who keeps showing up in his dreams. He knew his dreams were trying to tell him something, but whatever it was, it went against his logical, conscious mind, as if he had some sort of doubts tucked in the deep recesses of his brain where the skull meets the vertebrae. In an instant, the revisiting guest of burden and fear pressed his mind in a surging flair of anxiety, and he gripped the sides of his chair as tight as he could, stood up as if he had been on the edge of his seat, and threw the chair as far as he could into the middle of the hallway all while looking straight into the priest’s eyes in the middle of mass. Without a word, he eyeballed everyone in the room, one by one; the priest ceased his sermon immediately and doubled back in wide-eyed disbelief at the oblivious hatred of the odd man in front of him. Stan then eyed the door as he made a stiff stroll across the linoleum floor. As he strolled, he thought about how everyone had always treated him in a condescending way, as if he hadn’t been programmed to feel, in the way that Stan would put it, “weak and remorseful.” He thought about how no one wanted to sit by him or get to know him because he was a “freeloader.” He was halfway down the hallway before his face scrunched into a ball, and the fire within him catalyzed his stroll to a quick sprint out of the french doors, nearly breaking them off the hinges. That was the last time he had went to church. The nonsense was over now.

His life was better now he thought, as long as Tammy didn’t find out about Monica. He went over to her house often while Tammy was away visiting her mother on the weekends. Tammy was going to medical school to become a brain surgeon. She was very gifted in her craft, and was interning for a small private company she had connected with in college. She had sewn up Stan’s cuts in the past, even saved his best friend’s life by assisting in the operation of removing a tumor in his brain. She was undoubtedly a very talented women, twenty-five years old with a bright future ahead of her Stan knew. For a great women such as this, however, there was a catch. She was jealous. Not only scorching with jealousy any time she saw him talking to another female in public, but whenever she saw him high. She was fascinated with him, and was devastated that she couldn’t be with him all the time. Even when he was tripping. She even told him that she dreaded she couldn’t be with him when away at school and visiting her mother who was sick in the hospital a couple times a month. Lucky for Stan, being unemployed and having a rich girlfriend who was enveloped in medical school gave him all the time in the world to find new hobbies. The hardships of his life were taken care of after he dropped out of college to be a stay at home boyfriend. Stan was only twenty-one, and his life seemed as complete as it could be for the first time ever. His life had seemed almost too good to be true.

Stan woke up in the morning with a migraine. He took some advil to help with the pain, but couldn’t help but notice that his girlfriend wasn’t in the bed. She usually always is there, sleeping in with him until nine o’clock. He got up, brushed his teeth, slipped his socks on, and went to the kitchen where he poured himself some cereal. He looked on his phone for a half-hour before he cooked himself some eggs. He turned on the television and watched the weather report for the weekly cast. “For being so young,” Stan said to himself, “I live like an old man.” He put his feet on the footrest and sprawled out on the the black leather blob of a couch. The weather outside seemed to be pretty windy. Actually quite windy, as shrubs were flying past. “That’s weird,” cried Stan with a mouth full of eggs.” “The weather never said it was going to be windy.” He put down his plate and wiped his mouth with his hand as he stood up. He put his shoes on and went to grab his keys. Monica had texted him that she was ready for him to come over the day before, but he was about to show up now. He’d done so often, as she was always about her house except for when she had to model once a week. “I’ve got a big day ahead of me!” he scowled with a grin as he slid on his red studded jacket. When he went to pull on the freshly waxed handle of the Ferrari under the carport, the car exploded, and he was tossed into the street several feet away. He got up and was bleeding slightly on his hands without any major injuries. “What the hell was that!” He cried. He went to call 911, but the number was blocked. Confused, he went to his neighbor's’ door and knocked on it to ask for help. The stiff man who answered it was expressionless as the door creaked slowly open to expose a hideous bearded face. When the door opened, Stan looked the tall burly man in the face while shouting: “Thank goodness you answered! Listen, my car just blew up and no one is picking u...” Stan stopped in mid-sentence. The man was missing an arm and had blood all over his shirt. He was glaring, pointing a revolver straight at him and licking his lips. A woman with half a face limped to his side at the door. They screeched with a pitch that was loud enough to burst an eardrum in unison, and Stan took off running on the street as bullets ricocheted off it and he was hit. He ran into his house and locked the door, clenching his leg that had been hit. He knew he wasn’t high--this had to be real. He hadn’t even done acid this time. He remembered waking up, he remembered doing his boring morning routine, and he remembered getting ready to leave the house to fulfill his desires; he didn’t remember, however, why Tammy wasn’t in the bed. Every nightmare that Stan ever had, every trip that he went through, she was with him. Something metal scraped the doorknob on the back of his neck when he stood up with his good leg. Stan reached back and felt it, the needle like metal legs deep into the neck muscles and slightly bulging from his vertebrae; it had a small vial of fluid he could feel and hear sloshing around inside, the whole device about a square-inch in area in the middle of his neck underneath his skin. “When the hell did I get this!” he cried. Did Tammy’s absence have something to do with this? Why would she be doing such a thing? Stan’s mind was racing as he limped to the stairs as fast as he could. “Why can’t I wake up! Where are you, TAMMY!” He began to scream. The neighbors began to bash on the door. An octopus leg came up from underneath one of the rungs and wrapped around his torso on his way up the stairs, of which he struggled to break free from. He went to get his pistol in his nightstand, but once he reached the top of the stairs, he read a message scribbled in what looked like blood on the wall outside of the room where he and Tammy usually slept that read: ‘Cheaters never win, Stan.’ He immediately froze in place. He understood now. She had somehow found his hidden phone and read his texts when he was high, and she was getting back at him. It was the only explanation. She was about get him killed--or was what he was seeing coming from the device? She must have put him under anesthesia and installed it, or had someone install it, last night when he was out. The device suddenly made a static noise, then Tammy’s voice projected from it underneath his skin, but could be heard because it was inside of him making noise, much like headphones. “Hello, Stan, how are you enjoying your new world?” Stan fell to the ground and begged for forgiveness. “I know what I did was wrong, and I’m sorry! What do you want from me?” he shouted. The device retorted: “You never knew what was right, Stan. You only knew what felt good. I knew you were a psychopath ever since Monica talked to me at the grocery store yesterday. She said she saw me with you at the pizza joint last week, and asked how I knew you. We traded stories about you, Stan, how you never argued with us, how you were always asking to use our cars, borrow our money, and made us take care of you while you were high, yet never gave us anything but your “love” in return. She was so helpful, that she even told me where you keep your phone,” Stan shifted his weight and put his head on his knees. “Well I have something to give to you, Stan. You can be high all the time, but just like when you are high with me, you won’t be enjoying it, but in your own world without me. I had it installed on you last night and set it to activate this morning. The chip is attached to your amygdala, the fear center of your brain, so you can live in your nightmares, the ones you will live to see. It’s up to you to decide what part of your world is real and what isn’t, obviously not this relationship. Maybe in another lifetime, you will be more careful! Have fun swimming!” The recording stopped talking.