With Nuts

Michael Czyzniejewski
| Fiction

 

Walking away from your sister’s, away from your own house, do you ignore the cold and walk until you can’t see the blue and red lights spinning on the treetops and roofs anymore, until you can’t hear the squawking of walkie-talkies, until you get to a street where nobody knows anything about any joggers or ambulances or cops? Of course you do. Because you know, don’t you, that this is no longer between you and the police or you and your squealy kids or you and that poor dead jogger crushing the daisies? No, it’s not, because now it’s between you and you. The kids are never going to find out that a jogger died on your sister’s lawn because Pam would never tell the kids anything so horrifying. The kids don’t read the papers and none of you watch the local news. Full of ice cream and ravioli with meat sauce, the kids have long forgotten the story, the man’s face on your windshield. Nobody’s coming after you but you. You might even convince yourself that you have to tell somebody what’s happened. You’d tell them it was an accident, that you had your lights on, that you looked both ways, and the jogger, in this sleek, black jogger costume, ran in front of you? They, John Law, wouldn’t send a man with no previous convictions (not even a run yellow light)—the father of two small children, the brother-in-law and best friend to a man dying from cancer—to jail, would they? They’d have to press charges, assign a lawyer, maybe even take that guy into custody, but they wouldn’t even hold him overnight, would they? It was an accident. The jogger was wearing all black. He was jogging at night. Who would be out jogging in this type of weather, anyway? You laugh, but that first-time offender’s not doing a second of time, is he? Fucking-A no. So, with no one on your trail, no one to point a finger at you, it’s just between you and yourself. Why disrupt your whole life, have this involuntary manslaughter on your record, face the victim’s family in a court of law, knowing you’ll never actually go to jail, anyway? What’s the point? Sooner or later you’ll learn to live with it. Turning yourself in isn’t going to bring this dead jogger back. Why ruin two families’ lives instead of one, eh? It’s punishment enough, that journey you’ll take from the now to the then, that point at which you’ll be able to live with yourself. It’ll be a rough journey, bad as anything the legal system could throw at you—worse, even, because not turning yourself in would only add to the guilt, magnify it at least a thousand times, right? Maybe a million.
Who won the game, you’re asking? Honestly, I can’t say I know. Ironic, right? If I had my phone, I’d check, but I don’t—it’s most certainly in my sister’s yard somewhere, buzzing away in the dark.
So, anyway, you keep walking until you hit a busy intersection, a street so busy that you have to stop—you wouldn’t want to end up hit by a car, too, now would you? In more blocks than you care to count, you run into Main, see that diner across from the hospital and realize you never ate, the guilt only amplified by the twinge of hunger in your belly. You go inside, sit down like nothing’s wrong (because nothing is, right?), like nobody in the diner knows anything (because they don’t, right?). You seat your- self even though there’s the sign that says PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED and when the waitress asks how you got there, who seat- ed you, you say you didn’t see the sign, so big and obvious in front of the host station that you maneuvered it like a sleeping dog. But it’s late, a Sunday night, and nobody’s there, right? Just you, the waitress, and presumably a cook, someone who’s going to make the open-faced beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and brown gravy that you’re going to order. This diner has the best in town, doesn’t it? Then you see chairs up on the tables in the next section over and feel bad, wonder if you’re keeping this waitress and the alleged cook here late, then wonder what they have left, how old that beef will be, how long their gravy’s been stewing. You order a piece of the lemon meringue from the glass case up front, some chicken noodle soup, hoping it’s from a can. You ask for so many crackers it’ll be more cracker than soup, but anything to fill the gap in your stomach, to make that rumbling go away, right?

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three story collections, most recently I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He teaches at Missouri State University, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Review and Literary Editor of Moon City Press.

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