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“Darryl,” Widow says, pushing a lock of silver hair out of her face with her free hand. “You’ve got to stop kidnapping wildlife as an excuse to show up here. If you’re going to ask me out, just do it.”
“Uh . . .” Darryl’s eyes slide to me, hoping for privacy. But I’ve never seen a romantic situation where two adults, one snapping turtle, and an American kestrel are involved.
“So, you wanna go out sometime?” Darryl finally manages, although he does technically address the raptor on her arm, not my boss. “There’s a new coffee place out on the inter—”
“No,” Widow says definitively. “Now, go release that turtle back where you found it and stop displacing wildlife.” She tromps into the main office without saying goodbye, and I follow her.
“That happen a lot?” I ask as Darryl rides away, spinning out and throwing up gravel.
Widow frowns and holds a wiggling white mouse in front of the kestrel. It lunges, and the mouse is gone with two snaps, tail still twitching from the corner of the bird’s beak.
“What, men?” Widow asks. “Yeah, they happen.”
“I don’t mean like do they exist,” I counter. “Do they come around?”
I’m not surprised. Widow is tall and lean, with long silvery hair and just the right amount of crow’s-feet—although I suspect they are from squinting into the sun, not laughing. It had been hot enough one day that she’d taken off her Restoration Acres–branded hoodie and dug out Tripod’s latrine, sinewy back muscles and biceps evident under tanned skin.
“They try,” she says with a shrug. “Lots of men my age been thrown back, two, three times. It’s getting late in the game, and nobody wants to die alone.”
I like Widow for a lot of reasons. A big one is that she says the quiet things out loud.
“I’m sorry about your husband,” I blurt, and Widow looks up from the second mouse dangling from her fingers, twisting by its tail.
“My what?” she asks.
“Your h-husband,” I stutter out, the kestrel now turning to look at me as well, four pairs of eyes letting me know that I’m making a drastic mistake. “I’m . . . sorry for your loss.”
Widow barks out a laugh, her hand moving when she does. The kestrel lunges again, and the second mouse disappears, along with a chunk of flesh from Widow’s thumb.
“Shit turds,” she says, waving her hand and sending droplets of blood across the desk, some of them landing on the donation jar—which is sporting a fresh twenty—and streaking down the side. She pops her thumb into her mouth, sucks on it for a second while eyeing me, then transfers the kestrel to a perch.
“Honey,” she says in a tone that implies a small amount of affection along with a healthy dose of derision. “I’ve never been married. Widow is my name.”
“Oh . . .” I say, my voice not quite stopping before I also say the quiet part out loud. “That’s horrible.”
“My brother was named Typhus,” she adds.
“Jesus,” I say.
“That one wasn’t a Zedeker.”
“Was your dad Typhoid and your mom Mary?” I ask.
“No, Zoster and Laura,” she corrects me, but there’s a smile on her lips. “When I was young, nobody was in a hurry to chase a girl named Widow, plus the Zedekers aren’t exactly high society around here. I gave up on humans a long time ago.”
She reaches out to the possum in its cage. It hisses and pulls back, then smells the blood and moves forward, licking her thumb clean.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I’m getting there.”
Eleven
Micah
I wake up with a hangover, which isn’t exactly motivating, so I end up doomscrolling rb/dirtyslut. I’m not proud of the fact that naked chicks are my coping mechanism—but I’m a guy, and titties fix everything. Except, they only fix it for a little bit. Then it’s back to restarting the cycle of shame and dread.
I switch over to rb/anxiousinohio, another sub that I also clear my history after visiting and often leave with the same amount of shame. Most of the posters advocate against self-diagnosing and remind everyone that getting medical advice from Rock Bottom isn’t the right move. But a lot of the people here are like me; living in the constant shadow of How would it look? I know that mental health issues are real medical problems, and that I shouldn’t be any more ashamed of my anxiety than I would be if I had asthma. But I’m an alpha male in Bethington, a place where men fix their problems by not admitting they have them in the first place or drinking until they forget what they were.
Last night I discovered the next big thing to fear, which is that it’s possible to choke to death on your own body. I woke up frantic and gasping, completely unable to breathe. I sucked air; it slipped past my teeth, touched my tongue, and then just stopped, unable to go farther. Panic set in, and I tried to get out of bed, tried to run to Mom and Dad, but my legs got twisted up in the sheets, and I went down hard. I crawled then, dragging myself forward with one hand, the other at my throat. A gurgling sound slipped out of me, and all I could think was I’m dying, and I don’t even know why. Then I felt something click in my throat, and I could breathe again, the black spots that had begun to fleck my vision receding.
