“Sick like Glass” (fiction)

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“So, this is the new place. Try not to laugh,” Stone says. He gives the door a light tap as he passes through. Linda makes an almost inaudible sound as she enters the apartment.

“Stoney-Baloney’s place. The king of the castle,” he says, gesturing expansively.

She nods and looks around. He looks with her. He’d semi-straightened up that morning.

“It’s nice, Robert,” she says. She’s dyed her hair chestnut red. He has to admit that she’s held up well at 35.

“It’s not so bad, right?” he says. “I say to myself: ‘Stoney, you’ve done all right for yourself.’ King of the castle!” he crows.

“Yes, Robert—Stone. It’s nice, Stone.”

He sits in the padded rocking chair over which he normally drapes an old floral print sheet, retrieving the bag of Skittles he’d left open on the bed. She sits on the rocking chair’s ottoman, which is where he sits when he eats at the card table that he uses as a kitchen table. Tilting his head back, he lets a handful of Skittles tumble into his mouth. He holds the bag out to her, and she declines with a tight shake of the head. He cranes his neck to look out the window.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

“I put my bike out there, locked up to the telephone pole. Usually I bring it inside, but I think with both of us in here at the same time there might not be enough room for a bike,” he says and laughs. “Would you believe after I first moved in here, some guy reached right into my grocery bag and pulled my soda out when I was on my way home. I said to him, I said, ‘I hope you choke on it.’ And you know, he said, ‘What’d you say to me?’ Just like that: what’d you say to me? You know, they’re all out there thinking that there’s a new whiteboy in town, and they all want a piece of that ass.”

“Robert, why would you talk to a man like that?”

“Hey, if he wants a piece of Stoney’s ass, he’s gonna get an earful.”

She turns her head to the side and speaks in a monotone without looking at him. “Just be careful here, Robert. Call the police when something like that happens.”

“That’s how it’s gonna go if they want Stoney’s ass” he mumbles. The bike had been a gift from Bear. After seeing it in Mike’s Bikes, he’d called Bear that night. The next day, Bear had called to say he’d sent him a check, and Stone went back to Mike’s Bikes and put the bike on credit card.

Linda had already heard about the bike. On their way into the building, she’d had asked how he got to work. He’d told her about his ride: the hills, the cars that drove by so fast, the big suburban houses. Those neighborhoods felt familiar and immediate, but also weirdly foreign when he considered that he couldn’t even afford to ride the bus.

What he hadn’t told her was that he hadn’t been to work in over two weeks. He was suspended because of Alicia M, the less attractive of the two Alicias. Alicia M had told Doreen that he’d said something sexual to her. “For Alicia M? God, no. Maybe for Alicia S,” he’d said to Doreen in his defense when she took him off the phone to meet with her in the conference room that smelled like Sulphur because the bathroom next to it always had its door open. For some reason, all of the water at Tech-Light smelled like Sulphur.

He hadn’t looked at Doreen when she’d told him that he was suspended until further notice. He’d stared at the conference room’s whiteboards, which no one ever used. Having the whiteboards there made him feel good about working at Tech-Light.

“She’s a liar-in-training, bitch-in-training,” he’d said to Doreen about Alicia M that day. Both Alicias had graduated from high school the month before. Doreen had said she would call him about when he could come back.

He still technically had a job, so he wasn’t lying when he said he did. He’d been using his credit card to buy food at the convenience store. He wanted to tell Bear that he needed money, but Bear didn’t want to hear anything from him now.

“I found some of your old things from the show down in the basement,” Linda said. Acknowledging his past was a gift.

“The old show,” he said smiling. “At the rate I’m going, I’ll be back in the saddle before you know it. I’ve been coming up with some stuff to pitch. I’m telling you, people are going to love what Stoney’s got up his sleeve for them this time.”

Linda smiles faintly.

He was getting better. He was getting better as fast as he could. The problem was that the world was so impatient. We all get sick, he thought. Maybe being sick was just a way of saying that some people healed slower than others. What some people might heal from in seconds could take him months or even years.

In middle school, Greg Lantos had told him that glass was a liquid and not a solid. It just moved so slowly that it seemed like it was solid. “Maybe it’s not that glass moves so slow, but that we move so fast,” Stone had said with his finger raised, feeling proud of his insight. Greg Lantos hadn’t seemed impressed.

Linda had brought a paper bag in with her that she’d put down on the table. He’d noticed it outside but hadn’t offered to take it from her. A loaf of bread sticks out. She sees him looking.

“A few things to help you get established. Some of those candies you like,” she says, smiling conspiratorially. She doesn’t hand him the bag or uncross her arms.

She stands out to him against the background of the dingy apartment. Her scarf is nice. She’d looked sloppy before—like the middle-school teacher she is, he’d always thought. She looks better now, he thinks. Classier. The apartment smells like mildew, sweat, and dust mixed with the sharp bleachy smell of the soap he got from the dollar store. Being in the apartment would probably make her smell like it. When he leaves the apartment, he can smell it on himself. Sometimes when he eats, he can taste it on his food.

“Thank you,” he says. “I could use that. Things have been tough since they had to cut down on my hours at the call center.”

“Well, you’ve got this to get you going. You’ll be fed.” She chirps a short, awkward laugh, picks up the bag, and puts it down a foot in front of her in his direction.

He can hear silverware scrape a plate in another apartment. There’s no privacy here. It reminds him of growing up in his parents’ house. When he was twelve, he’d first realized how much he liked spending time outside when he’d wandered out to a patch of trees near the highway overpass. He’d walked down the slope and gone under the bridge. He’d poked around down there for a while, kicking old bottles and trying to read the graffiti, before he’d started crying.

“You know, we really had a good thing together. If I moved back in, we wouldn’t need to be together like ‘together.’ You wouldn’t have to pay for everything yourself, and I wouldn’t have to live in this, this hovel.” He laughs, but she doesn’t. “I’m much better now. I can pitch my new show. It would be like old times,” he says.

“Just like old times,” Linda says distantly, sounding muffled like she’s behind a pane of glass.