Synesthesia: Chapter Eleven

serial fiction

Image: Brett Jordan, Unsplash

“Jesus Christ, we’re not gonna eat you,” I said to the distraught jogger huddled in the dog crate. “Gross.”

At that moment, I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I glanced down at my watch. It was already three in the afternoon.

“We should eat something, though,” I said to Amber as she emerged from the bathroom.

“I want to eat, too!” whined the man in the crate.

I looked over at him and nodded. I was used to this by now. I’d fed my kidnappees for weeks, even months on end. Of course you had to keep them alive. Dead people don’t smell like anything but dead people.

“And I need the bathroom!” he continued, shifting his legs in front of him. I noticed that his blue jogging shorts were freshly wet again. Too late for number one, I guess.

I unlocked the crate and walked him over to the bathroom as if I were a prison guard, pulling the door mostly shut behind him while making sure he couldn’t lock himself inside.

Ten flatulent minutes later, the toilet flushed, the water ran, and a submissive “I’m done” sounded from inside the small bathroom. I marched the man back over to the crate, watched him climb inside, and locked him back in.

“Thank you,” he said, looking up at me with puppy dog eyes.

Gross.

“Let’s go eat,” said Amber, who was already standing by the door with her shoes on and her hand on the door knob.

---

We decided to skip the Golden Plate this time in favor of the Golden Arches. I didn’t like frequenting the same places all the time, in case somebody started recognizing my face. And Amber said she had a craving for Chicken McNuggets.

As we slid into a booth with our food, Amber gave me a sideways look.

“What did you mean back there, about the guy smelling delicious?” she asked, peeling open a container of Tangy BBQ sauce.

My face flushed. I hadn’t meant to let that one slip.

“Nothing,” I said, trying to brush it off casually.

She squinted at me hard.

“Are you gay? Is this a gay thing?” she asked.

“What? No. I mean—”

“You’re gay.”

“There’s nothing sexual about it,” I insisted, beginning to wonder if there was, in fact, something sexual about it.

Amber dipped a McNugget into her sauce and chewed it pensively, still examining my face.

“Then what is it?” she asked.

I shuddered. I didn’t like talking about this stuff. The one and only time I’d opened up about it to anyone, I’d been treated like a freak. Better to just let her think I was gay.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m gay,” I said quickly, hoping to change the subject.

That seemed to satisfy her. “Well, he’s not my type, but I’m happy for you,” she said, picking up another McNugget. “What’s the plan for Gas Stove?”

To be quite honest, I didn’t have the first inkling of a plan for Gas Stove. I was pretty happy with the arrangement as it was. Hoka guy was performing his function just fine, and I didn’t feel any urgent need to bring a new kidnappee into the mix.

I shrugged, swallowing a bite of my Big Mac. “What do you want the plan to be?” I asked.

Amber got a strange hard glint in her eyes, and for a second I almost thought I saw them flicker gray.

She leaned over the table conspiratorially. “I wanna kill him.”

I stopped cold, my mouth open an inch from my half-eaten hamburger. Was she serious? I’m not a killer. Never have been, never will be.

I set the burger back down on the brown plastic tray. “I told you I don’t hurt people,” I reminded her.

“You don’t have to hurt him,” she said. “You just trap him in that dog cage you’ve got, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

My eyebrows rose of their own accoxrd. I surveyed her petite frame, her scrawny arms, her little nothing of a neck. She looked like she’d have a tough time fighting off an aged chihuahua.

“Come on,” she pleaded.

“Why d’you wanna get him so bad? What did he do to you?”

Her face darkened with fury. Maybe that had been the wrong question to ask.

“What didn’t he do!” she hissed.

I blinked at her, waiting for her to elaborate.

“I met him when I was fifteen,” she said, her face twisted with anger. “I was a runaway. Parents didn’t look at me unless it was to hit me. He was the first person who was nice to me.” She picked up a french fry, examined it disinterestedly, then dropped it back onto the tray.

I said nothing. This story couldn’t be going anywhere good.

“Well, he wasn’t nice to me,” Amber continued. “Just pretended. Made me do stuff. For him, then for other guys. Whole time, acted like he loved me. And I was dumb enough to believe it.”

She looked down, her head hanging limply, and stayed like that for a long, uncomfortable stretch of silence. I would have thought she had fallen asleep, if not for the intense scents of baking bread, fresh strawberries, and watermelon coming from her direction. Eventually, she raised her head and glared in my direction, more through me than at me.

“And the worst thing he did,” she whispered, so quietly I had to lean in to hear, “was that he took Jacob away from me.”

From the way she looked and smelled, I could tell this was something that had hurt her deeply. But I didn’t have the first clue who Jacob was or what it might mean for him to have been “taken away.”

Without thinking, I opened my mouth to ask. “Who’s Ja—”

“My son,” Amber said, smearing a crumpled, greasy napkin across her tears.