Synesthesia: Chapter Forty-Nine

serial fiction

Image: Joan Moccagatta, Pexels

I couldn’t see a thing, but the stench of freshly shat shit was all around me. Had I fallen face-first into a pile of it?

A weight came off of my back, and then a smaller weight after it, and then I realized I could turn my head. I did so, and got an eyeful of blinding Arizona sun for my trouble.

I closed my eyes and groaned, feeling an ache throughout my body that I had been too distracted or scent-drunk to notice before. I wished I could close my nose too, but the shit-smell only got worse as I lay prone in the dust.

A shadow fell across my eyelids, a shadow that smelled faintly of pine needles.

“Hi there,” said the shadow. “My name’s Richard. What’s yours?”

I didn’t want to talk to the shadow. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

“Is he conscious?” asked a voice somewhere behind Richard.

“I’m gonna check your pulse, okay?” Richard said.

I didn’t want Richard to check my pulse. I didn’t want Richard to touch me or talk to me, although I appreciated the shade he was creating.

I wanted Richard to go away.

I opened my mouth and told him my name. Quietly, so that Amber wouldn’t hear.

Richard opened his own mouth and repeated my legal first name to everyone within twenty yards. He asked me where I was from, repeating my legal first name again.

He did not go away.

“Indiana,” I said, opening my eyes. Richard was smaller than I’d expected, muscular and dark and compact, maybe no more than an inch taller than Amber. He reached out and made good on his threat to check my pulse, and I suppressed a desire to growl at him.

“Are you hurting anywhere?” Richard asked, again using my legal first name.

“Please don’t call me that,” I muttered, spitting dust from my mouth.

“Sorry,” Richard said. Somehow, I got the impression that he meant it. “What would you like to be called?”

Just beyond where Richard knelt in front of me, I caught a glimpse of Amber’s silver sandal.

“Zodiac,” I said.

---

Richard and his highlighter-yellow-clad search and rescue crew insisted on taking me to the clinic to get checked out. I assume they took the girl too, but I never saw her again after they lifted her off of me at the trailhead.

Amber and Jacob came with me to the clinic. When I finally emerged from the sterile little room where a female doctor who smelled of wood smoke checked all my limbs, reflexes, and various other indications of being a normal, functioning human being, Amber rose from her dark blue plastic chair in the hallway and hugged me, reeking of shit and eucalyptus. This time, I managed to stay on my feet.

“How did you know she was down there?” she asked, releasing me and gazing up into my eyes.

An invisible punch landed in the soft space right between my ribs as the realization hit. Amber thought I had run into the canyon to save that girl.

I felt like I could melt into the beige tile floor from shame. Amber’s green eyes sparkled at me like two cut jewels. She thought I was a hero.

What would she think of me if she knew the truth?

I opened my mouth and closed it again, not knowing what to say.

“Hey, Zodiac!” A male voice echoed down the hallway. Silhouetted against the deepening pink of the evening sky, a dark figure approached from the glass double doors of the clinic entrance, one of which was still sighing shut behind him.

I didn’t need to see his face to recognize him. I knew him by his voice, which I’d first heard while lying face-down in the canyon dirt, and by the faint scent of pine that seemed to be a permanent part of his character.

“Richard,” I said, a statement of fact in place of a greeting.

He reached me and clapped one hand onto my upper arm, his mouth stretched wide into a smile. “I just wanted to say you did great out there,” he grinned.

I stared at him, trying to understand what was going on. One of his upper canine teeth was crooked, twisted partway around in its socket as if it had turned to call out to his uvula and been suddenly frozen in place. He smiled anyway, showing his crooked tooth to the world, smelling not of shit but of a pine forest.

“Thanks,” I said, unsure what I was saying thanks for. Did great at what, exactly? Face-planting into the ground with two women on top of me?

“I don’t know how you managed to find her, but we had people out there looking for a day and a half with no luck.”

Oh, no. That again.

So Richard thought I was a hero too.

“And then carrying her back up, too! Incredible,” Richard went on, deepening my shame. “You know, she probably would have died out there if it hadn’t been for you.”

At this, Amber hugged me again, scorching my sinuses with an intense wave of eucalyptus. “That’s my Zodiac!” she breathed into my chest.

I silently begged the beige tiles to swallow me up.

Richard looked up at me with his black-brown eyes, dark as two huge pupils. He was exactly the same height as Amber.

“You know,” he said, the pine needles now sprinkled with vinegar, “we could really use a guy like you on the team.”

Amber’s eucalyptus-scented pride was so strong now, I wondered if I should have the doctor check me again for damage to my sinuses.

“You gotta do it, Zode!” she begged, bouncing up and down like a kid begging for ice cream.

I was so full of confused, conflicting emotions, I felt like I might vomit up all the water and electrolytes I’d been forced to drink since arriving at the clinic. I looked back and forth between Amber’s sparkling green eyes and Richard’s shining black ones, both sets brimming with hope and pride and—and something more. Something I couldn’t name or understand.

“Okay,” I said.

Richard clapped me across the back, a gesture of masculine love and respect I’d seen a thousand times but rarely participated in. Amber squeezed me one more time, shit streaking her proud eucalyptus. Jacob tilted his little head up at me and took my hand in his.

The four of us walked down the hall and out of the clinic, into the cooling Arizona dusk, into a world in which I was, inexplicably, not a villain but a hero.