Colette Murphy (Coco)

Professor Miller

Fiction Writing Workshop

09/06/2024

Anonymous

Charon told me she’d never given a second thought about being remembered in the long run, “no one has the time.” She told me once. When she’d said it, she’d meant it; my best friend was never one to beat around a bush. But because of her blunt attitude and conviction that told her she’d never feel like someone would drop anything for her, many have been scared off. I don’t think Charon has ever known a state of psychological catharsis.

Around when I met Charon, she’d call me a little flame. She says that I’m a force, a flame with an insatiable desire as flames have, to be soft. At first, I thought she said that because I would bother her with worried questions she’d consider mundane; but I think what she really meant is that she admires my own light, and that she wishes she had some of her own. I, too, wish Charon had her own.

Skittish, fidgety hands wrestle a headphone into her ear; I’ve known this paragon of anxiety for two years now and she can’t go more than an hour without listening to Title Fight or Deftones or some soul crushingly depressing emo band. She’s the kind of girl you never want to pregame with, every song she plays would be a skip on my own playlist, even if I were depressed enough to enjoy what she listens to. She says it doesn’t make her sad, that it’s just music and since it’s “just music” all music makes her happy despite its soul-crushingness. I could never

agree- one listen to Brand New, or even the Foo Fighters, and I’m on the ground begging God to spare me already.

An amalgamation of rotted breath, oily hair, pale freckled skin stretched over thin bones- all that Charon is to me is here in this graveyard where coldness holds her closest and the pitstops in our conversations serve as vestiges of who we were before college. Her isolation has manifested into the faded scars on her arms, for most of her life as I’ve come to realize, my best friend has been stuck in her head. Though she’s kind of a loser, any information Charon does give me is of value since she rarely talks of herself. At first, I’d meet here with her out of pity to bum a cig; no one Charon has interacted with has wanted to stay it seems. She told me that once, in the illuminating light and faint warmness of another bummed cig. She’s a dual pill popper, I know because that night the rattling of a bottle in her pocket was quelled when she put it to her lips and I watched. No water, no struggle, no fight. She barely gulped when I watched her dry swallow two ecstasy. She didn’t offer me any that night, and it made me a little frustrated. Maybe the thought came from within me- a place of wanting to understand my best friend; but I kind of wanted to be a loser that night, too.

I often wonder about her home life, but I don’t want to push that door open. In all honesty, I’m afraid of this frail freckled Junior in college. Part of me knows there’s something going on because whenever she does go back home, it’s like a different person is talking to me when she comes back. I myself am a freshman, but I’m scared if I push too hard against the walls that Charon has up, they’d topple over and there’d be nothing left for me to see.

It’s freezing out- I’m not even exaggerating like I normally do- but she doesn’t shiver. She sits there, rice cake crumbs still littering her lips. Charon hasn’t been eating a whole lot these past few days, if at all. She wipes them off with a long sleeve that drapes itself over her papery

arm. Her sweater has a Radiohead album cover on it but where she got it from I’d have to ask late; anything long-sleeved is awfully out of character for her to wear even if Winter is coming around. It’s in our relationship for me not to ask, but recently she’s been weird; weirder than when she normally comes back from visiting her family.

She manages to worry me- doting over her isn’t so out of my character.

When she looks at me, it feels like there are a million eyes on me because Charon is the kind of girl that hangs onto every word you say with as much grip strength a 99-pound, bug-eyed girl can bare. But when you try to get anything out of her that’s not what bands she’s obsessed with- right now it’s some niche bullshit out of Connecticut she found through a local basement show- she shuts up like a God damn clam. There’s no work around to her, she’ll listen to me talk about how horrible it is living with my grandma after my parents left me at fourteen, or how I hate that my own band can’t find a singer, or how hard it is as a gay man to squeeze out of these stereotypes people have of me when attending college in the south; but the second I ask her about her homelife- why she stays at college over the Summer, or even if she’d brushed her teeth that morning- she’s a door that I’ve given up knocking on.

I can hear three things in the desolate scenery that we’ve found comfort in. The first is her pill bottle rattling, it’s the only thing making noise in this graveyard with almost no vegetation. No animals. No nothing. Except for the river nearby, but it’s out of range for us to hear from where we sit. The second is Charon’s lighter sparking against the cigarette nestled between her pointer and middle fingers. Like a forty-year-old man who knows he’s going to die by lung cancer, by his own hand, she has a right to it. The third is her music through the headphone that isn’t covering her ear- it’s a band I put her on to, Built to Spill. Maybe she’s

giving me an ego boost on purpose, she usually has both on when we walk around looking at the last names on the gravestones.

In this graveyard, there are also three things I’m certain I know about Charon, whether she’s told me or not. The first is that she doesn’t have a dog. But here we are. She called me- she never does that- at 9 AM yesterday morning saying she wanted to visit the gravesite of her dog that just died; but again. I’m certain Charon, whose dorm I’ve been to a half handful of times, doesn’t have a dog.

The second thing I’m certain of is that I have never seen her wear long sleeves in my two years of knowing her. We met when I was touring the school mid-winter at a convenience store close to campus that my grandmother insisted we went to. Though I live only fifty minutes out- my grandma wouldn’t let me go any further away- I’d never been in our campus’ area. That was when Charon, bright dyed hair, sweat pants, and a God damn crop top in mid-Winter- it was cold that year for the South- beelined for the liquor isle, stole an IPA in her left hand and a pack of cigs tucked into her bra, and left. I hate that piss-flavored beer- the feel of its suds on my tongue makes me never want to drink one again- but if you’re looking for a singer for your band like I’ve been, she was a perfect candidate. Ever since I got her number that night- she doesn’t use social media; she rarely even responds to me over text- I have never seen her wear long sleeves.

The third and last thing I’m certain of is that she quit drinking around the night we met. She mentioned it even, so why the Hell had she shown up with a whole bottle of rum? She turned twenty-one a few weeks back, and we’ve had fleeting conversations in the past about her sobriety; how she doesn’t want to be a “slave to alcohol” like her father. The scorn that licked her lips when she spat her father’s name told me all I needed to know about their relationship.

Warm cigarette smoke hits my face as I open my mouth.

“Rum?”

Cigarette smoke cauterized by dirt makes me turn my head as she flicks the butt of it away from us. She has the bottle between her legs and picks it up, swishing it around a bit in the process as if she’d been doing it for years. I watch as she opens her mouth to drink some, and roughly three shots seem to go smoothly down her throat. She doesn’t wince in this graveyard that we sit upon. She doesn’t cough after she swallows the woody, apple intoxicant that would’ve burned my own throat. She just looks out at the gravestones, gets up, and reaches her hand out to me as if to follow her, because she knows I will. Charon’s purple hair is a stark contrast to the rest of the scenery, her fleeting sparks of unpredictability keeping me on my toes.

She hands me the bottle, which I’m now realizing she’s drank quite a bit of, and I make a mental note to myself to not give it back to her. I can tell she’s drunk, though I’m not sure how long she’s been sipping at the rum, when she falters and sits on the top of a headstone. She’s rubbing her left arm, but I can tell it’s not because she’s cold. Charon seems to have been hurting for a while now.

“You’re too soft.” Her words are sluggish, her voice hoarse. Her head teeters snarkily with each stressed syllable; she wouldn’t be a good vocalist, but I recognized that a while ago. “Shut it, you’re drunk.” I retort flatly as I reach out my hand to pull her up from the headstone. She looks at my hand, eyes tracing up my arm, but she doesn’t look me in the eyes. Charon shoves herself off the head stone and continues walking down the road without looking back.

My eyes follow her for a little while, half expecting her to stop or turn around. Subtly, Charon turns her head towards me as if to say something, but I look back too soon. I make eye contact with a whisper of a woman, and she doesn’t care to hold it. She doesn’t care to hold onto

anything these days when she mutters under her breath, “Gimme the rum,” she fully turns around looks me dead in the eye, and says “it’s only humans who take so long to mature.”

“Charon..” She ignores me and grabs the bottle from me in a vexatious haste, taking another couple-second swig. “Dude!” I scold her, trying to grab her arms, but she falls back onto the hard ground below us, spilling the remaining rum out onto the dirt, and hisses, “don’t touch me!” Her headphone flies out of her ear, spit flies out of her mouth.

Bewildered by her sudden defiance I step back, but she doesn’t look at me. She fully collapses back onto the ground, headphones twisting themselves in a mess around her waist. I watch my best friend cover her eyes with her sleeves as I hurriedly try to pick up the rum that is now in her hair and soaking into her sweater. She turns over, making a mess of herself and wrapping her body in a fetal position around the bottle, laughing as it soaks her.

She peeks at me through her sleeve, hair and dirt sticking to her face when she gives me a crazed look and sits up. She rips her headphones out of her phone, throwing them to her side as they unwind in a whipping motion from around her waist. Charon finally makes some real eye contact. Her head bobs down as she looks up at me. “You make me wann’ pray” her words are barely coherent; I’ve never known Charon to be like this. Her movements are sluggish, eyes half open as I watch her lick her lips. “Heaven’sa vision outta reach, I’ve sinned too much for some dystopian bull like that.” She leans on the word bull, I let it echo in my head.

I speak but she cuts me off and begins to talk over me, so I keep quiet. It’s rare for her to talk so deeply, but when she does, I’m always there to listen. “’s lost on me; I can only pray for that kinda release.” I look at her thin frame now showing from the alcohol seeped into Charon’s Radiohead sweater as it begins to hug her frail body with sticky moisture. I can see her ribs, not that they were new to me.

I sit down next to her, rum immediately making my sweatpants wet, it’s putridness sickening my nose. “I won’t touch you, what’s going on?” I set the bottle up next to us, look it up and down, and take a deep swig of what’s left- probably three shots- recoiling in disgust as I instinctively throw it to the ground away from us. Miraculously, it doesn’t shatter.

“Dog died.” She doesn’t budge, even for me, but I figured she’d be that way. “Yeah, then where’s the headstone?” I stare at her, if she won’t budge, I won’t either. “Can’t get up to show you, ‘ts by the river.” The word comes out more like rither, she falls back and moans when her head hits the ground.

I don’t feel pity, I won’t allow myself to. I need answers that pity won’t give me, I think to myself.

“Wear my shirt, your sweater’s drenched, dude,” I take it off in hopes she’ll tell me something, anything. I’m met with pins of cold against my naked skin, but for Charon, it doesn’t bother me. I want to taste the salt water that’s been suffocating her while she drowns in her efforts to keep everyone at a distance. I don’t know why she’s kept me at this imaginary shoreline for so long, she knows that I want to help her. If it meant she’d feel better, I’d lick Charon’s silhouette on the off chance she’d feel my comfort in the bone of her shadow.

She lays on the ground with her thumb holding the drenched cloth against her palm, biting at the purple chipped paint on her nail. “You’ll get a cold, stop being stubborn.” When the words leave my lips, I sigh to myself, maybe I should follow that advice, too.

Perhaps it’s because of the alcohol. I tell myself it’s because I want to help her, but maybe it’s more of me wanting to give her this sense of heaven that’s been out of her reach for so long- even if it’s just a taste. Even if it’s just my dumb shirt.

I close my eyes and make a point not to look when I reach for the hem of her sweater. I start pealing it away from her torso and struggle to make it go over her head when I feel sticky hands wrap themselves around the skin of my face.

“You want to fucking,” she hiccups, “help me so bad, fuckin’ look Anima,” she grabs my face and my eyes fling open when she grunts my name like she’s telling me she’s a lost cause. Her face is inches away from mine, I can smell the alcohol on our breath as I breathe her in. Her hands are clammy, dirty, and shaking against my temples. Her cheekbones are showing more than before, there’s still a piece of crisped rice on her chin, and a bit of drool that also could’ve been rum glossing her cracked lips. I can tell she’s not all there, but at this point neither am I. “Just fuckin’ look!”

Her hands dart to her shirt and before I can process the sticky residue of rum on my face, I watch in horror as Charon lifts it over her head; completely topless in front of me. My eyes don’t waver as a moment of soberness washes over me. I’m face to face with three large purple hues that fade into blacks, blues, and bits of yellow; one over her pelvic bone that reaches into her jeans, the second barely above her breast, and the last covering her shoulder into her arm. My eyes follow the last one, tracing cool hued skin slick with alcohol that makes her shine in the light of the moon, as I’m met again with another large bruise on her forearm.

It feels like I can never make eye contact with her again.

“You think I’m disgusting!” Her knees meet her bare chest as she rocks violently, fists angrily drumming against her knees and then banging feverishly against her forehead. “You think I’m disgusting!” She rocks back and forth as mascara and snot dribble onto her bare chest. “You think I’m fucking disgusting!” She wheezes and I watch my best friend wince when she lands a blow on the bruise above her breast, knees locking back against her chest as she whines,

repeatedly throwing her head into her knees. “Charon!” I grab her arms as she leans forward and hiccups a whale into my own chest, collapsing in a raw, bare mess against me.

“You think I’m disgusting.” She breathes it out as if she’s accepted it. As if it’s been branded into each wrinkle of her brain. As if each letter of the word “disgusting” has been plastered over finger prints she’d been forced to identify with.

I don’t wish to know the expression she makes as my soberness fades out, and my head feels heavy again. Her own head is getting heavier against my chest. I let her right hand come back to rest against my temple as she looks up at me. She’s a shipwreck of black tears and snot, cheeks flushed because of the cold and breath reeking of syrupy rum and salt. Her left hand smooths itself over my own as I realize how hard I’m holding her arm. Only then did I notice her hands were actually freezing, her wrists thin. They were also quite light despite this heavy grief and anger she’s been carrying. I let myself take her in, my eyes blanketing her like a frightened child.

She sluggishly drags the palm of my hand over her pelvic bone where the first bruise paints her figure. She doesn’t let my hand linger, not that it would, as I break eye contact to follow hers. Her frail waist is sticky and slick with rum and snot when she graces our hands over the hills of her rib cage. I can feel her eyes boring into me as her body flinches when she maneuvers our hands around the second bruise, up past her breast. When did this happen? I think to myself. She almost stops at her throat, and drunkenly nuzzles my palm just past her temple, her fingers interlocking with my own as we both run our hands through her coarse, frayed purple hair.

“Charon” I start slowly, shakily.

I can’t bring myself to whisper anymore when I say “If there’s so much salt in this wound you’ve kept unbandaged, let me be the one to pick out each grain.” I want her to know she’d never be met with derision from me. “Let me wrap you in gauze and medical tape, let me be there for you.” We stay sitting like this, looking at each other with sticky hands covered in rum, snot, tears. I look into her brown eyes and watch as freckles dance along her cherried cheeks; I feel my eyes try to focus on hers despite drunkenness that pines at me.

I let her talk when she feels comfortable.

“It’ll never go away.” She loses eye contact and grabs my shirt from me, and I watch as her purple hair disappears under my white cotton tee with Dark Souls One plastered over the front. Maybe I am a loser. I think to myself. Can’t help but love that franchise.

She struggles to fit herself through an armhole, then the other armhole, and then finally the neck of the shirt. “I’ll never feel clean.” When her head pops out her mascara is stained against my shirt and her usually monotone voice is shaky. “When I go home, every mountain I’ve summited has been turned into a seabed by my parents. So, when I come back down here, it’s only distain that keeps me motivated anymore.”

“Distain for your parents?” I can’t help but ask- in this drunken whir I’ve found my hands cupped with dirt ground from greed for any seeds of information I could get out of Charon. I’ve found myself shaking hands with it, holding onto every word she does give me.

“No.” The word falls from her lips like she’s been rehearsing it. “Distain for myself. Distain for who I see reflected in the mirror.” A pit falls in my stomach as I lose eye contact, not so eager for another answer. It feels like I’ve been waiting for her guard to fall so I can see my best friend, but when it finally has, I’m stunned.

“Charon.. I didn’t know this weight-”

“You never will.” She cuts me off to look at me. “No one ever will.”

I shake my head, “No. That’s only true if you don’t let people know this weight.” I hesitate before continuing, “you act like everyone doesn’t have their own weight. I feel worn like a fucking… accessory by these girls. They show me off like I’m some prize of theirs just because I’m gay.” I spit the sexuality from my lips like it’s venom. Like it’s my own distain.

“While I may not fully understand your pain, I know the flavor of it and its weight in my mind. I know how it sits on my tongue, unable to be swallowed; and I know how hard it is to talk without choking on it.” I pause to make sure she’s listening, and there she is. Charon is holding onto my words like they’re her lifeline. Maybe these conversations have been distracting her for a while now. Maybe everyone’s wall falls at some point, maybe every door opens. “You have to remember that what you’re showing me, that what you’ve been through, is a fraction of your whole self.” Her wall has toppled. But she knows I’ll be there to examine each unstable brick she’s been hiding behind, whether she put it there consciously or not. She rubs snot from her nose, in my shirt, but I don’t care. I wrap my arms around her, I let her shake and snivel in my arms. I let her be.

We’ve touched this hurt that’s been haunting her, and Charon hasn’t fallen apart. “You’ve only been unraveled; you’ve only been bent, not broken.”