Through Me

     She was sprawled on her bed in the yoga pants she always slipped into after a long day at the registers. Her dark hair cascaded around her face, the ponytail holder that earlier held it all in a high bun now on her wrist. She looked peaceful. On the nightstand next to her bed was a half-empty bottle of Elavil, the prescription John had picked up for her just yesterday. Next to it was a half-empty bottle of Halcion, with another patient’s name on the label. And next to that, an empty fifth of Aristocrat gin.

     John wasn’t surprised by any of this. He stood there in his slip-resistant black boots and bus boy apron, staring at the scene. He didn’t touch her. He couldn’t. He couldn’t even move.

     He wasn’t surprised. For some time now, his mom’s depression was pretty bad, worse than he could remember as a child. In their younger years, she went through phases, phases that John learned to anticipate.

     He grew up fast, realizing he needed to be the man of the house. He needed to be the rock that would get them through her dark episodes. That was a lot of pressure for a five-year-old. The funny thing was, when he was younger, it was easy. He would make some innocent observation about something grown-up, or tell her a joke he heard on Seinfeld, and butcher the punch-line.

     When he played baseball, it was easy to get his mother out of the house. The games forced her to sit in the stands with the other parents and socialize. She even let herself be set up by one of the other moms, with a male friend of hers. John never met him, as the courtship never made it past the second date. She said it was because she was too busy with work, but her shifts never changed. John knew she ended it over a non-existent problem because she promptly fell into a round of depression.

     No one could be too hard on the woman. Pregnant at sixteen, kicked out at sixteen, high school drop-out at sixteen, homeless at sixteen. Getting past that first year alone was a feat. So the fact she made it sixteen years after that was impressive.

     In fact, it was surprising she didn’t do this sooner. John remembered a few of the times she thought about it. When he was four years old, he vividly recalled being buckled into the back seat of their 1976 Datsun Sportswagon as they drove over the same bridge four times while his mom cried behind the wheel.

     John looked at the pills on the nightstand, then went to the kitchen. He found the black, plastic bag on the counter with two more fifths of Aristocrat. He drank one of them in two long chugs. He never had alcohol before, but he couldn’t taste anything. He couldn’t feel anything. He set the empty bottle down, and took the second one back to his mother’s bedroom.

     With the second Aristocrat, he began swallowing the remaining pills on the nightstand, three at a time, then four. The pills were gone before the gin. Then he finished that, too. He was sitting on the floor now, just watching his dead mother.

*

     John awoke to howls. The first thing he saw upon opening his eyes was two mangy dogs eating a third. He was in a desert. The earth, cracked. The air, still. The howling wasn’t from the dogs. It was from people in the distance. The agonizing screams were coming from all around.

     John stood up, and began walking towards the screaming, which only led him around in circles. After getting dizzy, he stopped himself and closed his eyes to listen hard. He concentrated on the screams until they separated from each other, and he could hear each one individually. Then he heard it. His mother’s crying. He started walking.

     If there was one thing John knew, it was his mother’s crying. She had cried so much in his lifetime that he had learned to suppress his tears before his second birthday. She did enough crying for the two of them.

     As he walked, her whimpering grew more distinct. She was a “silent crier,” who only John could ever hear.

     He came into new landscape. Not only could he finally see people, but there were now trees, all of which were dead and rotten. Some were fallen, some still stood. Everyone looked miserable, many were hunched over. No one seemed to see anything. They all were pale, with pink rings around their blood-shot eyes. Now, in the midst of these lost souls, John could make out their cries. People were calling out for loved ones. Some were crying in pain, or burning. Others were clawing at their throats.

     Far off, John spotted the first bit of color since waking up. He saw a familiar burnt orange. As he got closer to it, he recognized the Datsun Sportswagon from his childhood. He quickened his pace. Growing closer to it, he noticed something strange. The orange paint deteriorated, and the metal body began to shrink. The edges shriveled away, and the hood to the engine bay grew black. John reached the vehicle and, inside, found a crying baby strapped to a car seat. Then it vanished.

     John stood there, looking at where the baby had been, and suddenly felt something. There was a pain in his chest that forced his broad shoulders to curl forward. He hunched with them, gripped at his chest, and fell to his knees. He started to sob.

     He was crying for some time when he felt someone's in front of him. Through tears, he saw black cotton. His eyes moved up to a pale, tear-stained face with pink circles surrounding brown, blood-shot eyes. Around her face and over her shoulders, brown hair cascaded down. She reached out to his face, cupping his chin in her hand.

     “Why did you do it?” John asked his mother.