We were throwing eyes onto the train tracks when Bobby asked me to be his best man. Our knees dangled from basalt escarpments where he’d spraypainted Bobby+Heather4ever. Apparently, her ex, Reynolds, still sent Heather wild horny messages. Bobby couldn’t stand it. So he and Heather were getting married. He pitched an eye, and colored glass exploded, glinting on the rails. Our dads were ocularists: eyes that didn’t sell to taxidermists and hospitals accumulated in our garages. When Bobby said Marla would be a bridesmaid, I bit my cheek. He was my best friend. I’d fallen away from everyone else in our loose orbit and didn’t want to be alone.

It started Halloween, a year ago, at the twins’ house. Brenda and Marla were identical except an Illinois-shaped birthmark behind Brenda’s ear. Bobby and I’d brought some of our fathers’ eyeballs to their Halloween party. They looked real but were cold in your hand. 

In a basement crowded with halfhearted costumes, we drank their dad’s beer. Marla wore an XL Slipknot T-shirt. She handed me a Budweiser, said she was supposed to be her last shitty boyfriend. What was I supposed to be? But I hadn’t dressed up. I wasn’t anything.

Everyone knelt in a circle, spun a bottle. Some pecked lips and hurried back to their spots—a bold few claimed the bathroom. My knees ached. I hoped the bottle didn’t pick me. Bobby had eyes for Heather from the start.

Everything bored Heather since breaking up with Reynolds. At another party, he’d ran around on all fours, yelping like a coyote and sniffing crotches. She loved to tell that story. When the bottle aimed at Bobby, Heather shrugged—these were just games. Bobby crawled across the circle and whispered, “I’ll win any game you wanna play.”

The bottle picked me next. But before anything happened, the twins’ dad came home bellowing mad: his fridge was empty and his house full of teen strangers. We scraped bellies and shins, escaping out the basement window. We fanned across the neighborhood, kinetic, and weightless. We shouted down alleyways and between alders of the shadowed park.

Marla caught me by the wrist. Her eyes thrown wide open, pulling all the scant light. “You still owe someone a kiss.” She pointed to Bobby and Heather pawing each other on a park bench. “That’s how the game works.” 

By February, Marla wanted to share vials of blood like she’d read about Angelina Jolie and Billy-Bob Thornton in Star magazine. We were alone in her basement. Sarah McLachlan played loud so her dad couldn’t hear us. We kept falling out a window and never hitting the ground. We counted rug burns on each other’s backs. I stared at the knife in Marla’s hand. When I couldn’t do it, disappointment scrolled in her eyes rolling back. She undid her bra, and McLauchlan sang, “We are born innocent.”  

One night, we dusted backroads in Bobby’s Corolla. Pines saw-toothed in the moonlight. Heather propped her feet on a box of our fathers’ unsold eyes and splayed her fingers, admiring the engagement ring. In the backseat, Marla said she loved me. I’d never said that to anyone. That wasn’t something we said in my house. 

Bobby accelerated, blasting nu-metal. I tried to speak and couldn’t hear myself.

Marla pressed our foreheads together. “Say it back.”

The Corolla struck a pothole. A big cavity in the blacktop. For a second, everything lifted. We met the road with a bang. In the wrinkling gravity, my chin spilt Marla’s lip, and her brow filled my head filled with loud white light. By the time my eye began to swell and blacken, I still hadn’t said anything. The words thickened and webbed down where my breath had left me like it was never coming back.

By wedding day, Marla and I hadn’t talked in months. The groomsmen changed into our rented suits and cranked Foo Fighters on a boombox. A spoiled veggie platter was stinking up the church basement—something between mold and fart. I took this for a bad omen but couldn’t say so minutes before the ceremony while knotting my tie. Bobby grinned, air-drumming to “Everlong.” I held my breath and smiled back. The night before, we’d drunk Mickey’s on the escarpment. Trains cleaved the dark and scattered broken eyes like eggshells. We’d popped Vicodin and imitated how our dads talked—low, woozy—as though this were something near to us now. When rain fell over us, it felt like nothing, like it’d fallen yesterday over someone else.

After the I-dos, Bobby and Heather donned sunglasses and threw the bouquet. Marla and I were paired to walk in the procession. My hands shook as we converged into the aisle. But her arm hugged mine tenderly, and I felt the soft velocity of how we were before.

“You guys stink,” she whispered. “Did a sink backed up?”

 The wedding party spilled onto the sidewalk. An errant wind pushed its fingers through everyone’s hair. Illinois flashed in pink skin as I watched Brenda tamed her curls down. 

“Please don’t tell.” Brenda said. “Marla owes me bigtime for swapping with her.”

The newlyweds moved into a tiny walk-up behind the Thriftway. In a couple years, the rickety stairs leading up to their door would collapse. Whenever I visited, they appeared bewildered by their lives, the air stiff with weed smoke. Bobby described his new HVAC job—the mundane details. I tried to care. Tried for Bobby. Heather studied her fingernails. 

At another party in the twins’ basement, everyone snorted crushed pills off a Ouija board. I didn’t come to any of the parties anymore. But supposedly, Reynolds showed up after everyone had gotten crooked. Bobby passed out in his coat. Plugging her nosebleed with a tissue, Heather pulled Reynolds toward the bathroom, smiling shyly at the twins because it was only games.

By night’s end, Brenda had to put Marla in the bathtub with her shoes on; she wouldn’t let go of her phone. I woke up to garbled texts, a tumble of letters, I could feel their frantic urgency, as I arranged them into words you can never take back.

That summer, my dad declared bankruptcy. Our house was quiet and charged with shame. Brenda and I stocked shelves at Thriftway for minimum wage. She told me that Marla had moved in with a guy over in The Dalles and was going to be a dental hygienist. I asked what Brenda was going to be. She flipped me off. “I could ask you the same thing, shithead.”

On sale days, we tied ballons and hit off a helium tank until the hours perforated. Brenda related Bobby and Heather’s drama, her voice all chipmunked: Reynolds driving Heather around in a stolen Pinto, Bobby tail-spinning out of work, out of sight. I’d gone to the apartment, to his dad’s place, but Bobby didn’t live there anymore.

When Brenda palmed me some warm pill, I washed it down with bright green Jones Soda we pulled from the fridge along the back wall. On the bottle was a black-and-white photograph of a pair of arms raising a child to sky, and that child leaving those arms, like swimming up through summer. We discounted cans of creamed corn while Lyle Lovett played in the overhead. Tract lighting snowed down the aisles. Through the static-frosted air, I brushed the curls away from Brenda’s neck and Illinois, pink behind her ear. It didn’t matter who we were. 

A sharp bubble rose in my chest. I felt it pop as something unstoppable came crushing through me. In a fluorescent blizzard, I heard the furrowed steel of trains punching down the tracks. The distance from here to then went on, telescoping until I couldn’t make a sound.

 I remember Brenda was laughing. She laughed for a long time.

By Desmond Fuller

Desmond Fuller

Desmond Everest Fuller is a first-generation college graduate and writer from the Pacific Northwest. He earned an MFA in fiction at Boise State University, was a 2023 Sun Valley Writers Conference Fellow, and a 2021 Glenn Balch Award recipient. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appears in or is forthcoming from Greensboro Review, Permafrost, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Grist, Florida Review, and elsewhere.

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