f (foundling) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-03-04 20:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, cristián martin-argüelles |
Narrative: Cris M
Who: Cris Martin-Argüelles
What: narrative
Where: Marvel, his apartment
When: the morning after this, after Sam splits
Warnings/Rating: usual!
She was gone. Cris sent Teresita off to school and showered, and not fifteen minutes later, when he came out, and she was gone. The bed was empty. The apartment was empty. And not for the first time, Sam had left. He didn't panic. He didn't look to see if she'd taken anything, beyond the chess piece he already noticed missing from the bedstand. He dressed. He went down to the kitchen. He started black beans in the slowcooker. He moved on to making Teresita's lunches. He made bacon and left it to cool on a paper towel covering a plate. He got the whole wheat wraps outta the fridge and smeared two thick with peanut butter. The bacon was crumbled onto that and drizzled with honey. Add a banana slices, coin-sized and scattered, and roll. The Elvis Burrito. A favorite among five-and-a-half-year-old Cubana girls who opted for pigtails almost every day. For Tuesdays and Thursdays, of course. Monday and Wednesday: ham and cheese quesadillas. And this Friday's wildcard—lunch money, he decided, tired and torn there against the kitchen counter. The sandwiches and reusable water bottles were soldiered in the fridge, in their brown paper bags, with appropriate and varying snacks—fruit, yogurt, that kinda thing. Cris worked, cleaning, scraping, spreading, and he kept his phone and tablet right there on the kitchen table. He waited. And two hours later, when he came back in from burning the shirt and pants in the den of his garage, huddled brownstone brick in the snow and oil-spotted cement, when he came back in with black on his cheek and sweat along his hairline, after beating those bloody shoes to hell and burning them too, heels stubborn under flames, stinking up the small space—he still waited. He went for a run, blue Rangers hoodie over thermal, dark cap, gloves, and ASICS pants. It was long. His phone was a weight in his pocket—heavy enough that he let his feet take him to the boxing gym. He didn't let himself use a different room than normal. He went in and he remembered all of it, bloodspots there, partway up the wall. Halfway through, he tore off the hoodie and thermal and tossed them over with his gloves and hat. He didn't have his handwraps and it was poor decision-making that let him keep going. But he did. Keep going. He went until the skin over his knuckles split back from bone, no wedding ring making it worse, and the bag was wet. Cris left the gym. Outside, on the sidewalk, in the gutter of the Bronx, he stuck his hands into dirty snow. When he got home, he decided it was worse than he thought. Not his hands. Whatever it was he'd done to make Sam leave. Panic was still a little ways off, beat to the punch by guilt, and he showered a second time. She didn't reappear in the interim. She was gone. He crawled into his still-unmade bed and he laid where Sam had slept, and he used the pillow that still bore mild dampness from her hair and now his. He fell asleep, and his mind untethered as REM approached. When he woke up, it was still too early to get Teresa, and he just stayed where he was. Sam said he had to give her time, and he had to be okay with how she did things. But he'd given her the whole day, and it was starting to sink in that maybe her exhaustion in the hallway the night before had been as much about him as Joey and the half-remembered ghosts of Micah and Ian. He knew Neil was bad for Sam. He got high with her. He left her. But this was somewhere up there. It had to be. He couldn't let the girl talk without making her shutdown so completely she couldn't even walk. He refused to leave her. She talked about papers. She loved a guy in a way Cris got, rationally, but not in any other way. And maybe she loved him because he was all the things Cris wasn't. Not that anyone else would think of it that way. But maybe as much as she said she hated the passivity and Neil not going after Meredith, she'd liked it enough at some point, hadn't she? Enough to stay for three years and enough to love a cabrón without him ever having to lift a finger. It didn't make sense to want someone who made you work so hard for it, who made you walk yourself to suicide watch. Then again, it didn't make sense to want someone who was so like his father, it turned his gut, who wouldn't let you go from his house when you asked and he promised, who was just some gangster kid from the barrio all grown up and given a badge, who broke his own hands open because he was too stupid and too stubborn to stop. He was so stupid. ¡Coño! Cris swore and scrambled out of bed, his fingers twitching where they'd sent a bullet into a man's brain. He ran downstairs in his boxers. The beans were going to be overcooked. |