Breadcrumb #2

Bob Raymonda

The late August evening air was 10 degrees colder with windchill, but that didn’t bother Marcus or Teddy. The two sat at the top of an old Ferris wheel, suspended for a moment as Clyde let on another couple. There was a small space between the two of them, but their hands hung at their sides and their pinkies grazed ever so slightly. Marcus felt electrified. He hadn’t been this close to Teddy since they were standing in line to get their photo IDs taken at the beginning of the summer.

     The sky was burnt orange as the sun set over the carnival. Teddy stared out into nothing and let out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t think I can do it, Marcus.”

     Marcus pulled back his hand and dug his too-long fingernails into his palm. He glared at the back of Teddy’s caramel neck and wondered what it would be like to kiss it. “Do what?”

     Teddy turned to face Marcus and caught his glare. The Ferris wheel started with a creak. “You know what.”

     The ride was in full swing now after Clyde let on the last of their other co-workers. It was the end-of-summer party, and the park was already closed for the year. Teddy would be going home to Atlanta, and Marcus would stick around here and go back to working nights at his mother’s diner. It seemed unfair.

     They both wore the red-and-white pinstripe T-shirts of a games employee. They’d spent the whole summer in stalls across from each other, competing to see who could wrangle in the most customers over the bullhorn. Teddy always won, but that didn’t stop Marcus from goading him on, claiming he was the inferior.  

     “I don’t know what you mean,” Marcus lied.

     Teddy grabbed Marcus’ hand and pleaded for him to look into his eyes. “She’d know. She always knows.”

     Teddy’s mother was a Christian, and she had no patience for what she called his “affliction." She’d caught him with another boy at the end of the summer last year. He never told Marcus about it, but all the park employees knew. She had the boy fired, telling their boss that he had been harassing Teddy for weeks, even though that was far from the truth. Word spread fast — stay away from the boy with the shy brown eyes.

“Word spread fast — stay away from the boy with the shy brown eyes.”

     The ride sped up as Clyde depressed the lever further than he normally allowed it to go. Any other day of the year and he’d be fired for this, but at the end-of-the-year party, anything goes. Marcus slid closer to Teddy by the sheer force of gravity. Their thighs tensed up and Marcus could feel all the blood rushing from his head to other, more urgent vestiges of himself. He grabbed Teddy’s face and kissed him hard on his unseasonably chapped lips. He didn’t care if he never saw the boy again, or if he lost his job because of it. And in that moment, as the sun set and summer ended, he thought that maybe the Ferris wheel would never stop spinning. And that would be a good thing, because he was exactly where he wanted to be.

• • • 

Breadcrumb #1

Bob Raymonda

She spent the majority of each day hunched over the sink washing her hands. No matter how dry, cracked, and scaled it made them, she persisted. She’d turn the faucet up until it was steaming, piping hot and lather from the tips of her fingers up to her wrists with harsh lye soap. Plunging them underneath the stream, she would count aloud, “One…two…three…,” until the soap was nothing but a memory and her knuckles were too numb to feel.

     Des had been living in her aunt’s old home in the time since she’d passed away and left it to her. She barely left the Cold War-era fallout shelter which had, in her mind, all she needed: a military-grade cot from her aunt and uncle’s camping trips, a small Sterno-powered hot plate, a vast quantity of canned foods, and bars of lye soap. Her job had stopped trying to contact her months before. She was alone with the sink. She was exactly where she wanted to be.

“She was alone with the sink. She was exactly where she wanted to be.”

     When she wasn’t washing her hands, she was indexing the canned foods her aunt had collected during wartime, when the end of the world seemed inevitable to everyone. There were eight hundred and ninety-six cans of black beans, four hundred and thirty-two cans of Vienna sausage, seven hundred and twenty-two cans of candied peaches, and twenty-nine hundred and thirty-six bars of soap. She allowed herself two cans a day, every day, to eat along with a glass of lukewarm water from the old sink.

     Des figured she could sustain life like this for several months before having to venture out into the world. Maybe even a year, and that gave her hope. She couldn’t say she quite remembered what it was like out there, nor would she even want to, because it wouldn’t be the same anymore. She wasn't sure exactly what happened, or how, but she knew that she was alone now. The bombs fell in the early days of her tenure in the bomb shelter. She couldn’t see it, because she was too busy washing her hands and taking inventory. But she heard it and felt it. The vibrations of the first impact were by far the worst, but in the days that followed, they became a welcome interruption. Des was just glad she couldn’t hear the screams of those who weren’t lucky enough to possess an eccentric old couple’s relic of '50s paranoia.

     The funny thing is that Des didn’t seek shelter here to preserve herself from apocalypse. No, she was far too ignorant of current events ever to suspect a thing. She simply felt more comfortable in sterile, enclosed spaces. Cold, calculated places, where you didn’t have to interact with others or explain your idiosyncrasies to them.

     Des would gladly join her contemporaries in the cold hereafter, if only she had possessed the courage. Her uncle had even left a well-oiled Ruger in the bomb shelter, and enough ammunition to ward off several waves of scavengers. Sometimes she would take it out, load it, and hold it to her temple. But she could never pull the trigger. No, she’d empty the chamber, drop it on the ground, and return to the sink where she’d continue to attempt to wash away the skin that she was trapped in.