“I can do it,” she said, squeezing it over her throbbing skull like a too-tight girdle. The roar of the motorcycle almost knocked her over as the boy started it. He patted the seat behind him and she climbed on and clutched him with a desperation she did not like.
As the boy drove her back home, her face twisted into a similar, not-same wicked grin as the day before. Or was it the day before? She had lost her sense of time until it crashed back down with the sun when she asked for it, squeezing her, making it hard to breath. Then she saw it.
Reflected in the back of the boy’s helmet (which she noticed had turned form black to red), staring her in the face, was her past. She could smell the putrefying sores that had reclaimed his entire body, rotting the seersucker of his suit, their puss dripping toward the boy’s neck.
Panicked, she moved to catch it before it hit skin—but wait, there was no skin beneath the helmet, only a shock of translucent green feathers. And the roaring had stopped, and a high-pitched reverberation had taken its place. And she realized she was high up in the air.
She clung, not to the chest of the boy, but to the neck of the hummingbird, now large enough to carry her weight. They were traveling at an insane speed, jolting in erratic directions, turning the towns below them into a nauseating blur that resembled a swirled bowl of oatmeal.
Once she wrangled her stare from the chaos beneath them, she turned back to her past, so furiously livid that it turned her eyes to fire and their glow reflected exactly on top of his, so they were one and the same.
“Why are you here?” She screamed.
The hummingbird replied in the voice of the boy, “I’m taking you home, love.”
“I’m not talking to you,” she said, softer this time, not trusting that it was really the boy speaking to her, but careful just in case.
Now she whispered, tersely, “Did you hear what he said? We’re going HOME. You go get your disgusting chair, and you get the fuck out!”
Her past gurgled with a slow, rising, patronizing laugh. “You still don’t get it, do you,” he growled. “I GAVE him to you for a night because you were looking so damned pitiful in your moping and your melting and your fear. He’s LEAVING you now, you dumb bitch. I thought a good lay might cheer you up so I could get some sleep instead of spending all fucking night answering all of your stupid, tired, same-old questions over and over and over and over.…”
She lifted off the hummingbird’s back slightly and grabbed the red helmet with her past’s face inside. With a scream that encompassed the entire world, she ripped the helmet off her feathered boy with such force that she launched both her past and herself off their perch and into the open air.
“Now I’ve got you. Now you will die,” she hissed at her past, not yet understanding, not yet registering.
“Well, perhaps I’ve underestimated,” he said as they tumbled down and down. “Only for someone with no future, there is no past.” His face faded from the helmet, and the helmet from her hands.
There was a momentary jolt of panic in her brain, but with her past dead and gone, it only lasted a second. There was no sound, no noise, except the gentle whooshing of the air as it buffered her body with increasing speed, and the noise of the hummingbird’s wings who hovered just above her, keeping her calm and cool and quiet with the winsome, melancholy gaze of his big, deep, blue eyes.
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