People Scream
by Bonnie ZoBell
A piercing sound travels down the long, waxed corridor at the Center for Life, where behind every door an Anonymous or Anon meeting is in session. Heather holds herself still at the receptionist desk when she hears it and even though she's heard it before, she stops breathing, like maybe she can see or feel where the unsettling cry is coming from. For this one minute she is alone. Afterward, she tallies tonight's donations even faster than usual so she can get out of here, but still she feels panicky. Who would make such a noise? Is the person okay?
She can't quite get comfortable in her mini and her new red espadrilles that tie around her ankles, so she keeps crossing her legs and recrossing them. Members walk by again, eyeing her nose ring and the tats on her arms, but she tries not to care. After all, these people are old, in their thirties, some even in their forties. And they have problems, something Heather hopes she herself will never have. For now she just can't wait to go clubbing with Raymond after work.
“Did you hear that sound?” she asks a woman hurrying past. She asks because sometimes she feels like there's a moat between her and the rest of the world, and she wants to make sure somebody else heard the scream too.
But the woman just smiles a fakey smile, shrugs, keeps moving.
Tonight the Center for Life has been like most Wednesday nights. She passed out envelopes for donations. The regulars filed through, and she gave them a guarded smile. The one she thinks of as Rug Man winked and jerked his head as he went by, making her wonder why the rug didn't come flying off.
Why he didn't just shave it like everyone else these days she didn't know. Then came the one she thinks of as the Efficiency Expert, tidy, always carrying a briefcase and wearing white. He walked by her desk three times, dragging his finger over the fake wood—thinking she didn't notice—then, as usual, stopped to ask the question: “Can I get a receipt?”
“After the meeting,” she always tells him.
“You look totally awesome tonight.”
He's so lame. He says that every Wednesday night.
Even Wally from Whittier showed up, wearing his United Parcel uniform, rolling his eyes and saying he'd come to put in his two hours.
But by the time she hears the shriek on this Wednesday, it's 7:30 p.m., and everyone is inside the rooms, and the hallway is all but deserted. She's not sure where it's coming from. Alcoholics Anonymous? Gamblers, Overeaters, Sexaholics, Narcotics, or Rageaholics Anonymous? Did his wife leave him because he couldn't stay out of Vegas? Is he fat, in debt, horny, a wino?
Heather took the receptionist job at the Center because she thought she'd meet more interesting people—well, men—than she did at Redondo Community College. More mature, more worldly. But sometimes she thinks that on Wednesday nights the place should be called Center for the Dead, what with the way people walk around licking their wounds, glassy-eyed, on the brink of falling apart. Besides, now she's met Raymond, and she's about to change her major to art. She'll fit in better in art. And Raymond likes the sound of it.
She steps outside to smoke a cigarette so she won't have to listen anymore. She supposes she probably does look pretty good tonight because she's just had her hair shaved from the level of her ears on down and dyed the tips of the rest of it mauve in anticipation of switching to the art department. And she's wearing a new pleather jacket, violet, that looks like leather but isn't from dead animals. Raymond thinks it's cool.
She steps back inside. Soon she hears the shriek again, and the old memories come up. It's clear like most screams, but tonight it seems bottomless, like a moan from the depths of the belly, and it goes on for longer than it would seem possible until eventually it fades out into a dry whimper. It sounds like a dog throwing his head back and yowling at the moon, a train flying through the mountains and riding the horn, a baby desperately in need of being held.
Heather doesn't want to think about either the sound or what's causing it.
She swims to the other side of the moat, sorts her receipts by room number, stamps personal checks with the Center's stamp. Most of the groups send in a check or two, except for the debtors' group. Their envelope contains only cash.
§
At Myth, a rave club in Brentwood this week, Heather's tats and her hair, which she messed around with before leaving the Center, don't seem quite so unusual. In order to find where Myth moves every week, you have to be cool enough to have the phone number. Even that changes occasionally. Heather has followed the club for over a year.
She's glad Raymond came and picked her up from work because she left her car at home. Something foul-smelling is going on inside her own vehicle that she can't figure out—a rotten piece of fruit under one of the seats? A moldy sandwich?
She and Raymond, whom she met two weeks ago at a club in Inglewood, are leaning against a waist-high, two-person table. “So how was work today?” she shouts over Narcoleptic Youth's hoarse delivery of the song, “I Can Be a Bitch If I Want To Be a Bitch.” Raymond especially likes the band because they skateboard on stage.
Heather asks him how his day was mainly because she wants him to ask her how her day was. Raymond helps train dogs, then takes them to local convalescent homes and hospitals. He runs the dogs through a routine, then lets them shake hands and be petted, have their ears and their chests scratched, which for some reason cheers people up. Something about physical contact and unconditional love is the line he always gives. He takes a college class now and then, says he wants to have his own business, though Heather doubts it will ever happen.
She thinks of one of the many times during the sixteen years she lived at home when her father said he was going to open his own garage. Humming an old Beatles' song one morning, he was toasting himself an English muffin, a slice of margarine waiting at the end of his knife. He checked the liquor cabinet to see whether he would have to go out that day while Heather read the back of a cereal box.
“Yup, hon,” he said, “a few more years of this nine-to-five shit, and I'm on my own.”
Heather nodded, only briefly glancing up from the box.
“Nobody breathing down my back anymore, nobody okaying my vacations . . .”
When he wasn't talking, he hummed “I Am the Walrus.”
“No more dirty fingernails and cuticles for the old man . . . know what I mean?”
He knocked the cereal box away so she couldn't help seeing the oil stains on his hands.
§
Raymond is waving his hands to get the cocktail waitress's attention, the blue streaks in his hair catching in the brilliant bands of light. At first Heather thought his impatience meant he was a born leader. Lately she's had trouble resurrecting this fantasy. Most of his time is spent text messaging buddies. He and Heather don't talk much; he doesn't know who she really is. While she doesn't either, at least she'd like to figure it out. It bothers her that it doesn't bother him more. Raymond's skateboard might be longer than anyone else's, his ripped threads cutting edge, but she feels more like his audience than his girlfriend.
“Work was okay,” he says now, “but one a the old guys really got on my nerves. Dog licks his hand, and he freaks. Like dog spit's any worse than human.”
Heather waits what she hopes is an acceptable amount of time, and then she says, “The screamer screamed again tonight. It's so loud. I can't figure out who's doing it.”
“Some poor bastard.” Raymond makes a clicking noise with his mouth. “Hey, you want me to go have a talk with somebody or something?”
“__ Raymond__ —somebody's just unhappy.”
“You gotta be a loser to go to one of those meetings anyway, dontcha?”
Heather sighs and goes back to watching people dance, her arms crossed over her chest. She's learned in the short time she's known him that he's from a family of men who drink too many beers. At family functions, like the St. Patrick's Day party she went to last weekend, the women chase toddlers and drink wine coolers while sampling each other's guacamoles and tuna casseroles, and the men play horseshoes and burp and then say things like: “S'cuse me—must've been someone I ate.”
§
It's 1:30 a.m., and Raymond and Heather have arrived at Denny's earlier than the others and have already split a chocolate shake and fries. Raymond and his friends seem to meet here after partying nearly every night.
Two young girls, maybe seventeen or eighteen, have scooched into the orange vinyl booth next to
them. Both have blond hair. Both are slender. They glance over at the mauve on Heather's tips and quickly look away. They're with a man who's about forty years old.
Heather wishes she could hear the people's conversation better. The blond girls seem so normal. Maybe if she could hear better she'd get the answers to some of the questions she had when she was their age. Maybe she'll bleach her hair blond. The three are fairly animated: first laughing, then shaking their heads, then making vehement assertions they all seem to agree on. The latter is what makes Heather doubt the man's their father. Why would they tell him about something that really matters?
She hears a lot of loud whispering, something involving a friend they haven't seen. One of the girls starts crying.
What could these girls—so wholesome, so normal—possibly be upset about? Maybe their friend has run away from home; maybe she's in trouble with the law. Maybe the friend they're speaking of is pregnant. This is probably the only time the blond girls have ever been to a Denny's. Besides whoever this man is, they probably have mothers who love them. These girls will never be alone. Why are they eating at a Denny's at 1:30 a.m.?
Then Heather stops herself. __ Of course__ the man could be their father. Girls like this—soft brown eyes, barrettes in their neatly parted hair, cardigan sweaters—have fathers they can confide in, even about something like pregnancy.
“I can't figure out why she was crying,” Heather whispers to Raymond. When the trio finally gets up to leave and walks by their booth, she asks, “Do you think that was her father?”
He shakes his head. “They had a hell of a time getting tartar sauce.”
“It was about some friend of theirs who disappeared . . .” Heather stares out the window as their car pulls away, “. . . and then they found out she was hiding. They didn't understand the friend wanted to be left alone.”
Raymond shrugs. “All I want to know is who'd order fish from a Denny's anyway?”
Soon enough Raymond's friends join them, two other couples.
“Where'd you end up?” one of the guys says.
“Myth,” says Raymond. “Woman wasn't having a good time, so we dogged it.”
Rose the waitress has stalked by several times scowling, on the verge of telling them, as she has in the past, that they can't have a booth unless each of them places an order. Raymond seems to get more raucous every time she comes near. But then some other late night carousers enter the restaurant, and she has to rush away.
Rose, so old she has to be eighty-seven, must have started in her tan Denny's uniform before any of them were born. Heather can attest to the last six years, anyway, since that's when she turned sixteen and got her license and started driving over for coffee to get out of the house. Heather can hardly stand to look at Rose, whose life seems to have been so squelched from her that now she cares more about how many Equal packets people use than anything else. Heather imagines her going home to a studio apartment above a bar, where a neon light flashes blue into her living room and the closet contains nothing but Denny's uniforms.
“__ Raymond__ , Rose is on her way over again,” Heather whispers, wondering why she has never before seen how juvenile he is, how blind to the world around him.
“Relax, woman. You're giving me the creeps,” Raymond tells her.
Heather scoots out of the booth. He always wants to tell her what to do. In the parking lot, she sniffs back tears and calls her friend Irma on her cell, but it's 2:30 a.m., so of course Irma's still out.
Then she notices Wally from Whittier pushing his way through Denny's revolving glass door, alone. He isn't wearing his United Parcel uniform she saw him in earlier, and she thinks he looks okay. Of course he isn't her type. Though who is her type escapes her at the moment. She pretends to be looking something up in the Yellow Pages of a phone booth, watches Wally take a seat at the counter.
When she was nine years old, she used to sit at the Denny's counter with her dad and order waffles. Just the two of them. She doesn't remember his being so poisonous until later. Maybe she doesn't want to remember. By the time she was seventeen she hardly heard anything he said. She went underwater. The words he sent her way turned into sound waves, diluted by the time they reached her. If she heard them at all, they didn't matter as much. Nothing mattered. She moored her deepest thoughts and dreams, rarely letting them drift to the surface, only vaguely into the real word. When anybody spoke to her, unless she really concentrated, she only caught about half of what they said. People were always asking where she was, what continent, what planet, what universe.
The moat worked for a long time, but lately it seems to be drying up. She can't seem to get away from the world, the part of her that matters seems unguarded, there's all the screaming.
“Heather!” Raymond says, advancing toward the phone booth outside Denny's. “C'mon.”
Under “exterminators” in the yellow pages, Heather sees Lloyd's Pest Control, Pied Piper Termite and Pest, The Terminator.
Raymond sidles up beside her. “What is this, sweetheart, one of those girly crying jags?”
“I'm not going.”
“Whaddaya mean you're not going? How you gonna get home?” His face turns red.
“I'll manage,” Heather says, her eyebrows arched. That's why she should have driven her own car, so she could leave when she wanted, but then she remembers her car has that smell of rotten fruit, day-old garbage that has turned up out of nowhere and won't go away.
Suddenly getting rid of Raymond becomes all important. “__ Leave__ ,” she whispers.
“Fine,” Raymond says. “Like I need this.”
And before she knows it, he and his friends peel out, trailing smoke in the Denny's parking lot. Even though she told him to go, she never really expected to be standing here alone.
She looks up “Taxicabs.” Yellow, Red Medallion, Bill's.
Through the glass of Denny's, Wally is engrossed in his newspaper, enjoying a burger and fries. She guesses he must not be in Overeaters Anonymous. Unless this is a binge.
“Hey, Wally,” she says, standing beside him now.
Wally jumps, begins folding his newspaper, cleaning his mouth with his napkin, though it isn't even dirty. She guesses he's uncomfortable around women, that it's not a Sexaholic meeting he attends at the Center.
“What are you doing out so late on a Wednesday night?” she asks.
“Second job. Started doing a little bartending to pay some bills, and I'm still there. How about you?”
Heather stares at his mustache. He doesn't sound like he's in AA or in serious trouble with debts. Would she be able to get him to shave the mustache if they became involved? Would he try to tell her what to do? If they got married, would he keep the second job?
“Look,” she says. “Could you give me a ride home? It's not that far. I had a little difference of opinion with my boyfriend . . . this guy . . .”
Wally seems nervous. She wonders if he's married. Maybe he's got kids at home asleep.
But he says he'll give her the ride.
They're in the alley, and he's unlocking his beat-up Dodge hatchback. There aren't any Legoes in the back, but now she sees he must be older than she thought. Thirty-five? There's his ZZ Top cassettes to consider, and his moustache is so 80s. Thirty-seven?
Before she gets in, she hears a scream from down the alley. Maybe it's a cat. Maybe it's a woman. She's never thought about the sex of the screamer before. In fact this scream in the alley doesn't sound so different from her own voice, or at least how she perceives her voice to sound.
She hears it again. Frozen, fascinated, she looks over at Wally, who is watching her listen. It's a thick scream, a knobby scream, from the depths of someone's or something's being. It is the scream of two girls out with a boy who's driving his Pontiac too fast, a cat who has been treed, a woman giving birth to a child. It is the scream of someone who has won at the lottery, a man finding his dog dead of old age on the back porch, a woman jumping from the car after her husband slapped her for being too friendly with the waiter.
The air afterward is tight, too quiet. Heather's ears are attuned to the slightest sound. There is none.
“Getting in?” Wally asks.
Then she remembers where she is and she does get in the car.
“Did you hear that?” she says.
“Someone screaming,” Wally says, shrugging.
“It just unnerves me when I hear that.”
“So where you headed?”
She gives directions. She says, “Have you heard the person at the Center? Every Wednesday night someone screams. It's a loud, horrible scream. None of the doors open, and no one ever comes out.”
“People scream,” Wally says.
He hasn't lit a joint yet, so she doesn't think he's part of NA. What will he think of her majoring in art? Most likely that it isn't practical. She wonders how he'd feel about a career in nursing.
“Tell me the truth,” she says. “Don't you think some of those people at the Center are mental?”
They're at an intersection, and Wally glances over at her. Like four hairy caterpillars, his eyebrows and mustaches all rise in unison when he smiles. He's not so bad looking: He has a hot smile and only the beginnings of a beer belly. “You're young,” he says. “People get weird as they get older. It's too much work to keep trying to be normal, and you can't help being weird after all you've been through. It's better to accept it and go on.”
Heather studies the awnings, shops, and gas stations as they drive by, then, as the hatchback accelerates, stops concentrating at all and allows them to blur into a long fuzzy streak. “But don't you think it's strange,” she says, “that none of those people have anything better to do than go talk to complete strangers on a Wednesday night?” Vaguely, it dawns on her that maybe she shouldn't be saying this since Wally himself goes to these meetings.
“Is this where I turn?” Wally asks.
Heather nods, points: “It's right in front of the place with the bright green lawn. My landlord just painted it. Can you believe he'd paint the lawn?”
“A lot of people are looking at why they're unhappy,” Wally says. “A lot of people aren't satisfied and they want to know why. They don't want to sit around and pretend like their parents did. Right here? In front of this old station wagon?”
“Yeah,” Heather says, and then she laughs. “That's my old clunker.”
“People take what they can out of those meetings and leave the rest. You're the one you have to live with. You're the one who has to be able to stand the thoughts in your head.”
Wally parallel parks, then turns to her and says, “Do you know you left your window down?”
“It's been broken for months. I want to sell the car and get a better one.”
He pulls on the hand brake, cuts the ignition. She wonders if this means he'll walk her to her
door, try to kiss her.
They turn towards each other on the old bucket seats, the gear shift their only obstacle. “Nice, quiet neighborhood,” Wally finally says, one of his elbows leaned against the steering wheel, the other over the back of his seat.
She sits tall. She doesn't want to slouch, like her father used to complain of. She sits tall so she won't look dumpy, shakes the hair around her face.
They lean forward, closer. She's sure they're going to kiss—the moment, the quiet. She imagines a time not too long in the future when he'll love her so much, think she's so beautiful, he'll follow her into her apartment. They'll undress with only the street light shining through her windows. He'll help pull out the sofa bed, unless they're too passionate to wait that long.
“I think someone's in your car,” Wally says, stepping onto the street.
“What?” Heather's in another world, in her apartment with her clothes off, stroking the back of Wally's head while he suckles her breasts, his brows and mustaches brushing against her chest.
But Wally is already out of his hatchback, inspecting.
“Someone's in my car?” she says. She hesitates, checks to make sure her clothes are really on, then jumps out after him.
She's not sure whether the explosion she hears a couple of blocks over is a gun being shot or just the backfiring of a car. Why do loud noises, screams, seem always to follow her?
Wally leans down, peers inside the station wagon window. When he suddenly throws the door open, the dome light illuminates an older man curled on her back seat. He has a dingy blanket over him, and there are plastic grocery bags everywhere, stuffed with newspaper, aluminum cans, clothes, and food.
“Oh my God!” Heather says. “My God, who is he? Is he dead?” She pulls the sleeves of her pleather jacket down over her hands, the collar up over her nose and ears. If only she could disappear. What must Wally think? She has to make it clear to him that this isn't normally how her life is, that sleazy things like this are out of the ordinary.
But Wally is laughing. “Looks to me like he's had a few,” he says.
Heather shrieks at the man, “__ Get out of my car! This is my car__! ”
Wally lifts her by the middle, carefully places her several feet away on the sidewalk. “Take it easy,” he says. “Unless you know who the guy is. You don't need more problems.”
“Of course I don't know who he is. I don't know people like this.”
Wally heads back to the car just as the old man sits up in the backseat, scratches the dark film over his face and neck, the only parts of his skin they can see. “What's happening?” he says.
“Time to move along, champ,” Wally tells him.
“Sure, okay.” The man flings old newspapers out the door, three tattered coats, a piece of cardboard. His smelly blanket follows. “No harm, no foul,” he mumbles, tying his shoes. “Just a few nights.”
“No, way!” Heather says. “He's lying,” she tells Wally, but even as she's saying it, she knows it's true. The funny odor in the car now makes sense, as does the bag full of aluminum cans she'd found on the back seat last week that she couldn't remember putting there.
“__ Get out of my car__! ” Heather shrieks again, breaking out of Wally's hold. She socks the man in the shoulder and the chest. She doesn't know how people get like him, but she has to fight back to make sure she doesn't.
Wally pulls her away again, and she's crying. “Did you smell my car?” she yells. “He's the one who should be in AA. He's the one who needs help.”
The man straightens up from tying his shoes. “There ain't no help for this, sweetheart,” he mumbles.
“This is hell we're in right now. There ain't no help for human beings. Could you hold her a minute, bub, while I go get my cart?”
The man scurries off down the alley—long gray hair, not putting weight on one of his legs—and returns quickly with a Von's shopping cart. Taking more bags from the car, he stacks them on the sidewalk, just like she does when she's been shopping, then disappears quickly around the corner.
Heather feels a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I'll walk you to your place,” Wally says.
She sees the blueness of the television flickering at her landlord's. He leans out, his hands on his screen door just below his porch light so that she can see his cuticles are stained green from the lawn.
“Everything okay?” he calls. He probably watched the whole thing from his window, will probably think of something she did wrong or try to charge her for having a roommate since the guy was sleeping in her car.
Wally waves the landlord away, and Heather wonders why a man who has to be nagged about fixing leaky pipes cares so much about how green his lawn is. It's like her own father, wanting to be sure the pails were wheeled in the second the garbage men emptied them, meticulous about his hibiscus, always the one in the neighborhood to put out a flag on holidays. If you could make things look right, maybe no one would notice the rest. She's beginning to think it's crucial that she mention what's going on underneath, the things that don't get said. She's begun to think she's going to have to speak up or lose it, tell people how they can treat her and how they can't if she wants to feel better, stop worrying about the moat. You can't permit strange men to live in your car; you can't pretend it's not happening. Even thinking this makes her stand up straighter, feel more in control.
Wally is laughing on her front porch. “Were you listening? Did you hear what he said?”
“Who?”
“The landlord. He saw the guy take all the bags out the other morning and then put them all back that night, but he wasn't sure whether or not the guy might be some relation to you.”
“I'm __ sure__ ,” Heather says, too angry to look at him.
Wally continues laughing merrily, but he lets go of Heather's arm.
“How do people get like that old guy?” Heather wants to know.
“It'll be okay,” says Wally. “Just move the car in the morning.”
He doesn't kiss her good night, doesn't even ask for her number. “See you next Wednesday,” is all he says, then turns to walk away. Heather wonders if he thinks her life is full of busted car windows, fights at Denny's, that she actually likes her job as a receptionist.
She locks and chains the front door, pushes a chair in front of it, closes all the windows in her
apartment tightly.
She isn't going to let anybody hurt her ever again. The next day she skips classes, then calls in sick at the Center. All they have is swimming lessons that night anyway, and a fencing class. They'll get along fine without her. She spends the day watching television, staring out the window, making sure the man doesn't come back. She can't afford to continue having men living in her space without asking.
That night she parks the car two streets over, then calls in sick Friday as well. She spends the afternoon at Redondo Community College, careful to make her appointment with a different counselor than the one she spoke to about changing her major to art. She wants Wally to see her as smart, practical, maybe a nurse, but the truth is she'd give anything to know what she herself wants to major in.
She lies low over the weekend, discards so many items from her closet that she feels she's starting her life over. She sprays her car with deodorizer more than once, dyes her hair brown, neglects to answer the phone. Or at least she would if it ever rang.
Finally Wednesday rolls around. She takes great pains with her appearance tonight. Gone is the mini skirt and high-heeled espadrilles. Gone is the vampish cerise lipstick. Instead she wears tight blue jeans (Wally will love them), leather boots (her feet can breathe!), a bandanna tied over her head like a pirate's (interesting and neat).
Her Wednesday night people have begun to show up. Heather watches them with more curiosity than usual as she gives directions and answers the phone. She wants to know why she's been able to live through so much—moving out on her own at seventeen, taking care of herself from then on—and yet these people can't seem to get through their little problems. She wants to know if there's a pattern as to who goes in which door. She thinks it can't be just random.
There's Rug Man winking as usual. She smiles and so he lingers a bit. She's thinking he's not so bad; she could make him feel more comfortable about his balding, get him to shave. She could consider a career in psychology.
Just as she loses sight of him, there's the Efficiency Expert making his second trip by her desk. He drags his finger down the fake oak, has begun to ask a question when the phone rings. He tells her she looks awesome like usual, but he'd probably like her in a clean, tailored suit.
When she looks up again, there's Wally from Whittier.
“Cheers,” he says, brightly. Could he be going to AA, after all? He leans against her desk, asks how she is, checks out the fit of her jeans.
Sex Anonymous?
“You know, I'm embarrassed,” Heather says, “about the other night. The man sleeping in my car. I have no idea how he got there.”
Wally smiles. He really is hot. “Forget it. He's no more desperate than anyone else.”
“I didn't want you to think . . .”
“Oh, I don't think anything,” Wally says. “Feel like talking later on? Getting something to eat? I got the night off from tending bar.”
She's going to say yes, of course, but then there's a loud noise at the entrance, so she turns and sees that someone's umbrella is jammed in the revolving door. He pulls and pulls but seems stuck behind the glass forever. She knows Wally's still there as her phones light up. She answers three calls in a row, gives directions, information, advice.
Then she looks up. Everyone's gone. Behind all of those doors. Even Wally. Which door did he go through? All she can see is row after shiny row of black and white tile. She can hear the clock make distinctly separate ticking and tocking noises when the halls are this quiet, this still. The hallway reminds her of the long tunnel of her adolescence, of being completely alone, of knowing no way out, of having no one to care.
She's prepared to stay open somewhat; she's never going to shut down as much as her father did. But she's got to bridge the moat.
She looks around, afraid of what she knows will happen, what she knows she will hear. She can still call Myth. The club is always there, no matter what has gone wrong. She dials the number. She still has a few outfits she hasn't thrown away. There's the plastic dress, a roll of stick-on tattoos. She could still go home and roll a skirt up short. A man answers, but before giving her the Myth's current location, he wants to know who she is.
Suddenly she can't think of a thing to say.
The line goes dead, cold. Could he really have hung up on her? After a whole year?
Then she hears it, the scream, the inconsolable cry of a child who has lost both her parents forever, a girl irretrievably alone, a woman trying to accept this but who still yearns for something more. She has to command her legs to hold her a few more minutes as she runs down the slippery, waxed hallway.
Which door did Wally go in? Which door was it?
Then she sees that it's not important, and she picks a door, any door.
Bonnie ZoBell has received an NEA and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and won the Capricorn Novel Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such print magazines as American Fiction, The Bellingham Review , and The Greensboro Review , and online at FRiGG, Juked , and Word Riot . She received an MFA from Columbia and teaches at San Diego Mesa College.