Cherry Kills | Chapter One | Normal Brains
Cherry poked at her seared tofu and thought of her dad’s face. It too was seared, but not with clean black lines. Not finished with a ponzu glaze. His face was a charred mask of nightmares. It blistered, melted. Always.
Although in her dream—the one that tormented her most nights for the past seven years—his face was calm, and his expression was one she’d never seen while he was alive. It was an expression that said, Don’t cry for me, Cherry. Everything is A-okay. But then his face would melt, and the symbol, materializing, splitting the flesh on his forehead, would make her feel as if she were falling off a cliff. She’d wake up and push her thumbs into her eyes until blinding lights popped in her optic nerves. It obscured the image, but never for long enough. The glyph was always there, like the trailing light of a sparkler. Even now she could see the delicate flourishes of gold making up the intricate wings of the falcon, and the circle on top, its ever-watching eye at the center.
“Oh, Cherry. Always deep in thought.” Ramon filled Cherry’s water glass, removed a towel from his shoulder, and dabbed at the tablecloth. “You’ve hardly taken three bites. No good?”
“I’m just thinking about the economy, Ramon.” Cherry smirked. “You think I’d just sit here if it wasn’t any good? I’d give you shit—you know this.” She cut her tofu with the side of her fork and took a bite. “It’s terrible. I’ll sue.”
“And here I thought you liked my cooking.”
“I love your food, Ramon. Nobody knows my palate like you. That’s why I’m going to sue you. I’m going to own this restaurant—then I’ll be able to boss you around every night.”
“You already boss me around.” Ramon winked, then leaned in and whispered, “Would you like a brownie?”
“To go, if you don’t mind.” Cherry smiled and added, “Maybe I won’t sue you after all.”
Cherry couldn’t afford to eat out every night, but that didn’t stop her. After all, that’s what credit was for, wasn’t it? She’d told her case worker it was aspirational, motivation to live a quality life. She left out that she had never expected to live long enough to worry much about repayment. But now, at twenty-two years old, she’d come to the realization she would need to start living like someone with a future. Not a great future, but a future nonetheless. And while that might have been a comfort to most people, to Cherry it just seemed like a lot of work. It meant searching for a job—one that didn’t make her feel like jumping off a bridge. But those gigs were for people with diplomas, ambition, and let’s face it: normal brains.
If it weren’t for Ramon and his restaurant, Cherry wasn’t sure she’d have survived the past few years. He was the closest thing to a real friend she had, which would have been depressing if she had a moment to herself to think about it. But Uncle and the gang made sure that wasn’t the case. That’s why she’d snuck out—to pretend life wasn’t so messy.
Black Garlic was a clean enough restaurant with decent food, but despite this, it was never crowded. Cherry liked it that way. It was private enough to keep her from feeling overwhelmed, public enough for her to remain part of the living world. Being at the apartment too much made her feel…absent.
The first time she’d come into Black Garlic, Ramon didn’t pay her much mind, just the normal, “How do you do?” and “Would you like pepper?” and “Ma’am, please remove your feet from the seat of that booth.” But as with all relationships built from duration more than commonality, eventually the notches lined up with the pegs, and although the relationship would never work outside the confines of the restaurant, within it the two ebbed and flowed as a single body of ponzu.
In a booth directly behind her, a woman whimpered. Cherry pretended to search for something in her bag to get a better look. She recognized the woman right away, with her glossy pink bangs pinned down by a sparkly barrette with a purple cat on it, hair that had always reminded Cherry of cotton candy.
Cherry touched her own hair, dry and fried from the at-home bleach job, a failed attempt to look like Debbie Harry. Uncle said she looked more like Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner.
The pink-haired woman was a regular at Black Garlic the past few months, always alone, always reading books at the back of the restaurant. They’d never spoken, just a head nod here and there, an acknowledgment of subculture, though what subculture didn’t matter; it was an other recognizing an other—two cursive letters in a print world.
Black droplets from the woman’s mascara trailed down her cheeks—leaving watercolor branches that fed directly into heavily-applied black lipstick—so that her eyes and mouth seemed connected by a stream of despair.
“Excuse me?” said the woman.
Cherry looked down at her tofu, pretending not to hear.
“Excuse me? Sorry to bother you—do you have a tissue?”
Cherry retrieved a tissue from her bag and handed it to the woman without saying a word. Cherry didn’t want the world to suffer—even if she thought maybe the world deserved it a little—but this woman wanted more than a tissue. She could feel it in the woman’s gaze. Charity wasn’t her thing, the giving or receiving of it, which was one of the many reasons she’d snuck off to be alone tonight, to get away from the nagging, overprotective enclave of Alternates back at her apartment, always trying to save her. And fix her. Still, there was something about the woman’s eyes, absent, searching for something in her mind, that made Cherry pause; they reminded her of her own eyes the night the detectives told her that her dad was dead, like she didn’t already know.
Cherry signaled to Ramon, who came over in a hurry.
“Bring the lady a shot of that stuff you gave me last Friday,” said Cherry. “Better make it a double.” Then added, “Better go ahead and bring me one, too. Make mine a triple.”
Ramon dashed off to retrieve the drinks.
The woman walked over to Cherry’s booth, plopped down on the seat, and extended her hand. “Name’s Mai.”
Cherry gathered her belongings, pretending not to see Mai’s hand. The woman seemed perfectly nice, but Cherry needed space—one night alone, for Christ’s sake. She glanced at Mai and noticed her hands were blue. She was on the verge of yelling to Ramon to call for an ambulance, but then she saw the same blue on the woman’s white boots. It was paint. “So what, you an artist?”
Mai nodded absently.
“I’ve always wished I could paint,” said Cherry, “but every time I try, it’s the same painting, a white dog in the snow. My problem…well, besides the talent thing…is coming up with a good idea. How do you come up with your ideas?”
Mai’s eyes focused as if she’d returned from whatever horrible memory had tethered her to her sadness, and although the pain still lingered in the corners of her mouth and eyes, she managed a quiet reply.
“They hide from us until we’ve given up. But they’ll find you, once you’ve stopped searching.”
“Who will find us?” asked Cherry, pulling out a compact and reapplying the new candy-red lipstick she’d swiped from the Thrifty’s on Main.
Mai’s eyes widened in momentary panic.
“Whoa, hey, it’s okay, honey,” said Cherry, noticing the fear sweeping over Mai’s face. “Whatever it is, you’re safe here. Tell me what happened—someone mess with you? Tell me where they’re at. I’ll beat their ass. I will. I took a free Krav Maga class down at the Y a year ago, learned the best move is still a swift kick to the nuts. Some things never change I guess, you know?”
Ramon set the glasses on the table and patted Cherry’s shoulder, then walked over to seat a couple well into a celebration. Cherry thanked God she wasn’t a waitress, then remembered she was nearly broke and that maybe being a waitress had some perks, money being one of them. The supplemental checks from Uncle Sam only went so far.
Mai took Cherry’s hand and squeezed. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a desperate whisper. “It was real. It was real…it was.…” She searched Cherry’s face for confirmation that it was indeed real.
Cherry pulled her hand back.
She thought back to that night at the apartment, Elwood coming out of the flames to save her from the smoke and fire, carrying her out into the fresh night air. That wasn’t real. Psychosis, the doctor had said. But, psychosis or not, it wasn’t going away anytime soon, so she’d learned to accept it, but to keep it hidden. It wasn’t real, but it sure felt like it.
Cherry retrieved her eyeliner and pulled her lid down to apply it. Her caseworker told her to go easy on the makeup while she looked for a job, but any employer who didn’t respect a Cleopatra eye inspired by the great Vivien Leigh, or high-arched brow inspired by Claudette Colbert, was not a good fit. Also, fuck them.
“Okay, sure. I believe you,” said Cherry. “It was real. Who am I to say what’s real and what isn’t anyway? I’m the worst person to make that call, truly. Here, sip this.”
Mai downed her drink, then reached for Cherry’s glass and sipped.
“Okay…” said Cherry. “Well, I probably would have gotten shit from Uncle if I came home loopy anyway.”
Mai didn’t seem to notice this comment. Her eyes were still far away. Then she spoke, “Have you ever been to the Gut Punch?”
Cherry put her makeup back in her bag, took the cigarette from behind her ear, and placed it beneath her nose. She didn’t smoke, but she liked the smell of cigarettes, and she liked to hold them and let them hang from the corner of her mouth, just like her dad used to.
“Little punk bar a few blocks from here, right?” Cherry asked.
Mai sank into her seat and looked around nervously.
“It’s alive,” she said, her eyes welling with fresh tears. “It knew me.”
“It knew you?” Cherry said, matching Mai’s whisper. “What do you mean it knew you? Who knew you?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Mai’s lip quivered as she spoke. “It…you know that feeling you get when walking alone at night? Or when you’re passing by an open closet door…it’s that feeling that something’s there—something that can get you. It’s an old fear. Like it’s always been a part of us.”
“Yes. I know what you mean. Seems like there’s always something at my heels.”
Mai continued, “Well, the Gut Punch has always been a sanctuary for me. Best tots in the City, too.” She smiled briefly. “But, today it was different.”
“Different, how?”
“It’s hard to explain without sounding like a nut job. They’d hired me to paint a mural on the wall in the back room, a giant squid fighting a whale. Everything was going fine—some of my best work. Then I felt that feeling, like someone was behind me. I looked, but nobody was there, so I kept going. Then….”
Cherry moved in closer. “Go on.”
“The squid’s eye opened. I thought I was imagining it. Maybe I was too focused—like my eyes were fatigued, you know? But then I felt its tentacle arm weaving between my legs. I screamed, but when the owner came running back to help me, the painting was back on the wall. It was just a painting.”
“Interesting,” said Cherry, leaning back in her seat.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you think you saw what you saw. The mind is tricky—trust me on that one.”
“Well, I have proof,” said Mai, standing and hiking up her skirt. There on her thigh was a puckered, circular red mark, and a deep bruise in the shape of a snake climbing her leg.
“Shit,” said Cherry. “Well, that’s more than tired eyes or an overactive mind.”
“I ran out of that place without even getting paid. I didn’t even grab my bag! My portfolio, wallet—everything was in there!”
“Christ, well…”
“Could you go get it for me?” Mai said, a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I can’t go back…”
Cherry tucked the cigarette behind her ear, took the glass from Mai’s hand, and downed the brown liquid. “Sorry, no can do. Have to get home or Uncle is gonna be pissed. Maybe you can call them up, have them hold it for you until tomorrow. Or ship it—”
Mai sobbed.
Cherry wasn’t lying about needing to get back home. Uncle had probably already discovered she was missing, and when Uncky got angry, the walls shook. But more than that, she just wanted a moment of independence to prove she could handle life on her own, even if she wasn’t sure this was entirely true.
Still, Mai seemed a good egg, and whatever had happened to her at the club really shook her up. Besides, wasn’t everyone always calling her apathetic? Telling her to care more about things? Well, maybe she’d start here, with Mai. A quick way to prove to her messy brain she didn’t need any help from these hallucinations—not anymore. A way to prove she could not only take care of herself, but also other people, and that she wasn’t completely broken.
Cherry looked at Ramon, who shrugged.
“Listen, I can’t stand to see a lady crying. I’ll go—I’ll go!” Cherry stood and headed toward the door. “I’m curious about these tots anyway. They’re on you, by the way.”
“Thank you! Thank you so, so much! What’s your name?”
Cherry turned to face Mai. “Cherry Kills.”
Mai’s eyes widened. “Is that short for something?”
“Cherilyn,” said Cherry, then threw out a peace sign and walked out the door.
