Morrison's

Shelby is watching the owner of the gas station, Bill Morrison, and his son unload crates of candy bars from the back of a truck. The summer air, warm and golden, pushes wavy wisps of blond hair about her shoulders, neck, and face, and the late afternoon light reflects amber in her blue eyes. Mica watches her watch someone else with an indescribable feeling, as he rotates on his wrist a rubberband he wears a bracelet, and is jarred when Shelby suddenly stirs, and puts out her cigarette, which she hadn’t even drawn in breath of, but had still burned down to the halfway mark.

He did not know how or why when she pulled it from her open box, there had been a dark purple lipstick stain the shaft, as though it had been in someone else’s mouth, and when she saw him staring, she smiled at him around the cigarette as she lit it, and said, ‘a stolen kiss,’ as though that made some sort of sense, though it charmed him. After she had lit it, she had taken it out of her mouth, and let it smoke into the air between her two fingers where she held it.

Mica glances back over at Bill’s son, Cody, whose pale arms jiggle as he sits down a crate too hard on the sidewalk. Shelby turns, sitting on the same truck loading bay Mica has himself propped up against, and puts her long, naked legs across it, her pale pink shorts riding up her thigh as she does this, and for a second she chews on the edge of her mouth, concentrating on a thought, the whole image of her, her smell, her movement, captivating Mica. He knows, has the strong feeling, they’re only sitting at this abandoned building, across the way from the gas station, so Shelby can watch Cody work.

“Cody doesn't really look like his dad, huh,” she says in her voice, low and rich like honey, but its calm, sweet nature doesn’t do anything to stop Mica from being caught off guard by its suddenness. This is what Shelby was thinking about, and it further surprises him.

She turns her pretty head over to look across the road again, her eyes shining gold, her jaw gently clenching underneath pale skin, and the light further accentuates her high cheekbones. Cody’s father scolds him for setting down a box too hard, and Cody hurries to pick it back up, and at this Shelby’s eyes show a warmth that makes Mica’s stomach become a cold pit punctured by a stabbing, painful anger. Shelby always looks at people in a nice way, but there’s something different to anybody that Shelby watches Cody with. Mica grits his even, white teeth as a hot, barbed wire of hateful jealousy pierce through his muscular barrel of a chest.

“What?” he figures he ought to humor her though. He isn’t sure where this is going.

“See, Mr. Morrison? They're similar in the face, and in build, but he’s hard, not like his son,” Shelby’s dark, perfectly shaped eyebrows are lowered ever so slightly, showing deeper thoughts racing behind those eyes made bourbon colored by the sun, but the corners of her rose colored lips are quirked up in a small smile that purveys a knowingness to something outside of Mica’s grasp.

“Un huh?” Mica’s hard green eyes burns holes in the back of Cody’s big head, and he only just listens to Shelby, lost in a hateful fantasy.

“Yeah. But Cody is soft. He doesn’t feel much like the way his dad looks,” Shelby tilts back her head, finding a place against the rust colored brick wall on the edge of the loading dock, and the setting sunlight nestles in her tawny hair real pretty.

Mica’s head jerks back to her, and for a moment that piercing anger is lost to the visual that greets him, as rapt and peaceful as the wise men greeting Christ. But then bitter reality lashes back at him, burns his throat and the palms of his hands, and hard wrath comes wadding up in his body like tumors growing in the hollow of his lungs.

“Feel much like?” suddenly, Mica was itching the scar through his lip, and avoiding extra hard the /s/ he normally lisps over in ‘doesn’t,’ omitting it entirely before ‘feel’ “What’chu know about what he… about that?”

“We have home room together, right?” Shelby’s mouth draws up, showing a small sliver of pearly teeth, a soft and gorgeous smile, eyes dancing, unaware of the rage growing bold and oppressive in Mica’s chest like a prowling dragon.

“Right?”

Mica’s voice was a low growl that caused Shelby to look at him head on for a second, studying him, suddenly realizing a harshness in the heart of her friend, but then he nods, earnestly but tersely, for her to go on, and with a new sense of cautiousness, a kind she didn’t realize she had to take with him, she continues.

“Well, sometimes we talk. Other times we talk behind the school, and I get to put my hands wherever I please on him – hold his face, his shoulders, his waist. That kinda thing. It’s awfully pleasant,” she forgets in the middle of the second sentence that she has any reason to fear Mica, who has for so long been a good companion, and Shelby’s coy, meandering, honey-tasting words suggest more than pleasantries.

Mica’s hand tenses into a tight, iron fist he wants to drill into Cody’s meaty head. He feels he has stakes in Shelby, deserves her, to kiss the honey from her lips, and knowing Cody has tasted that brings fury like a black smog into every space in his body, and he feels more choking and rage than man. For a long time, he doesn’t say anything, and the longer it goes on, the more Shelby notices. Until now, she had been oblivious that Mica liked her. This did not feel like a safe way to find out.

“I don’t mean anything by it,” she says, drawing her legs, slender and doe-like, to her chest, and pulls up one her mismatched socks to her ankles, where they belong. One is the same pink as her shorts, one a pastel, buttercup yellow. Her shoes are white, and black, and scuffed from many long, winding adventures she likes to take with strange company.

“Right,” Mica responds coldly, throat so taut with anger it shows in his deep, warbling words.

“Really.”

Shelby’s arms wrap around her knees, beautiful face cast down as the sidewalk travelling on their side of the street, no longer look at Cody. Mica stares straight, piercingly ahead, taking in the Morrisons, thinking about awful, hateful things he’d like to do to them. In his clenched fist he can feel warmth, phantom thoughts, a memory unknown to Shelby that Mica keeps in that large chest of his, of his young, strong hands around the small throat of a chicken, on his grandmother’s farm. He held it tight until it went limp, felt it blinking into his palm, one fist around its neck, one around its head, and remembers the feeling of its eyeballs trembling against his skin, and the bird slowly going limp, ending up like wet, heavy silk settling into water.

He’d like to do that to Cody right now.

“You… you really can’t find it in your… in yourself to like me like that?” Mica asked cuttingly, to which Shelby winced. His S in ‘yourself’ comes out a bit thickly, almost making that ‘th’ sound.

“We’re just friends, I thought- I didn’t know you-”

“Whatever. That won’t change anything. Knowing,” Mica pushes off the wall, and takes several steps away, his broad, muscular back to Shelby "You'll talk with anyone. If I were gonna get my turn, I woulda."

She’s glad her knees are drawn up to her chest. She’s glad her arms are drawing her legs into her. She’s glad if he turned on her now, she could jump down off the loading dock and faster and more fervently than he could, and she could disappear around the streetbend in the blink of an eye. Because she feels raw intention in his movements, can see the thought to round, and come at her, like a dog.

Mica works out to deal with stress, and the man is always stressed. At this point, he is built like a sculpture of one of the many Greek Gods. He knows this does nothing for Shelby, but he doesn’t know why.

“I… I like you as a friend. You’re a good friend,” Shelby says, though she regrets it, making herself known again, a possible target, a thing that can speak, and breathe, and bleed. Mica bristles like an carnivore agitated, but stays where he is, hulking.

“Whatever.”

She takes in a deep, slow breath, and gathers herself. Her shoulders gently shake, but she tries to still it. Right now, Mica reminds her of her father. A large, foreboding presence that makes her feel physical threats beating down against her back. In this moment, afraid, she does not love Mica at all, in the way she loves her friends, or any other. She does not think she will ever love him again, because of the way he’s willing to confront her right now. Like he’s going to hurt her.

She gets up, dropping off the short dock, and stands there for a second, looking at Mica’s back for a long time, her jaw tight. Mica eventually turns his head, not enough to see her, but regard her, and begins to speak with accusation.

“You don’t care,” Mica spits, forcing himself to ignore the fact that he knows he’s wrong, that of course Shelby cares “You don’t care, or know anything about me or what I like because you never ask or think about what I feel!” his rough voice has hiked to yell, loud enough to shout over the truth, and to this Shelby braces herself and tries to decide whether or not, right here and now, if he’s going to attack her “Get the fuck away from me. Go talk to Cody. If you ever fucking look at me again, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you and Cody like livestock.”

Shelby’s chin bobs up, seeing her father in Mica’s place, and pulling up courage with all her might, with everything she has, she says back: “No you goddamn won’t.”

Mica’s head shoots towards her, and suddenly he’s facing Shelby and coming at her all at once, and she reacts, skin prickling and adrenaline pumping through her body like venom, she springs into action and steps back several paces and makes a quick, broad semicircle around Mica as he tries to come at her. Across the street, the Morrisons look up to the sound of Mica cussing out Shelby in a roaring torrent of white hot, undignified, unjustifiable rage.

“Dad, go inside, call the cops,” Cody doesn’t wait for his father to move, he leaves the boxes on the sidewalk and heads across the street, rolling up his sleeves over thick arms and thinking only of Shelby and the six feet of muscle trying to corner her.

“Cody!” shouts Mr. Morrison “Cody, get the fuck back here!”

“Call the cops!” Cody yells back, the noise of the two alerting Mica and Shelby to their awareness of the threat that Mica has become.

Mica looks from Shelby, to Cody, to Mr. Morrison, and thinks of eyes blinking into his hands. His thoughts flash to limp, warm, wet silk, the feeling of dropping a small body to the ground, to the thought of his hands seizing Cody’s neck and forcing him down until he became like heavy silk as well. And he thinks of the sunlight in Shelby’s blond hair, the amber that her eyes become, the honey on her blush lips.

Mica fumbles, tears from his wrist the rubberband he wears around it, and throws it on the ground. Everyone stops, for a second, and in this time he turns, and walks off at a brisk, shamed, angry pace. Cody hurries over to Shelby’s side, and quickly assesses the situation, looking her over to make sure Mica didn’t hit her the way he clearly intended, and then takes her by both arms and says, genuinely, he was worried about her.

Shelby smiles at Cody quickly but sincerely, the haze of adrenaline keeping her from interpreting his words, and stares after Mica, worried he’ll turn around, and come back, and try and kill them both like he said he would. Her heart beats in her ears, and the sun is slowly sinking in the sky, going from golden to red, and cigarette smoke lingers so faintly in the air. Cody tries to lead her across the road, looking both ways before taking her into the street, and she follows only when they meet eyes again and she can tell he really does care, having only her safety in mind.

“Come on. C’mon,” he urges her, softly “We’ll get you inside.”

She can hear him again, and this time what he’s saying makes sense. But she watches Mica disappear around a street corner, his hands tucked shamefully into his pockets, and she hopes she never sees him again.