“What’re ya working on there, Ace?” Mommy told me always to make good use of my hands, and so I took to typing. I think it’s a good and proper way to keep my hands busy, because I need them to be busy at all times or else I develop this sort of anxiety that’s hard to shake. This urge builds up within me to do something do something do something or else I think my brain’s gonna explode out of the side of my skull or something like that. I know that’s crazy, though, but it’s just the way the urge works. I oftentimes pick at my fingernails and the skin surrounding them too. To me, it’s a great relief to peel away the white and deadening flakes that hang on so carelessly by a single strip to the edge of my finger, it’s as if I’m clearing dead space for fresh things to grow through freely. And once I see the fresh, pink skin making its way to the surface like bread rising I feel so satisfied inside, and then once that skin dies, the process just repeats itself, and it never ends. I tried biting my nails a few times, but the feeling isn’t quite the same, and also it doesn’t feel like I’m using my hands quite enough when I do it, so there’s really no point, as it doesn’t relieve any of my urges. I drum a little bit, too, on my head or my leg or my other hand, just following beats I hear from the stereo or beats I make up in my head or ones that I remember from the past that just seem to find their way into my subconscious like a drifter at a bus stop. The drumming is great, and when I drum with all five fingers and the beat ends on my pinky it’s very satisfying, like my mind can finally rest once it happens. I’m drumming now, on the countertop, following a beat that’s playing on the stereo, and I’m feeling good, and I can sense that the beat is probably going to end on my pinky so I’m gladly anticipating it when Golson says to me, “What’re ya working on there, Ace?” I think very little of Golson and I think even less of him calling me ‘Ace’, because it’s meaningless and just fills the air with words that don’t need to be spoken. And I would gladly tell Golson that it’s a waste of his breath but I feel as if I would be helping him if I said it and so I choose not to. When Golson asks me what I’m up to there, Ace, I lose the beat on my fingers and suddenly I find myself very dissatisfied, and I’m not sure now if the beat will end on my pinky or my thumb or my ring finger, and it’s highly doubtful that I’ll ever really figure it out again. “I’m listening to the music, Golson,” I tell him, because it’s the truth and I know he’ll become annoyed with my answer. “How about you do something a little more productive?”
I don’t look at him because I want him to know full well what I think of his authority and I walk into the back to hide from him. There’s a stack of tomatoes in a brown box that need to be sliced for the bins, and so I get working on them because I feel as if tomatoes are probably good objects to make beats on. I can’t drum a good beat on the tomatoes and slice them at the same time and so I feel my heart start racing a bit, and I feel as if the back room just got a little bit smaller, and it doesn’t help that the bearded guy who also works in the restaurant is washing dishes and listening to heavy metal music very loudly only a foot-and-a-half away from me. Beating, beating, beating, my heart goes and not to the tune of the heavy metal music or the music I hear in my head, and so I rush to finish the tomatoes in the hopes that I can get back to what I was doing before. When I finish and put the sliced tomatoes in their bin and walk to the refrigerator to store them, I see Golson sticking his head through the door, presumably to keep an eye on me and to make sure I was doing my job. “Did you already finish those tomatoes, Ace?” Golson asks me, and the back room gets smaller and my heart beats faster and my neck starts to sweat a little bit. I hear Golson snicker when I don’t look at him and put the tomatoes in the walk-in fridge, and when the door closes behind me I take a moment to sit on the lid of a bucket of pickles and watch the in and out of my breath as it becomes visible in front of me. The cold air slows my heartbeat enough to where I’m satisfied with it, and when I walk back out the front of the house I see Golson look at me as if I were some sort of alien creature exiting a spaceship. The look I give him back must be sufficient because he seems to lose interest in me and goes to talk with the brown-haired girl he’s been flirting with all night. Golson leans against the wall as if he were Atlas and the wall his Sky and he talks out of the side of his mouth when he talks and this annoys me and it seems to annoy the brown-haired girl as well but I believe she’s too polite to say anything to him about and so she goes on listening because she’s on the clock and she gets paid to both slice tomatoes and listen to Golson’s ramblings and so she listens. It’s approaching two in the morning and we haven’t had a customer enter the restaurant in over an hour but just as I think this thought a man comes in who’s clearly drunk and he comes up to the counter where I wait to take his order. I usually cannot stand drunk people but the man is pleasant, and while taking his order I have a short conversation with him about the sports team that won today and we were both very pleased by it, and he told a joke that I found very funny and we both laughed at it, and I thought that I like this guy because he’s funny and he doesn’t at all remind me of Golson. I very much like ringing the cash register because I can do it quickly and deftly and my fingers and hands move lightning-fast and so it’s great fun to keep me occupied. Golson, however, quite possibly aware of the lack of response he’s receiving from the brown-haired girl, shrugs the sky and goes to make the funny man’s food, and the brown-haired girl seems very relieved and smiles at me as I put on a pair of rubber gloves. She’s very pretty, the brown-haired girl, with big eyes that look curious and a spring in her step whenever she moves around the restaurant. I very much like her, and I find her to be fascinating. I repeat to her the joke that the funny customer told me and her eyes light up and she laughs, and when Golson hears her laughing he turns around from the customer and looks at me angrily and my heart starts beating rapidly again. I begin picking at my dead finger skin at double the pace, and it’s becoming increasingly harder for me to focus on my conversation because I can hear my heart in my ears and there’s just not enough skin on my fingers, and then – Ouch! I look down and see blood. I picked too deep, and I’ve cut myself. With every beat of my heart I feel the blood pumping out in rhythm, and I take this moment to excuse myself from the conversation and walk into the back to run my bleeding finger under the cold water. The water is slightly soothing, but my finger now hurts and my heart is still beating and then Golson walks back and asks me what I’m doing and so I tell him and he seems annoyed but I can’t be bleeding and working and he tells me to hurry up, Ace, and I make a grunting noise and he doesn’t leave. The open wound on my finger makes picking the rest of my fingers nearly impossible, and so I try drumming some on the side of the metal sink, and I leave small bloodstains on it each time my one finger hits the beat. “You’re just trying to be difficult, aren’t you?” Golson says to me, and damn it I lose my rhythm again. My heart begins to beat faster and faster again. I don’t want to turn around but I’ve stopped picking my fingers and I’ve stopped beating the side of the sink and the bearded man is still washing the dishes and listening to his heavy metal music and my heart is beating faster and the back room feels smaller. When it feels like I can’t breathe, I snatch a paper towel and wrap it around my bleeding finger and with my head down try to make it past Golson and out to the front of the house to do my job but he stops me and stands in front of me without moving and I look into his eyes and I say Golson, please move, but he tells me I need to open a new bag of lettuce from the refrigerator even though he sees my finger is bleeding. The blood that hasn’t yet poured out of my finger is rushing through my ears, and I can’t hear anything because of the heavy metal music and there’s now a ball of emotion sitting in my stomach like a rock or that alien from that movie and so I turn around from Golson and put on a rubber glove and bleed into it and grab a knife and head to the refrigerator and it feels a mile away but I finally make it and I open the door and close it behind me and when it’s shut I sit on the lid of the pickle jar again just for a moment of peace. I try to watch my breath but it’s not soothing me quickly enough, and so I stand back up and bang the handle of the knife against the metal edge of the stocking shelves until I can hear a beat, but doing this hurts my finger, and the glove I put on over it has started to turn red and I’m not feeling any better and my heart’s beating so fast that I think there’s something wrong with me, and the ball of emotion in my stomach has doubled in size until I feel like it’s going to come out of my mouth! I guess Golson must’ve heard me banging the knife because he enters the fridge behind me and I almost don’t hear him until he says, “What the fuck, Ace?” and he reaches for my arm and I turn around and I just hit him with the pointy end of the knife, and his eyes go wide with fear and I pull the knife back out and I put it right back in and I pull it out and I put it in and I pull it out and I put in until I hear a beat and then both of my arms are covered in blood and Golson is no longer looking at me with that angry look and he slumps forward into me and I catch him and we slide to the floor of the refrigerator. Just for a moment I hear my heart return to normal, and I see my breaths in front of me and I can think clearly and my stomach is empty. I don’t realize at first that I still have my arms wrapped around him, almost digging my fingernails into the back of his shirt from when I pulled him with me to the floor of the fridge. Just then I hear the beat in my head. I tap it out on Golson’s back; I’ve found the rhythm. Picking my fingers is a bad habit, but the tapping never harmed anyone, and the tapping never hurt me. The tapping is a good use of my hands, I think.
Submitted June 06, 2016 at 12:07AM by Luke_Coolidge http://ift.tt/25FNwhP nosleep
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