Carl

Carl and Missy lay in bed for three days after they lost the baby. They bought pills on credit from her ex-husband, a recently former head engineer at the Ramada Inn, before that, a retired meth cook. He worked with us too. She mostly sniveled in the crease of his chest where, at the premature age of twenty four, the musculature has slackened from the two years he spent stacking railroad ties, the past six months he spent roofing with us, the seven years of pills and liquor and nursing black eyes and bruised ribs and bottles hid beneath Missy's sweatshirt. The dogfights they would sometimes host in the square of grass they rented in Maryville. She pulled her lips over her teeth and her chin bucked against his sternum in strange spasms of movement like twitching in sleep. Sucking in breath, her lips rippled over her jaws in brutish melancholy. Carl felt the black of his eyes spread to the ends of his face, and he let the pills ripen in his legs, the blooming chemical blue and red ballooning inside all the dry and cracked granite of his organs. He closed his eyes and let Missy cry alone and left both of his hands underneath his old t-shirt on the now empty body of his girlfriend. When he came to retching outside, he put his head down on the trailer's concrete steps. He dreamt he had a million dollars.