A Graveyard of First Chapters, by Johnny Payne

She had the same heartbeat as a blue-throated hummingbird, 1260 beats per minute, she was sure of it, except when she fell into a torpor on a cold night, when she hibernated, at which point it fell to 50 beats per minute.  She could walk on hot coals dumped from a grill when her friends cooked out by the riverside, in violation of the law, because it was fire season, and she walked across the coals precisely to put them out with her feet like ice.  She could regulate her body temperature that way.  She could do cocaine in a crowd, lights twinkling on the riverboat, and it had no effect whatsoever on her bloodstream.  She watched the others twitch-dance, while she moved lithely among them, touching this back and that, bestowing her blessing without getting involved with anyone.  She was an android, not a real one but the equivalent, a simulacrum of a simulacrum.  She was linear.  Everything in her universe made sense.  

She could attempt suicide by rope, pills, gunshot, jumping from a bridge, running out into traffic, electrocuting herself, swallowing acid and nothing would happen, not even a stomachache or a headache.  She put one foot in front of the other, the way a verb follows a noun or a duckling follows its mother.  She was all-powerful but too shy and modest to mention it.  She would have made a good heroine in a gothic novel, surrounded by cosmic forces arrayed against her—necromancers, ruined anti-heroes, wolves or werewolves, thrown onto an ice floe to perish as she watched the mainland retreat, because she was the sacrificial victim of the tribe, or buried alive by an insane and vengeful lover, ants crawling over her, a goddess who metamorphosed right when she was about to get obliterated by the head god for disobedience, a female executive in a corrupt male world of depraved bank executives, not part of the club, they secretly wanted to pass her around like a commodity but couldn’t figure out how to get away with it so they shunned her, planning to make her the fall guy for their financial scheme to dupe the American people.  

She adopted too many pets, but they spoke to her in a secret language, literally spoke. She could decipher their mews and growls and squawks and hisses as if she were a linguist at an Ivy League school who had cracked the code of universal animal speech, decried by her colleagues as a charlatan but she would outlast all their pious heresies.  She ate men like air, ate women like popcorn at a tear-jerker matinee, ate herself and regurgitated and out of her own vomit fashioned a new being, more beautiful than her current self, and her soul slipped as easily into that totem as if she were passing a dollar bill from an old wallet to a new wallet.  She was a junkie whore, living in an abandoned house with rough men who were too strung out to actually rape her, so instead, they pawed her until she metamorphosed them into little glittering fish in an aquarium and watched them cruise through the water trying to remember what they used to be.  

She was unemployed, but things were going to get better.  Her car had stopped running and she didn’t have money to fix it, but she’d figure out a way.  She’d only just gotten over the flu and lay in her walk-up trying to recover, too weak to do anything except microwave the diminishing stock of frozen dinners.  Her cat had run off, but maybe it would come back, once she could get to the store to buy another bag of cat food.  She’d been turning t-shirts inside out, so the dried sweat wouldn’t be as pungent, but pretty soon she’d wash all the dirty clothes, once she’d figured out why the washer wouldn’t spin, and how to fix it.  Her man had moved in with their upstairs female neighbor to be friends with benefits, but screw them, rather, let them screw each other.  She was suffering from incontinence, at her age, possibly due to a bladder infection, yet soon she’d find that old bottle of antibiotics that she hadn’t finished taking and possibly it would fix her condition.  She had night terrors, dreaming that she was drowning in the bathtub only to wake up in her own bed soaking wet.  Her workplace had called and called about her not showing up for work, first scolding, then offering to let her work remotely, then threatening to fire her, then asking her to at least come in and train her replacement, then silence.  She had probably been fired at this point, not that she cared.

What was the motive for getting better?  Who would she seek out even if she got on her feet?  What kind of relationship could a woman hope for who couldn’t keep her job and was so unappealing that even her cat and boyfriend ran away?  How had she gotten into this position?  She tried to force her mind to trace the trajectory backwards, establishing a strict chain of causality so that at least the demise would seem inevitable.  If she could manage to reconstruct her recent past as an irrefutable logical proof, that would also suggest a logical final outcome.  If the steps of her degradation pointed to her death, at a minimum she could accept that, calmly make preparations to kill herself and get the job done with dispatch, without lollygagging.

Yet she couldn’t reason out the situation to satisfaction.  No matter which way her exhausted mind turned over the events, she could do no better than see them as an arbitrary succession of non-related missteps, not even a matter of self-blame.  Rather, her consistent bad luck figured as the random hate of the cosmos.  Her life was comical in that it was accidental, therefore, not to be taken seriously.  This being the case, she burst out laughing at her conundrum, cast off self-pity for such a ridiculous, pathetic figure as herself, and realized that she was nothing more than hapless in the hands of an uncaring fate.

She got out of bed.  Inspecting the washer, she realized it was just a sock that had hung up the tub from spinning properly.  The familiar noise of the machine summoned her cat, who must have been lingering nearby.  Its yowls for food made her shower, put on newly fresh clothes and go to the store for cat food, and while she was at it, do a full shopping for herself.  On the way down the stairwell to the street, she happened past her ex-boyfriend and his new squeeze and surprised them by giving them a polite wave and going right on by. This made her laugh again and put her in the mood for an espresso at the corner coffee shop.  The caffeine buzz made her flirt, and soon, she had a date for Thursday with a guy who worked in a nearby office.  Returning home, she put away the groceries, cleaned her house top to bottom until it smelled of perfumed disinfectant.  She made a sizzling stir fry in the wok, laced with lots of hot chili, cracked one of the frosty wheat beers she’d purchased for this moment, and settled in with her cat on her lap to binge-watch her favorite series, about three female roommates taking turns leading tormented romantic and work lives. She enjoyed their suffering immensely.

The next morning, she showed up for work as if nothing.  The boss looked surprised to see her.  He looked like he was about to launch into a big lecture, but instead gave her a set of instructions that brought her up to date and waved her to her desk.  In it sat a temp, whom she in turn asked to please vacate.  The temp cried and left, literally running out the front door while sobbing.

It was a good day to be alive.