"So, yeah, you're pretty much fired."
It was Fabian who had come to pick her up from the hospital, which was strange, because they weren't particularly close friends outside of work. She wondered if maybe he had some sort of lingering guilt for being the one that she had been chasing down when she crashed.
"...and the bossman was talking about suing you for damages, too. For the bike, I mean. He was real fucking pissed. 'What was she even doing on the bike, blah blah blah, was she going for a joy ride, she should have been on shift,' that sort of thing."
"I'm glad to hear that my well-being is so valued by my employers. I almost died."
"Yeah man, I still can't believe it. Fuck, I mean, I saw the crash on the way back, saw the ambulance even, but I didn't know it was you. Hell, I didn't even realise you were gone until after I was already at the store and had finished on the phone with that customer yelling about his pizza being ruined. Was that why you went after me, by the way?"
"Yeah. Cut myself and spilled blood all over the damn thing. You grabbed the box before I could tell you."
"Oof, sucks." Fabian bit his thumb, looking down at the pavement. "You didn't have to go after me on one of the bikes, though. Christ. You know, I did have my phone on me?"
April stopped, standing in the middle of the path that lead down to the car park. Fabian looked back at her, quizzically.
"I am... a fucking moron."
"Absolutely," grinned Fabian, who was surprisingly relaxed about the situation now that he had confirmed she wasn't actively dying.
"No, I mean- really!" April punched her fists downwards as she started walking again. "Twenty-twenty-fucking-three and I forget that phones exist!? Christ!"
"Yeah, I mean, giving me a call would have definitely made a lot more sense than hijacking a bike and coming after me like a maniac over some ruined pizza. Actually, you know what? I'm not sure if you should be on a bike at all if you're going to wipe out like that in the middle of an empty street. What even happened, did you lose balance?"
"No, uh- actually, there was, um. A guy in the road."
It was Fabian who stopped walking this time.
"No fucking shit! Fuck! Is he- I mean, I only saw the one ambulance- Christ, April."
April shook her head. "No, uh, he was fine, I think. I think I missed him. That's why I fell."
"Well, that's- Jesus. Jesus, well at least it wasn't any worse. But damn it, April, what were you thinking? At that speed, not paying attention to what's in the road..."
"Maybe I'm just a dumbass, like you said."
"Yeah, for serious. Shit, just, don't do it again, I guess? Bloody hell." Fabian reached the car and unlocked it with the key fob before holding the door open for her. "Climb over the driver's seat. After all this I really don't think you should be driving."
"I don't think I could even if I wanted to." April clambered into the car, swinging herself over Fabian's seat awkwardly. "My leg's kinda busted up."
"Shit, yeah. Honestly, I'm surprised you weren't hurt more. That bike was in pieces."
"I got lucky, I guess," said April, shrugging into the passenger seat and fastening the seatbelt over her legs. "Scraped up my leg something fierce, but I didn't actually break anything. The friction slowed my body before my body could actually crash-". She neglected to mention that it had, at least in part, been her skin acting as the brake pad. "Probably would've had my brains spilling out onto the road if I hadn't been wearing the helmet, though- turns out it really is a good idea to wear those things, huh!"
"Grody." Fabian shuddered as he sat down. "Well, hey, not many people can say they've been in a bike wreck and got off that lightly. You must have a moron's luck, too."
"I'm not sure I'd call it luck, Fabe. I've got a bandage covering most of my shin after the road sandpapered me, and I think I've lost some sensation down there from nerve damage." She shifted her leg uncomfortably—the tight bandage and the fact that she had been pumped full of local anaesthetic didn't really help on that front, either. "If that makes me lucky then I don't want to see what bad luck would be."
"Well, at least you're not dead, that's the thing, right?" said Fabian, staring into the distance as he started the car. "You seen what can happen to people in bike crashes? Guy on the news I saw the other month, hit a car, his brains were spilling out. Shit. Makes me think twice about driving myself. If you got all the luck, odds are when I crash, I'll be the one to cark it."
"I'm not sure it works that way."
"Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I'm just superstitious."
"Then it's a shame that motorbike delivery is your job, I guess."
"God, don't fucking remind me. And, well... I'm not sure how much longer I want to stay at Sporks, anyway."
April looked up at him. "Really? How come?"
"Oh, you know," Fabian scoffed. "It kinda sucks there?"
She grinned. "Sure, but I kinda thought you didn't mind. It pays, right?"
"Right. And, well, I didn't, for the most part. But it's going to suck more, without you there. You know how hard it is to get the other guys- uh, and the other girls too, I mean- to listen to my stories? You're the only one who doesn't try to fob me off at the outset. Or, well. You were the only one." He looked back out towards the road.
Right, yeah, I'm fired now. Nearly forgot about that. And possibly in the hole for damages, too. April looked down at her knees, shifting her numb leg uncomfortably. Hopefully I'm at least not starting to go insane on top of it all.
She hadn't seen anything that resembled the colourful monkey since the crash, which was a positive in her book.
"Hey, I guess you have a new one now, too," she said after a pause, looking back over at Fabian and putting on a faux-masculine voice to mimic his tone of speech. "'...sup guys, did I tell you about the time the crazy kitchen girl stole a bike to chase me down and wrecked it down the street?"
"'Oh yeah, man, guess she was just that into me!" Fabian laughed along with the bit. "But fuck, see, that's the thing! It's almost too out there. People will think I made that shit up. The best stories are the ones that are weird, but believable."
"Come on, dude- yesterday you were saying you wanted to meet aliens. I'm sure that one would strain the bounds of credibility a little more than-"
"Than a girl chasing me down on a motorcycle? Clearly you overestimate my devastatingly poor track record with women." He gave her a sidelong look. "No, but, seriously. Alien thing, either I let there be some build up to it—or I, like, play it for laughs, keep plausible deniability. What happened yesterday... it's too real for that, I think. Both too real and yet too fucking nuts, you know?"
They both sat there in silence for a minute.
"I think I need a drink," said April.
*****
Fabian had driven away after dropping her off at her apartment, so when she left again later that evening she did so on foot, shrugging on a faux-leather jacket over her tank-top to stave off the cold. She had invited Fabian to join her when she went out later—he had sounded like he might have needed a night off as well—but he had politely declined, probably realising that they had already been pressing up against the bounds of on-the-clock workplace friendship in a semi-awkward manner when he had agreed to drive her home. It was something neither of them had particularly wanted to push.
She had called up some of her more typical drinking buddies to join her instead, and, perhaps in relief that she hadn't ended up as a bloody smear on a stretch of worn-out tarmac, a surprisingly robust group had agreed to celebrate her survival on what was, after all, a Monday night. She kept an eye out for anyone heading in the same direction as she walked down to the bus stop, making a prodigious effort to only slightly limp, which she felt was actually quite the achievement for less than 24 hours elapsed since being in a major traffic accident.
As the route 179 pulled in on the roadside, she caught sight of two of the friends she was aiming to rendezvous with already within, illuminated by the dim interior lighting. Swinging herself up onto the bus, she flashed them a smile as she tapped her card and slipped into a seat opposite the pair. Trace—a short, stocky woman with thick mascara, sharply pointed eyeliner and a surprisingly barrel-like chest—looked up from her phone to wave hello wordlessly, shifting a handbag that was coated in a sort of sparse black fur (ew, where did you even get something like that?) out of the way to make April some more room. Trace's girlfriend, Morgan, was a thin-faced woman with hoop earrings and dark hair dyed blonde; she looked up more enthusiastically, pulling out half of a shared pair of headphone buds from one ear.
"April Pearce! You didn't die! Are you okay?"
April groaned, settling into the seat while trying to make her leg comfortable in the cramped footwell. "Well, I got fucked up pretty badly, and I'm pretty sure I'm fired, but, other than that..."
Morgan flashed her a sympathetic expression while Trace pulled out her own earbud, pausing whatever had been playing on the phone and stashing it in the ugly black bag.
"Don't joke around with the woman who almost died, Morgan," muttered Trace reproachfully, before turning back to April, expression concerned. "But seriously, what the fuck?" She looked at her expectantly, as if she was expecting some kind of testimony.
April shrugged, vaguely. "Uh, what the fuck what?"
"What the fuck happened? Hello?" Trace shot her a bemused look. "I get a text from you saying you were in the hospital because you got in a bike wreck, but that you want to go out to a bar? I mean, what the fuck?" She waved her hands to gesture at the shape of her confusion.
April shrugged again by way of a response, then added, "Well, I mean, yeah, that's pretty much what happened."
Trace shared an exasperated glance with Morgan, before turning back. "April?!"
"What?"
"How did you get into a bike crash at work? April, you work as a pizza chef!"
"Technically I'm a pizzaiola."
"Oh, cool- is that Italian for 'crashes fucking bikes in the kitchen!?'"
Trace stared at her pointedly, Morgan with one arm around the other woman, looking at April slightly sympathetically from over Trace's shoulder. April met her gaze, sighing. Trace was never one to pass up an opportunity to get dramatic about interpersonal drama, and one of her friends being hospitalized was such a step up from her usual fare that they would likely be milking it all evening, if not all week. April resigned herself to weather the attention in good humour.
"Well, no- I was on- I took one of the delivery bikes out."
Trace squinted. "But you don't do delivery, right?"
"No, but, you see, I took one anyway because-"
"You stole a bike?! What the fuck?"
Trace threw up her hands and looked back and forth between her and Morgan, while the latter stared at her thoughtfully before speaking.
"Ooooh, so is that why you're fired then?"
April glanced over at Morgan herself, sheepishly.
"And you crashed it? Wow, you sure weren't kidding around with the crazy this time, Apes." Morgan grinned. Trace looked like she was considering continuing to scold, but then seemed to think better of it, resigning herself to looking at April in silent reproach.
"Well, at least you're fucking alive," she relented after a moment, glancing down at April's injured leg, the white of a bandage just poking out of her trousers. "But God, you've got some balls-" Trace grimaced, "uh, no offence."
"None taken."
"And, April, I don't know how to tell you this, but you've got to stop doing this shit."
"What, getting in bike crashes? I mean, I wasn't planning on making a habit of it."
Trace rolled her eyes. "Urgh, no, you- you know what I mean." She gestured up and down April, as if to indicate the full scope of her, fingers waving frustratedly. "Doing this crazy shit. Isn't this the second time in six months you've had to go to A&E?"
"Well, the other time was hardly my fault- That guy walked into me-"
"And you swallowed a rock! That was in your mouth- why?!" Trace's eyes were almost comically stern, highlighted in black and just slightly too large for her rounded face, in a manner that she was sure Morgan thought was very cute. She brandished a finger at April, pointing at her mouth.
"Fuck, look, we've been through this- if I want to experience the cool mouthfeel of a smooth pebble then I should be allowed to do that in peace without- without fucking, random guys, knocking them down my- look, I learned my lesson when they pumped my stomach okay, so drop it."
Morgan giggled and Trace glanced at her irritatedly before turning back.
"Fine then, what about last year- when you got into that fight?"
"It, uh..." April looked down, sheepishly, "I mean, it wasn't really a fight."
"You threw a tray at that poor girl with the nosebleed!"
"I didn't throw it at her, I just, was surprised when I saw the blood and... dropped it, with velocity." April held up her hand before Trace could interject again. "-but okay, fine, point made, my responsibility. But also it's like- hey, if I am a little clumsy, that isn't me deliberately setting out to be, like, a menace to society..."
"I don't know about society, April, if anything I am worried about you," Trace stared at her, more earnestly this time. "And I'm not sure that clumsy really cuts it, because like, look at you, this is serious shit! Really!"
Morgan glanced down at April's leg as Trace gestured to it, then back up again, sympathetically.
"And so I'm just thinking, April, are you okay, really? Like, what's happening with you?"
April opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. She knew Trace well enough to understand that the question wasn't in full seriousness; that if she objected, Trace would happily respond with more half-concerned ribbing, but something gave her pause. She felt a nagging unwillingness to dismiss the half of the question that was made in real concern.
She remembered the face of the monkey, its scarlet eyes gleaming as they bore into her, multicoloured starburst patterns blazing across its fur like the rays of a prismatic sun.
"Hey, Trace? Do you ever wonder if you might be, like, going insane?"
Trace snorted. "Don't I ever."
April didn't reply, biting her lip. Trace gave her a long look. "Wait, are you serious? Girl, if you keep saying things like that, then I really will be worried about you. What's going on?"
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
April looked down. "It's been a crazy week. And I saw some weird shit go down before I crashed that bike."
"Weird shit? What kind of weird shit?"
She hesitated again. "I'm not sure I really want to talk about it, but, like. When I say weird, I mean... real weird."
Trace's face looked a little more than half-seriously concerned now, and she glanced over at Morgan, who took advantage the pause to speak up.
"Hey, April? Are you sure that you want to come out tonight? I mean you did just get out of the hospital after all. If you're not feeling well..."
April shook her head, firmly. "Nah. I need this, I think. Need to, uh. Let off some steam. Clear my head some? It'll be good for me."
"Well, if you're sure..." Morgan looked as uncertain as Trace, but didn't seem to be in the mood to press the matter, for which April was faintly grateful.
"Where're we meeting everyone, anyway?" asked Trace, looking out the window. "We're close to town."
"I think Charlie's going to meet us at the 'Spoons on the high street. We can figure out where we're going from there if we want to do something different later on."
Trace snorted. "Fucking excellent, so we get to hang with all the divorced beer dads out drinking on a Monday night."
"We can hardly judge them if we're there too, can we?"
"It's a special occasion held in honour of our resident invalid, miraculously healed by the restorative powers of Whipps Cross." She gestured at April, dramatically.
"Yeah, and also I'm fired now, so I can drink whenever I like and it'll only cost me self-respect. ...And my rainy day savings, I guess."
Trace rolled her eyes, while Morgan frowned. "Babe, what the fuck is a whipped cross? It sounds kinda religious."
"It's the hospital I was at," interjected April, before Trace could supply an incorrect answer. "But can we-"
She was abruptly interrupted by the bus tannoy announcing that they'd reached their stop. The conversation died down as they gathered up Trace's ugly handbag, filed out of the vehicle, and waited for the traffic lights to disgorge them across street towards the local pub-diner.
The A. S. Eddington was one of those depressing examples of a local institution that had been digested by the all-consuming Wetherspoons gestalt and spat out as a very generic family pub-restaurant hybrid. Despite this, the convenient location made it a typical starting point for accessing the local nightlife, which was thankfully located within a few blocks that remained walkable even when slightly inebriated.
As they approached, April caught Charlie's eye, catching sight of him sitting outside the building in one of the flimsy round-table/slatted chair combos set out for smokers and those who wanted a breath of slightly fresher air along with their drinks. Charlie himself was already nursing a pint of something murky, which he gingerly placed down on the unsteady surface before getting up to greet the trio.
A brown-haired man in his mid-30s, Charlie looked boringly conventional enough that he seemed out of place with April's other friends until you tried to speak to him, whereupon he would quickly disabuse you of that impression through a combination of barely masked neuroticism and ever-so-slightly campness. The two had met six years prior in what had originally been a Grindr hookup, but after a few-weeks-long process of disentangling the fact that neither was actually the other's type in any one of a whole host of ways, they had downgraded their relationship to a friendship sustained by the regular convenience of living locally.
"It's the girls! Hello!" Charlie pulled April into a one-armed hug as he did his best to encompass the Trace/Morgan combo with his other hand, inadvertently crushing April's injured leg against his own. She pulled back, swearing under her breath.
"Fuck, sorry, I forgot," Charlie grinned at her awkwardly. "You doing okay?"
"Just about. Is Michelle here yet?"
"I'm not sure she's coming, I'm afraid," Charlie shrugged. "Said she had a client reschedule, needs to be up early."
"Damn, that's one down, then," said April, glancing over the assembled group. "I was really hoping to speak to her, too."
"Why, hoping to get back in her good graces?”
"Oh, God, Charlie, did she tell you what happened?"
He smirked at her while April looked faintly pallid. "No, not exactly, just... she said you left in kind of a hurry."
April pressed her face into her hands. "Fuck. Was she mad? Did she sound mad?"
Charlie laughed. "Don't stew on it too much, I think it's fine. It takes more than a little thing like that to rattle her—trust me, I was with her more than long enough to figure that out. She was more worried about the crash I think—mortal peril sort of has a way of breaking through ice, I guess. I told her you were fine, though."
"Good. Thank you. That's not really why I wanted to talk to her, anyway, I- no, seriously, stop with that face. I just want to see her for, like, friend reasons. Talk some things through."
Charlie managed to pick up his expression into a passably affable grin. "I can give her a message next time I see her, if you like?" Charlie walked them back over to his table, and sat down, picking up his drink.
"Yes please, actually- I'll talk to you about it in a minute." She clutched her jacket to her body as a gust of wind pulled at its edges. "Want to go inside?"
"Let's," interjected Trace, eyeing the unsteady outdoor table Charlie was sitting at. "I didn't make the effort to do my hair up to be out in the wind all night."
Morgan snorted. "Girl, your hair is two inches long at most, I'm the one who should be worried, honestly."
Charlie piped up. "She does have a point Trace- I'm pretty sure your scalp is gelled stiffer than an oak tree in a summer breeze. Morgan, let's get ourselves inside before your luscious locks become a casualty of war."
The interior of the pub took the form of a broad open plan dining hall, filled with wooden tables and chairs, and offset at one end by a bar table surrounded by a small handful of light-up gambling machines of the type that April had never actually seen anyone use. Between the metal numbers stamped into the identical tabletops and the cheesy red-orange patterned carpet, it felt more like the karaoke hall of a low-end cruise ship than an actual pub—but as with most chain pubs, the interior decoration had been selected via a similarly corporate approach to that of the former.
A faint background ambience of bassy music was throbbing over the general chatter of voices and clinking glasses. Occasional shouts of laughter from a group of rowdy looking men at a table near the bar would briefly surmount the ambient noise before dying down again.
Their group of four slid into a booth by the wall, its own stamped metal number labelling it as table eleven. Charlie pushed the wire frame stand containing menus and condiments to pne side in order to make room for his pint glass. Morgan snatched at it as it passed, pulling the menu out and casting an eye over it.
"Hey, do you guys want to do shots?" She gestured excitedly at the pertinent drink menu items.
"I think I would rather be shot," muttered April, rolling her eyes.
"Aw, come on, didn't you say you wanted to go out and have a drink, take your mind off of things?" Morgan brandished the menu towards her, pointing excitedly at a picture of something brightly coloured.
April grimaced. "I think if I were to start taking shots with you right now, the risk to my health from falling and breaking my leg on the way home would eclipse the damage already inflicted from having half the skin taken off my shin yesterday."
"Fuckin' ow, April," said Charlie, wincing visibly, "are you okay?"
"You know, people keep asking me that? And I think the answer is, 'probably, once I've had a drink of something that won't put on my back for the next fortnight'."
"Ah, well, suit yourself!" said Morgan, before turning to Trace. "Want to come up and buy something?"
"Yeah, sure," Trace replied. "April, can you look after my bag for me?" She hefted the handbag with its ugly smattering of black furry covering and tossed it at April, who caught it awkwardly, before she and Morgan slid back out of the booth to head towards the bar. April put the bag down next to her, gingerly.
Charlie watched them walk away. "Are you sure it was a good idea to bring those two? Morgan can get... competitive, when it comes to alcohol. Sort of thing you have to be in the mood for."
April snorted. "If they get themselves silly drunk doing shots together then it'll be free entertainment for you and me."
"Look at you, trying to deflect the evening's attention from you and your little stunt. You're a sly fox, April Pearce." Charlie sipped his drink, grinning. "Well, don't think I'll so easily forget why you've got that bandage on your leg."
"Believe me, I don't think anyone's going to forget anytime soon, least of all me. You know they fired me?"
"Fired you?" Charlie seemed somewhat taken aback. "Surely they should be paying you, I mean- wasn't it a workplace accident?"
April stared at him. "Charlie, I wasn't supposed to be on that bike. They're coming after me for property damage."
"Oh! Ooooooh." Charlie took a long sip of his drink, before putting down with a hard thump. "Is that why you wanted to talk to Michelle?"
"What do you mean?"
"You want to talk to her because she's therapist? And you're—I dunno—stealing shit from work? Damaging it? Signs of impulsivity? Dare I say, emotional issues?"
"What? Charlie, look, no, I didn't just-"
"-because you should know that she doesn't work for free just because you're a friend, or even a more-than-a-friend, you know. That was an issue that came up for us, too. She's gotta maintain those boundaries, work/life balance, you can't just-"
"Charlie, no, shush- look, shush!" She held up a hand in front of his mouth, palm out, until he abated, making eye contact. She held it for a second or two to make sure he had actually stopped talking before lowering her arms back to the table.
"Yes I did want to have a word, but just because- I just wanted to ask a few questions, is all. Not as a client, just, like, objectively."
"Objectively?" He raised an eyebrow.
"Yeah, like- if X and/or Y happens, what does it mean?"
Charlie cocked his head. "And X and/or Y are... stealing a motorbike and/or getting fired? Or like-"
"Christ, no, Charlie, look, I'm serious. Can you tell her I want a word?"
"I'm going to have to tell her something about what you want, though."
"Ask her what it means if I might have been... like..." She hesitated for a second, looking at Charlie nervously. "Like, seeing some stuff?"
He gave her a look. "'Seeing some stuff'?"
"Yeah."
"What the fuck does that mean, April?"
"It means- oh, you know what, fuck it, never mind".
"I don't know, April, that sounds like something that, like, okay, I maybe should mind."
April turned away from him, biting her lip. "Then ask Michelle for me, okay? I don't want to go to a... look, just ask her. I'd appreciate it a whole lot."
"Sure. 'course. But..." Charlie was looking at her with concern, now. It was a feeling that April was starting to find increasingly familiar that evening.
She looked up, about to reply, when her attention was suddenly stolen away by a raised voice that sounded across the room from the direction of the bar, abrasively rising above the background babble of the pub. Both she and Charlie turned away from each other, distracted.
On the other side of the room, Trace was in the middle of some sort of altercation with one of the rowdy men that she had noticed being loud earlier as they had entered. Morgan was still standing in front of the bar, half turned away from it, a drink in one hand as she looked worriedly over at Trace, who had crossed halfway to the table that the loud man had been sitting at. While her voice was still sub-audible to April as she sat across the room, her mouth was moving at an impressive rate, her eyes emoting wildly. For his part, the man she was addressing had stood up from his seat, a pint glass still in one hand, the occasional spatter of liquid flying out the top of it as he gesticulated in angry retort.
"Fuck me," muttered Charlie, as he and April stood up to hurry over. After a few steps April doubled back, just barely remembering to grab hold of Trace's handbag so it wasn't left unattended at the table. When she finally arrived, Charlie was already standing behind Trace, watching warily in case things escalated. April hurried up behind to join him.
"...I just don't know why you have to be so fucking rude," said the rowdy man, in a tone of voice just slightly too close to an outright shout to be socially acceptable.
"Yeah, well I just want to know why you think it's appropriate to harass me when I'm trying to order a drink," Trace shot back at him hotly, her cheeks slightly pink.
"Harass- harass you? Get the fuck over yourself, I was just trying to give you a compliment-"
"Yeah well it wasn't fucking appreciated, and it isn't going to be, either."
"Well- well that's your fucking problem, isn't it?" The man slurred as he spoke, although by that point he had had enough sense to put his glass down on the table to avoid spilling it as he moved. "It isn't my fault you're a bitch, is it?"
Trace took a step forward. "It will be my fault when I deck your pasty fucking man-child ass, I'll tell you that for free."
"Fuck you!" He edged forward a little as if he wanted to get more in Trace's face, but then took a step backwards to keep his hand on the back of his chair, which was seemingly partially responsible for keeping him oriented upright. Trace looked like she had half a mind to follow him forward, but turned back as her arm was caught by Morgan, who had stepped over from the bar.
"Can we go?" Morgan muttered anxiously, looking back towards the booth that April's group had stepped out from.
The drunk man looked over at her and snorted, turning back towards his table drinking mates, who—for the most part—had been watching the exchange passively; some with humour, others with sterner expressions. One, who had been seated next to the standing man, had half-risen out of his seat, and was now looking uncertain as to whether he should continue the motion.
The first man looked down at his friend. "Fucking dykes," he muttered, before sitting back down. April watched Trace's nostrils flare at that, and she took a step forward back towards the group of men, but this time it was April who put an arm out to bar the way.
"Trace, don't bother. Please."
Trace shot her an ugly look that April read as don't fucking white knight me, but relented, letting Morgan pull her back towards their table. This, oddly, left April and Charlie standing alone, halfway between the bar and the drunken man's table, April clutching loosely at Trace's furry handbag.
The man who had been undecided about whether he wanted to stand looked at them, seemingly unimpressed. "You fags got a problem?"
April replied to his smirk with a slight sneer, then turned away from them, back towards Charlie and-
It took April multiple full seconds to realise what exactly she was looking at. At first, it appeared as though somebody had smeared meat across Charlie's face and head at a jaunty 30-degree angle, smoothing a pasty mottled texture of ground beef and gristle chunks along a perfectly flat pane, as if it had been finished by a mortar-board. But that wasn't quite right, April realised, because she could see how Charlie's neck and shoulders were positioned, as he continued to stand in place.
If the meaty texture was pasted a few inches above them, as it seemed to be, then there shouldn't have been room for his head, unless his neck had bent backwards at an alarming angle. But that wasn't the case either, because she could see his mouth, too; its corners tilted upwards as if he was about to ask her a question, fixed in place on his lower face, right before the contour of it was abruptly bisected by the smooth surface of bloody-grey gristle along a razor-sharp slanted right-angle.
With a cold shock of still disbelieving horror, her mouth dropping open, April realised that what she was looking at was Charlie's head sliced cleanly in half, as if by an impossibly sharp samurai sword. The top section was missing, as though it had been erased from existence along a perfectly flat plane that extended from roughly his upper right cheekbone, narrowly cutting down across the bottom of his nose before terminating on the other side of his head just above the jaw. The meat texture she was seeing was the inside of Charlie's head, splayed open like a perfect anatomical model that cross-sectioned across skin and muscle and bone. April could see a perfect cauliflower bulb of brain matter tucked away within the sandwich-layers of bone and gristle.
If April had been capable at the time of thinking rationally about what she was seeing, she would later consider, then the strangest thing about the sight of Charlie's sundered cranium was the manner in which being exposed to the open air didn't seem to inconvenience its internal workings at all. In fact, she could see the constituent parts of him continue to function; tendons in the face were pulling at the skin, puppeteered by muscle tissue that should no longer have been there.
His arteries pulsed softly with every heartbeat, their oval mouths glistening with beads of scarlet liquid that should have been shooting up from the stump of a head with the force of a severed hydraulic line. Instead, the streams of blood terminated at the cut-off threshold, like frozen icicles sliced in half with a sharp blade. The exposed upper channel of his respiratory tract flexed and dilated as he took in a breath.
"April?" the thing that had been Charlie asked in a slightly bemused tone, as it took a step towards her.
For the second time in as many days, April tumbled backwards in shock and fear, although this time around the motion had significantly more force to it. She fell hard, crashing squarely into the table where the group of unpleasant men were sitting, knocking their pint glasses aside in a spray of spilled bitter and shattered glass. The table itself bucked, the wooden surface tilting as her weight levered it off from the ground, the central supporting pillar acting as a fulcrum, smacking the far end into one of the men across from her.
"What the fuck!" shouted the man who had called her and Charlie fags, jumping up from the table as his drink went flying. His friends were all standing too now, and she was expecting at least some of them to be focused on the mutilated form of Charlie, but instead they were, to a man, staring at her lying prone on the floor. She cast her eyes about again, focussing them on the Charlie-thing, which—she was horrified to discover that she had seemingly not been mistaken—was indeed still sliced open clean through its skull, even while it confidently hurried over to the table, extending a worried hand down towards her.
Although, she realised as she looked up at the grisly visage, that wasn't quite true. It was hard to see from her angle low to the ground, but, as Charlie bent over her, she could see that the exposed meat texture of his head was undergoing a sort of undulating fractal pattern-blossoming. The exposed blood vessels were shifting and shrinking in size as the pinkish brain matter bloomed out to fill a larger fraction of his head, the edges dancing smoothly between slightly varying patterns.
"He's filling back up," she thought, bewildered, because that was indeed the substance of what she was seeing. It was as if the smooth cut-off plane of nothingness that intersected his head was slowly withdrawing, and the dancing patterns she saw were subsequent layers of his insides as they were once again laid back down into reality, animating the progression of stacked tissue slices as they slid back into place, until...
Until suddenly, Charlie was whole again, staring down at her with a concerned expression. The last few remaining strands of his hair re-emerged into reality with a soundless puff.
"W- what the fuck!" stammered April.
"What the fuck! You fucking bitch!" screamed the man who had been berating Trace, now looming above her, his shirt soaked across the chest with spilled alcohol that spattered April too as he leaned down to yank her up by her cardigan. She found herself forcefully re-oriented upright, the ruddy face of the man inches from hers as he shouted at her. "You think you can fuck with us?!"
April's mouth flapped open, and she considered for a moment what she was about to say; probably something along the lines of 'it was all an accident mister, you see, my friend's head was cut in half there for a moment'. Before she could make a start on vocalizing the words, though, the man had pulled back a fist and punched her squarely across the face. She crashed down onto the slightly sticky, slightly damp pub carpet, vision exploding with a galaxy of stars, all coherent thought momentarily expelled from her brain. Somewhere above her she heard Charlie shout, followed by the panicked voices of Trace and Morgan, who had apparently re-entered the scene.
As her vision cleared, the focal point of her eyes skittering sideways across the floor, she found her gaze settling on the lumpy mass of Trace's furry handbag. It had fallen to the ground, presumably her grip having been another casualty of her earlier flailing. As she stared at it, the fuzzy patches of sparsely-attached fur-stuff began to blur slightly in her unfocused vision, the spinning of her head seeming to pull her forward towards the fibrous texture.
"Except," she thought to herself, "it wasn't just her spinning head, was it?" At least, if it was, it had progressed beyond the expected level of post-concussion dizziness. Maybe she really had gone insane, she thought—first Charlie, and now this. She felt a sort of sullen disappointment that she had been too slow in communicating her concerns earlier that day, and that she hadn't mentioned her sudden onset madness while she had still been in the hospital.
The lumpy shape of the black handbag was unfolding in front of her into an elegant six-fold symmetry, the ugly object opening up like a flower in spring bloom. The inside of the bag—which she was fairly sure had previously held Trace's keys, loose change and a packet of tampons amid torn velvet lining—was now a tunnel of sorts, one that dilated away from her as she stared into its depths. The edges unfolded along that same six-fold symmetry, receding away from her with a nauseating vertigo to reveal depths that glowed a dim storm-cloud red amid the black lining. April felt sick in a way that went far beyond having been punched.
April continued to lie there, staring into infinite depths as the felt folds of the blossoming handbag unclenched and folded around her body, pulling her forwards, and in.