Left

In the small room, the fluorescent light is anemic, like it’s filtered through dirty water. It shows only what it wants to show, so details—the corners, beneath the table, the grooves in the men’s faces—are not so much in shadow as they are not worth the bother.

The boy—he doesn’t think of himself as a boy, but everyone else in the room does—sits crumpled like a discarded pop can, almost completely still, except when he’s smearing tears across his face with his wrist. The men stare and to the boy, it’s like being underwater, the weight, the pressure of their attention pushing down, smothering. But they’re looking at him and they’re each seeing something else.

The one—younger, carefully unshaven, a blocky handgun on his belt—sees twisted, smoldering bodies, black and red steaming wistfully in the gentle rain. He sees a kind of mute and stupid hope in the eyes of parents looking at these charnel things, exposed and barren on stainless steel tables in a basement room. He sees himself, aiming his unflinching pistol at somebody—maybe the boy, maybe someone else—anybody who could be responsible.

The other—grizzled and tired and square-faced—sees a girl, his daughter, riding in cars with boys he barely knows. He sees her mother, sees himself telling her their baby is dead, wondering how this woman he’s known for twenty-two years would handle news like the news he delivered today. He sees his old partner, who shot himself over a case like this.

And so the boy sits, alone in the small room, in spite of the men in the room and the people in the hallway and his parents on the other side of the one-sided mirror.

Someone asks a question and it lingers, suffocating in silence. Finally, the boy speaks.

I remember a pinball machine. I know. Don’t rush me.

It’s weird. I mean, there was tons crazy stuff there. In the dump. And I remember a pinball machine. Not even a good one. Art was terrible. Layout was boring. And the playfield glass was cracked. Someone took a bat to it or something. I said it was probably some goon, there to collect, being tough and everyone laughed ‘cause I said “goon.”

And that was it. On to the next piece of trash. I mean, that’s why we were there. We just walk around and laugh about the stuff we find. We tell stories about the people who owned them, who bought them, who threw them away. It wasn’t the first time. We do it…we did it all the time.

Memory’s weird, you know? I see Jeremy holding something. He’s waving it around, talking really loud. Amber says something to him and he grins and there’s basil in his teeth from dinner. I remember that there’s basil in his teeth. I remember Amber’s joke and the girls laughing. But I can’t remember what he’s actually holding, what we’re laughing about. Isn’t that weird? But I remember a pinball machine that we never even looked at. I mean, I looked at it, and then later I—I don’t even like pinball.

You think I know a lot about it for someone who doesn’t like it. Well, thank my brother. He loves the old games, you know? The nickelcade? Spent most of his junior high there. So, you know, I had to love ‘em too. If I’m gonna keep up? If I’m gonna get him to pay attention to me? I know more about pinball than the people who make it, so yeah. You’d think I love it.

But I don’t. Don’t know why. No, that’s a lie. I know exactly why. It’s because when we were ki—when we were younger, we played all the time. I mean I watched him play all the time. I still remember. The way he stood, the way he moved. The way he sang that old song. You know the one. Bet your singing it right now.

But then, you know. He got older. He got friends. I mean. Friends. The kind you get when you’re pushing out on your own, when your little brother is like a tumor or something. Something that’s a part of you but that you’d rather not think about or have.

“See ya squirt,” he’d say, then he’d swagger across the grass to the street, leaving me behind. I hate being left behind.

I never understood then. Not sure if I do now. I mean, what’d I do? We were best friends. I thought we were best friends. And then he hits puberty and I’m left sitting on the couch watching Netflix or something. Alone. It’s stupid, I know. I mean, stupid kid stuff, but I remember standing there on our front porch, watching him leave, and feeling like the last person on earth. Marooned. Alone. Like, what was I supposed to do?

What am I supposed to do?

This is stupid. You asked me what I remember and I’m telling you about my brother. And about that stupid pinball machine. It was a space one, a Star Wars rip-off. Blue. The blue ones are always space.  I don’t know. I didn’t even look at it that carefully. Just at the end, when it was...when I was looking for a place to hide.

Look. I get it. You wanna know what I was hiding from. You want to know what happened to my friends. You don’t care about pinball. Or my brother. I get it. It’s just…

Okay. The thing with the pinball machine is…well, it left me. No, not the pinball machine. It. It came and it took them: Jeremy, Allison, Amber. It took them and it left me. It left me huddling there in the trash, in the stink. That stink. I’m gonna have to…burn…those clothes, you know? Or, my mom’ll have to. I couldn’t. Not after…

Okay. You want it? Well here it is. Yeah. We were there. We broke into the dump, but what’s a teenager supposed to do around here? Go to a movie?

Go to a movie….

So we climbed the fence. I used my jacket on the wire, you know? Allie kissed me for it. Kissed me like I was some kind of saint and you know what I did? I looked down her shirt as she climbed down. She was wearing this loose V-neck, gave me a perfect shot. They were nice, you know? And she had on this white bra that sort of glowed against her tan.

I mean seriously. In ten minutes she’s gonna be dead, a pile of ash, and I’m balancing there with the light, trying to get just the right angle. Amber called me a pervert as she climbed over, but she was grinning when she said it. We’ve been friends forever, you know? Since second grade. And now she’s…

I said I’d try and look at hers too, if she had any, and she gave me this look. I tried to laugh it off, but she was really quiet the rest of the way down. I don’t think she said anything else to me the whole night. I mean, I was joking, you know? I was joking. And it was the last thing I ever said to her.

Do you think I killed them? I didn’t kill them. They’re my best friends. They were my best friends. Allie and I have been together for more than a year. And Jeremy’s been my best friend since middle school. We’re always together. Even at night, we’re texting and sneaking out. Why would I kill them? How would I kill them? How could I do that?

You’re asking me, but I don’t know what to say. You won’t belie—I don’t know how to tell you want you want to know. I’m trying to tell you what you want to know.

We just messed around, you know? Like I said. We split up for a while, messed around, but then we made a game of, picking pieces of junk we’d put in people’s lockers, in people’s houses. Just fun, you know? A game.

And then it got weird. Not the game. Amber noticed first, said it was like someone was messing with the contrast in Photoshop. The colors started…I mean, everything started to look brighter, more colorful, like the pigment in our skin, or the garbage, or the dirt had woken up, or something. Like the photons from the moon and the streetlights and our flashlights were waking up.

Allie thought it was something in the dump. A chemical, you know? Some kind of reaction. We all got a little paranoid. It was getting worse and Amber said she wanted to go home. But then Jeremy said he was feeling hot, like he had a fever. He said he needed to sit down, but then he sort of just collapsed. I rushed in to see if he was okay. I thought I’d have to fight the girls to get to him, but they were just standing there, panting and sweating. The color thing was out of control, like it was trying to break out of them. Allie fell to her knees, crying, whimpering that she was so hot. So hot.

And then we saw it. A thing. A man. I don’t know. It looked like a man, but it was completely black and white. Like, no color, and I got this idea that he was forcing his color onto the world around him, like somehow he was the reason everything looked so weird. I don’t know why.

How would I know why, but Allie grabbed my leg, gasping and sobbing, and for the first time, I realized that I wasn’t hot at all. I was fine. Amber collapsed then. Her head bounced against the gravel. I was trying to help Allie, trying to get her to stand up, to run, but she really was burning up and I couldn’t hold on.

The thing was getting closer and there was this aura. I don’t know how to describe it. Like a lens or something, all around him. Everything close to him was on fire, like the colors had finally exploded into these white, burning flames. But in his wake, there was nothing. No fire. No burning. Just the junkyard, like the fire had been a dream. It was like his very presence was a revelation, like he was showing us something. Or showing me. Allie was curled at my feet, mewling.

It was almost on us and I panicked. I ran. I left them, throwing myself beneath the pinball machine in some ridiculous attempt to hide. And then they…they started screaming. It stopped next to Allie and its fire took them. They just screamed and they wriggled and I just huddled there and watched. Somehow, I knew that when the thing moved on, when it came for me, they’d be dead. For them, the fire was no illusion, not like it was for everything else. I watched them burn. I smelled them burn.

And the whole time, it just looked at me, like there was something we shared, some secret that only we knew. I shouted at it. I threw pieces of junk at it, but it just smiled. And when it was over, when they were…when it was over, he came to me. He looked at me. Like he knew me. Like we were friends.

The pinball machine began to burn. The trash and the dirt. It all burned, but I just sat there, engulfed in a white fire I couldn’t feel, looking at the piles of ash that had been my friends.

And then it was gone. The fire was gone. My friends were dead. It had killed my friends and it had left me behind. Why did it leave me behind?

Why did it leave me behind?

The boy starts to cry. He pounds his fists on the table and shouts the question over and over. The men sit for a while, watching him. They look at each other. They rise and leave. The boy puts his head on the table, then sits back, tears and snot bubbling down his face.

He looks around the room, settling on the table. He reaches out and pricks his finger on the corner, where the metal stripping has pulled away some. Then, without warning, he savagely rakes his wrist across the exposed edge. His flesh tears away, but when he pulls his arm up, there’s no blood. Crying out wildly, he tries it again and again, pushing deeper and harder, but still no blood.

The men rush in, arms out to stop him, but the boy lunges forward and grabs the gun. Before anyone can respond, he shoves the barrel into his mouth and pulls the trigger, but nothing happens. The gun jams. He pulls the trigger again and again, his screams covering the mechanical sound of failure.

The younger man grabs the gun. The older man grabs the boy and shoves him into the table, reaching for the handcuffs on his belt. There’s a kind of vibrance to the color of the boy’s hands as the older man reaches in. The open, bloodless wound is bright, somehow defying the desaturated fluorescence of the light. The boy stops fighting for a second, then starts in again with a fury, shouting and wrestling with the older man and the restraints.

The younger man staggers a little, says he feels feverish, then slumps against the one-way mirror, then collapses. Suddenly, people are screaming in the room beyond. The older man turns, leaning roughly on the table. He’s sweating heavily, groping down for his partner’s gun. The boy stumbles to the corner and slides to the floor.

He closes his eyes. He hears the older man bellow, hears the gun report three times, in spite of its apparent malfunction before. He hears screaming and burning and when he finally opens his eyes, he sees the man there, colorless and robed in white fire.

It looks at him like they share a secret, like they’re friends, and then it is gone and the boy is left alone, sobbing between cairns of ash that had once been men.