Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

word because they’re all dead. He won’t get his mouth washed out with soap or have to go sit on the couch and not be able to use his iPad because of using that word, either.

            Munster is twelve. He’s four years older than me, and he has a funny nose that looks like a Persian kitten’s sort of. It’s squished in at the bottom. I like cats. He has scraggly hair, too, and it’s blonde. It’s scraggly because he can’t go to a hair cutter anymore, and I told him I couldn’t do it because I’ve never cut anyone’s hair, and that if I tried to on his I’d probably ruin it. Munster told me he didn’t care. It could grow down to his you-know-what. He’s taller than me.

            We waited outside the mini-mart for a long time, and finally the rain stopped.

            “Can we go, Munster? Please?”

            He was looking out at the gas pumps where a bunch of cars stood, thinking again I knew. But he answered me.

            “Sure. Follow me.”

            He jumped off the curb into a puddle of water and walked over to one of the cars where there wasn’t a dead body inside or lying right next to it. I ran after him and tried not to step in any of the puddles, so I zigzagged. He opened the door and got in, but he didn’t close the door. One whole side of the car had a big orange flame on it that somebody had painted, and I think that’s why he went to that car. The people that owned it were probably the ones lying dead on the floor back in the store.

            “You can’t drive this car,” I said to him when I got there.

            “Why not?” he answered.

“Because you’re not old enough and you don’t know how. And you don’t have a license.”

            He looked out at me and laughed. He raised his right hand and jingled the keys.

            “This here’s the only license I need.” He was talking about the keys.

            I didn’t say anything. I still keep thinking there are things we can’t do because if we do them we’ll get in trouble. But I didn’t want to get in if he got the flame-car started. If I did we might crash into a pole or something out on the street.

            The flame-car started right up. He pulled the door shut and looked out at me smiling. I ran around the back end and opened the door on the other side. There was a big orange flame on my side, too. After I’d got in I prayed to God to protect us. I don’t like to be in pain. I had a broken arm three years ago when I fell off a swing at the park, and it hurt. If we ran into a pole I imagined having two broken arms and no doctor to fix them or give me pills to make the pain go away. That’s why I prayed. But if we got killed somehow, like if he ran off the side of the bridge into the river, then there wouldn’t be a single person left for God to listen to, and it only made sense that God wouldn’t want that.

            I put my seat belt on and crossed my legs on the seat. If we ran into something I knew my legs wouldn’t get snapped in two when the engine came through the front.

            “Are you sure you can drive, Munster?” I asked him. He was looking down at the gear thing. He had his right hand on it, and his thumb on the lock button of the handle. His legs were stretched out and his foot just barely made it to the gas pedal.

            “Yeah. I used to watch my dad do it all the time.”

            He squirmed around, stretching his chest and neck up so that his eyes could look over the steering wheel.

“I wish I was fourteen. I can barely see over the damn wheel…Hey, look in the backseat and see if there’s a pillow or a box or somethin’ I can put under my butt.”

            “Quit cussing.”

            I took off my seatbelt and looked in the back. There was a green jacket, some crumpled up paper bags, and a whole bunch of beer bottles, but there wasn’t anything that Munster could use to make him taller. That’s when it hit me that back in the store there must be something. I turned around really quick and opened the door again, and then I jumped out and ran across the wet parking lot.

            “Where you goin’?” he shouted. But I didn’t answer.

            I didn’t zigzag this time. I ran right through a puddle of water and my feet got wet, but I didn’t care because if I could find a pillow or a box or something not too tall for Munster, I wouldn’t have to walk anywhere else. I might get killed if he crashed, but I wouldn’t have to walk, and so it wouldn’t matter if my feet were all wet.

            I stopped inside the door and looked up and down the aisle where we got the candy bars, but there was nothing there but more candy bars and things like that. So I ran over to the counter where the man who ran the store was lying, and he was still there. There were little boxes and lots of papers on the shelves behind it, but no pillow or anything tall enough for Munster, so I hopped over the man and went to a big heavy steel door that wasn’t almost closed, and I opened it wider. It was very dark inside because there were no windows and the lights didn’t work anymore because—well, I wasn’t sure why all the electricity that went to the lights was gone. It was just dark.

            I saw a bunch of folded up clothes on a shelf a little ways in, though, and I knew they would work. They were white and about the same height as a big pillow. I pushed the door open all the way and ran to the shelf where I started pulling them out, and I shouldn’t have pushed the door so hard because it bounced off something behind it and then it swung shut and I heard the click, and it got very dark. That scared me. The door clicking shut, and especially the dark.

            There wasn’t a single sound at first. It was quiet. I walked very carefully back to where I thought the door was and hoped I wouldn’t trip on something, but then I thought that was silly because I hadn’t tripped on anything when I first came in, and that was only a few seconds ago.

            That’s when I heard a grown-up’s voice, and then I was very scared, more scared than I ever remember being before. It sounded like whoever said, “Hey” was really close, right on the other side of the tall shelves I had just been at. I wondered if he’d come out, and if he did, if he’d catch me and eat me or just beat me with a pipe or stab me or something horrible.

            I saw that on TV once when Daddy didn’t know I was in the room and the TV was on. That was before him and Momma died. He was watching a movie and a monster was eating all the people on a spaceship. It jumped out from behind things and had a little mouth with teeth that came out of its big mouth with bigger teeth. The people screamed and cried. I watched the little mouth come out at the people, like it was on a stick, but then you couldn’t see anymore, but you could hear the people scream.

            I wasn’t thinking that in the dark room, but I was thinking that the man behind the big shelf had a mouth like the monster’s. That’s all.           

            I found the door and I opened it very quickly because I was very scared. I didn’t want him to catch me, and so I ran and jumped over the man on the floor and the flies and almost slipped, but I didn’t. Just my heel a little. I ran outside, right through the water puddles again, but I didn’t care. I knew he was right behind me.

TWO

            Munster was still in the flame-car, but he was in the backseat, now, and he was looking through all the trash and bottles and the jacket I think.

“Munster! Munster!” I said very loud when I got there. I threw the white clothes into the front and didn’t know whether to jump in or keep running, so I stopped, and he poked his head over the seat. His eyes were very big and wide open. I didn’t wait for him to say anything because the monster man might be right behind me and he’d get both of us if we didn’t hurry and run off.

“Hurry and get out! There’s someone in there and he might kill us!”

I saw Munster’s eyes look over at the store where I was just at with the dead bodies in it, and the one that wasn’t dead, but he didn’t look scared, just surprised. Munster, I mean.

“What’s the matter?” he asked me.

“There’s someone IN there.”

He looked over at the store again, but I know he didn’t see anyone, because if he had his eyes would have been big again, but they weren’t. And that meant that whoever was in there was still in there or else Munster would have screamed just like me.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked me, and he sounded a little mad. Well, maybe not mad. Just…um, what is that word? He used it once in Scrabble, but I can’t remember it now. I was still scared, but Munster wasn’t.

“I don’t see nobody,” he said. That’s when I turned around, and he was right. There wasn’t anyone but us.

“I heard him, Munster. I’m not lying. He’s in the back of the store. We have to go!”

“You’re crazy, Amelia. There ain’t nobody but you and me alive anymore.” He was climbing back over the seat, and I was jumping around like a bug that landed in a frying pan, waving my hands and I was shaking my head no.

“I’m not crazy, Munster. I heard him.”

I wasn’t going to cry anymore, even if he told me a hundred times I was crazy. I wasn’t, and I knew he’d find out soon enough because he got out of the Flame Car and started walking across the parking lot through the puddles of water.

“No, Munster! Don’t go in there!”

He kept walking, though, and I saw him pull a gun out of the waistband of his jeans. It was the one he said he’d found. It wasn’t a big one like the ones Daddy had. Those were called rifles. Munster’s was like the ones the police shot people with on TV.

I was scared for him. I didn’t know what would happen and I wanted to run again. I wished my daddy was still alive and was there to go in instead. I stood there and watched until he