Mercy

I’m alone and dreaming, but of course I don’t realize this right away. Everything about what I see, what I smell, what I hear, seems so real that my mind overlooks the fact that I’ve never been to Wisconsin before in my entire life. I only know I’m in Wisconsin because Richie drives past a sign welcoming us to the dairy state. My brother and Adrienne have been here before, and they’re betting on how long it’ll take before we come across a pasture with nothing but cows. Adrienne is convinced there are no farms around for miles, but Rich is steadfast in his wager of less than fifteen seconds. I’m counting aloud as Richie’s truck flies along the interstate. Right as the number twelve escapes my lips we see a pasture off to our left. It’s certainly full of cows. My brother and I howl with laughter and high-five each other as Adrienne’s bottom lip curls into a pout, and her exaggerated frustration only causes us to laugh harder.

No fair! You two know things before I do! she whines.

Richie rolls his eyes at her and affectionately nudges me in the ribs as he begins to ease his truck onto the off-ramp. I ain’t the one who started this, babydoll. You seemed so damn sure o’ yourself ‘cause you ‘n’ your folks drive on through here twice a year, but o’ course you’re forgettin’ somethin’, he explains while he pulls the truck into a moderately busy gas station.

Oh yeah? What am I forgetting? she presses.

You’re always sound ‘sleep by the time your daddy’s car rolls through this here town, Richie elaborates with a wink. I giggle, knowing exactly how my brother had received this information. He is more intuitive than the average person, like me, but not quite as gifted. He doesn’t see ghosts, and he sure as hell doesn’t get visions from the future, but he’s damn good at plucking things from other people’s minds even when he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. I’m fairly certain he’s convinced himself that the nonverbal information he receives is what he must have remembered from previous conversations with the ones whose brains he picks, and that’s ok. I’ll let him assume we both just have eerie, incredibly accurate memories. It sure as hell beats knowing you’re a freak.

Adrienne continues to pout in her defeat as Richie and I jump out of the truck. He begins to pump gas, but I feel the need to wander into the gas station. He hollers out, throws a quarter at me, and orders me to buy my girl something sweet. He doesn’t want his nephew coming out all tiny and retarded because I didn’t feed his momma enough, so with an annoyed roll of the eyes and a theatrical sigh, I agree to buy her something. A chocolate bar, perhaps. I peek back into to truck to see if Adrienne saw Richie chuck the quarter at me, and I see a small smile lighting her previously darkened features. She definitely saw that.

I smirk to myself, momentarily pleased with how such a simple task is going to brighten Adrienne’s day, but a shout from behind the building quickly averts my attention. Curious, I poke my head around the corner to see who had made such a disturbing cry. What my eyes land upon is enough to make me want to puke. A little girl with copper hair and tearful blue eyes is being jerked around by a man who I want to believe is her father, but with a pang I realize he’s not. He’s only pretending they’re related so he won’t get caught. When he slaps the girl, a muddy red ribbon is knocked out of her hair and floats ominously to the ground. He tries to paw at her dress, but she wriggles far enough away from him to keep the fabric from being torn from her scrawny body.

Stop moving, Freak! he growls, rounding on the poor girl.

That’s…not…my…name, she wails in between sobs. The man pulls his hand up to slap her again, but consciousness drags me away from the scene.

In seconds, everything but a pair of frightened blue eyes and a blood-red ribbon are wiped from my clean from my memory. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I don’t know any little girls called Freak, and I’m nowhere near Beloit, Wisconsin. Her haunting stare and her foreboding choice in hair accessories are both put on a back burner in my mind as a familiar face ducks casually into my hospital room. My jaw drops in an instant.

“Richie? I thought you couldn’t stand bein’ in hospitals,” I gasp. Rich merely shrugs.

“Nah, I ain’t too scared to come visit you, kid. I was lookin’ for somethin’,” he explains, evidently proud of whatever it was that kept him from his rightful place at my bedside.

“What possibly coulda taken two days-”
“Four.”
“Four days to find?”
“First, a motel room. Then…these.”

Richie sheepishly holds a box out to me and looks away almost as if he’s worried I’ll reject his gift. One look at the label on the box tells me at once that he has no need to feel ashamed. I already love his gift more than he’ll ever know, and I haven’t even opened it yet. With greedy, impatient fingers I peel open the cardboard and gaze upon the most beautiful, newest pair of shoes I’ve ever seen in my entire life. As the youngest of four boys, I never had the opportunity to own a pair of brand new sneakers because my mother saved everything my brothers grew out of. I was doomed to wear hand-me-down everything due to my mother’s inability to afford nice things for all of us. Only Richie was lucky enough to receive clothes and shoes from our mother that hadn’t been previously worn, but the rest of us younger kids got the shit end of the stick. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever worn a pair of pants that didn’t have holes in them or a pair of shoes that weren’t falling apart.

With my own brand new pair of black Chuck Taylors sitting in a box on my lap, I nearly cried. These aren’t just a mass of canvas and rubber. They’re a symbol of my emancipation from Georgia.

Unfortunately, my feet are too fragile to break these bad boys in properly. The doc told me that I need to stay off of them for at least a week, and if I don’t comply, the wounds won’t heal properly. They’ll end up an even bloodier mess than before. I don’t care, though. I honestly won’t pop any stitches just by putting my new shoes on. It’s not like I intend to walk anytime soon.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

Richie notices the tears threatening to fall from my eyes and is immediately concerned. He grabs me by the shoulder and demands, “Hey, you ok? You need me to call one o’ them nurses in for you?”

“Nope, I’m fine,” I assure him, fingers tracing along the soles of my newfound freedom.

Rich nods and is silent for a moment before muttering, “I figured you’d need ‘em ‘cause you ran right out o’ your old ones when you was tryin’ to get out o’ the bar. I don’t want your feet gettin’ all bloody or nothin’ this time.”

“Richie, they’re perfect. They must’ve been real expensive, though.”

My brother bites his lip and allows for his gaze to drop to the floor. He’s embarrassed again. He doesn’t want to admit to me how much my present set him back.

“Don’ worry ‘bout it,” he mutters. “You needed these.”

An awkward silence engulfs us, and I feel the weight of an unspoken issue sinking into me, one that would be far more expensive than a pair of Chuck Taylors. It presses down on my stomach, my chest, my throat, and I’m suddenly finding it impossible to breathe. I choke. I splutter. I cough a few times, but those too became lodged in my throat as my lungs persist in their maddening spasm. I’m having a panic attack, but it’s far worse than any I’ve ever sustained. Fuck, I don’t even know why I’m panicking.

Richie understands at once what my flushed cheeks and pathetic gasps mean, and he swiftly springs into action despite how the machines have already detected my skyrocketing heart rate and are sounding their alarms. He sits beside me on the bed and pulls my body into a sitting position, bracing my chest with one arm and thwacking me on the back with the other. The arm across my chest is trembling so badly that I wonder how he’s managing to hold me up, and the fear seeping out through his every hair follicle and pore soaks into my helpless body as if I’m nothing more than a sponge for everyone else’s feelings. Forget my own. I’m a fucking Petri dish of emotions for both the living and the dead, and the chemist behind this sickening experiment is foaming at the mouth in anticipation of an adverse reaction. He’ll never be satisfied until I explode into thick, gory bits of Billie-goo.

At that point, saving me from everyone else will be out of the question. Then again, the mad chemist never had much interest in my wellbeing in the first place. Why else would he have made me this way?

“Breathe, dammit!” Richie grunts. He’s beyond terrified. If he was hesitant to be in a hospital before, he sure as fuck will never set foot in one after this ordeal is over. “Breathe ‘fore the nurses get ‘ere!”

I cough once and breathe in, expecting my airways to still be constricted, but I nearly choke on my own tongue as I take one massive gulp of air. Sweat and tears pour down my face and neck, and I collapse against my brother’s body. He pulls me close and allows for me to sob into his shirt while my body takes a stab at regaining all the oxygen I lost by panting erratically. The machines I’m hooked up to continue to whir in alarm as out of control as my heart rate.

I’m nearly calm by the time a nurse comes in to check on me.

“What happened here?” she questions, checking my vitals and pressing a button on one of the machines to shut off the alarm.

“Panic attack,” Richie grunts, eyeing the nurse warily, “but he’s ok now.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” the nurse replies, presuming she will find something else wrong with me in her fruitless search. She is sorely mistaken. She informs Richie and me to holler if we need her, and with her precious clipboard of medical notes, she leaves the room.

I don’t say a word for a second or two, but a question nibbling at my brain doesn’t keep me quiet for long.

“What the hell’re you so ‘fraid of?”

Richie stares at me, one eyebrow cocked, and blurts, “I was gonna ask you the same damn thing.”

“You first.”

After a drawn out sigh, my brother confesses, “I cain’t afford this hospital bill, B-Joe. We gotta split tonight while the docs and nurses ain’t lookin’.”