5. Jacklyn Has Birthday Drinks.
To read the story so far, visit the Table of Contents.
Apt. 8L
Jacklyn felt the mouthsweats coming on inside her cheeks.
She woozily lifted her head off the thin wooden kitchen table that she’d found a while back on the street; she’d cashed in a few months’ worth of flirting with Zed the Doorman to help her lug it upstairs. She closed her laptop, still playing that Snowden documentary she’d passed out in front of, and hustled into the kitchen. She grabbed a can of beer from the fridge and ran into the bathroom.
A moment later, she was kneeling on the pink rug, facing her toilet bowl. She set the ice cold can on the floor and cracked it. As the spritzing sound of the opening tab reverberated against the tiled walls, she unleashed a violent puke into the bowl.
She squinted through her tear-filled eyes at the disgorge—by that point in the night, it was mostly a faint amber liquid. The rougher stuff from the birthday meal she’d made for herself—same as every year, spaghetti and meatballs—had thankfully exited a few hurls previous.
One more, maybe two, and that’d close the books on another year for Jacklyn, her 40th trip around.
For the past decade-plus, as friends became acquaintances and family gatherings spun off into their own satellite affairs, Jacklyn’s birthday ritual had pared down to this. Turn off her phone, log out of Facebook—recently, she’d taken to giving her password to a friend, who’d reset it for the night—and sit quietly with her own thoughts, perhaps a book or a movie. Oh yeah, and either a gallon of wine or a 12-pack of beer or a fifth of vodka or whiskey, depending on that year’s whims.
She flushed the toilet and washed out the bile taste with a long swig from the full can. She breathed in deeply through her nose, a meditative reset, then slowly rose to stand. She looked at herself in the mirror, flanked by the pair of skeletons that hung on the wall, decorations for the holiday she shared her birthday with. She allowed herself a moment of self-pity before downing another swig.
Then Jacklyn noticed something strange on the wall beside the mirror. A little divot.
She pushed the mirror aside slightly so it hung askew on its nail, and found that there was a faint engraving behind it. A small, hard-carved spiral.
“Ding, dong,” interrupted a woman’s soft voice.
It was the apartment’s front doorbell, programmable to 45 different tones. It came with the place, and it was obnoxious as hell.
She let the mirror settle back into its place on the wall and looked at her watch. It was 10:27, too late for trick-or-treaters, according to the email on the listserv of The Palmer Arms. It had been a fierce debate among the two classes of occupants: those with kids, those without. Jacklyn was in the latter camp, but she didn’t really give a shit. Eventually it had been decided that trick-or-treating would stop abruptly at 8 p.m. Whatever.
Jacklyn twisted on the faucet and sucked down water straight from the spigot, sipped from a tiny bottle of mouthwash, and spit it all back out before leaving the bathroom. She grabbed a werewolf mask that she’d set on top of her shoe cubby for the evening’s fun and put it on before pulling open her door.
“Roar!” she screamed to the kids.
But no one was there.
She wobbled past her apartment’s threshold. Through the mask’s eyeholes, she examined the hallway in a sweeping arc from left to right. There was only a single torn piece of plastic in the middle of the bright red carpeting at the end of the hall.
“Fuckers,” she said, taking off her mask.
The plastic was another indication of the disgusting tenants that lived in these apartments. They’d track mud into the hallways, or worse, the building’s common spaces. They’d leave their trash scattered, drawing rats and cockroaches. Now and then, she’d come across evidence that these people actually walked their dogs in the hallways, leaving actual dog dumps spiraled on the carpet! Forget vampires and werewolves, these were our world’s true monsters.
She walked to collect the plastic to do her neighborly civic duty. Halfway there, as she heard her front door slam shut behind her, she remembered that she’d didn’t have her keys. She ran back and twisted the knob, hoping that she’d disengaged the door’s auto-lock, but knew it was wishful thinking. She was locked out.
“Fuck,” she said.
Jacklyn pressed her forehead against the door and counted. This would be the fifth time that she’d pulled this idiotic boner since moving into The Palmer Arms last summer. She’d needed a new experience, and there were jobs in her field here in the city, and the rent was getting bad everywhere else, so why not try. This “converted luxury high rise in a historic space” came with a workout room, outdoor movies next to the rooftop cocktail bar, a laundry room, group activities. She’d hoped she’d be able to meet some new people.
But in the year since, the cocktail bar stayed empty, the outdoor movie schedule had lapsed to once every few months, and there were no real group activities to speak of. She had come to accept this. Of course—who wants to dick around with their neighbors?
It didn’t help matters that the building always seemed empty. Of the twenty or so units on her floor, she only knew for sure that four of them were occupied. The others sat in cold silence.
She hated it here. She couldn’t wait to get out as soon as her two-year lease was over.
Jacklyn rocked her forehead across the door, as if rolling dough with a pin, and closed her eyes. Her wooziness was incredible. The mouthsweats soon returned. She opened her eyes to relieve her dizziness. Eye-level to the peephole, she saw the blur of her apartment.
A figure walked past on the other side.
She pulled back her head and made a meek noise of fear, dropping her mask to the ground. She tried to unblur her vision before returning to the peephole. The figure was gone.
Something rapped on the door. She felt the metal vibrate against her forehead.
She backed away as the shadow returned in the peephole.
She heard the lock disengage and the door to her apartment opened.
An old woman was on the other side. Deep brown skin, a sharp nose, three pronounced wrinkles running across her sweat-drenched forehead, and hair pulled tightly back into a ponytail. “Hello, doctor,” she said, and gestured for Jacklyn to come back inside.
“Show me,” came a voice.
It was deep and booming, resonating around Jacklyn, and through her as well, almost like she was underwater. It throbbed against her skull and tickled the insides of her eardrums.
“This way,” said the old woman, and turned into the room.
Everything had changed.
White track ceiling lighting was now replaced by scattered lamps with dim bulbs. The kitchen area was now a drab bathroom. A wooden desk where Jacklyn’s bed had been. Even the geometry of the space had changed. It was smaller, more cramped.
She followed the old woman around the corner and past the closet, where a bed sat in an iron frame.
Atop the bed was a white sheet that seemed to squirm from within. From it protruded a pair of brown feet, their toes curling in agony. A wet cloth obscured the face.
The old woman went to the bed and slowly lifted back the covers. The woman underneath was young, thin, her flesh coated in a sheen of sweat. She thrashed her legs back and forth. The motion tore aside the bedsheets, revealing to Jacklyn the woman’s full, distended belly.
“How far along?” the disembodied doctor’s voice said, now somewhere in front of Jacklyn.
“We think seven months,” the old woman said.
“What’s her name?”
“Alice.”
“Okay, Alice,” the voice said to the woman in bed. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”
Held by some invisible force, the wet cloth was lifted from Alice’s face, revealing blotchy skin, pursed lips, fluttering eyes that searched the room in pain and confusion.
“We’re going to try to help you out here,” the doctor’s voice said.
The pregnant woman’s arm raised. Jacklyn watched a vein rise, then made out a small crease that became a puncture wound. The arm slowly dropped back down onto the bed, and the writhing slowed.
Jacklyn walked toward the bed to get a better look. The pregnant woman’s eyes steadied into a blissful gaze. They now tracked Jacklyn as she came closer.
“Let’s begin,” the doctor’s voice said.
The metallic clack of a briefcase lock opening at the foot of the bed. The sheet yanked up with a flutter. Jacklyn looked into Alice’s dark eyes, which stared back with urgency, trying to say something.
The old woman held her down, so Jacklyn bent forward, but still couldn’t make out whatever the young expectant mother whispered over the room’s growing commotion. So, they simply stared at one another—speaking silent mysteries—for a period of time that seemed both limitless and gone in an instant.
Then, Jacklyn realized that the new child had been born. Its cries echoed through the room, and the young mother broke eye contact with Jacklyn to greet her new child.
Jacklyn woke up sometime the next morning, her face pressed against the carpet in the corner of her living room. She was now officially forty years old and incredibly hungover.
Later, when she left her apartment and found her werewolf mask still in the hallway, she simply picked it up, tossed it on the bed, and chose not to think about how she’d gotten back inside her locked apartment.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
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