Chaos Agent

Her drivers license was found in the toilet of the Wendy’s she stopped at a couple hours ago.  She knew it was missing when the bar tender asked to see it.  Of course, she couldn’t be trusted with it or anything else important to this world.  He let her drink a beer anyways, noticing how grizzled the woman’s forehead was with lines so deep she must have been thinking too hard for at least thirty five years. She handed him her car keys and wallet. “Can you keep them in a safe place?”

The bartender stared at her and complied. She slammed the beer and felt how chapped her lips were. She wet them with the foam of her beer and rubbed them around while remembering she had thrown her chapstick out the window once she hit Albuquerque. She was going to meet her dying mother the same way she came into this world with nothing. Hopefully, her car would get her there. She had a habit of throwing her car keys in the trash.

Mindlessly, the most important things were deliberately lost. If she wasn’t completely conscious, her credit cards would be cut and birth certificate set ablaze. She spent her entire life working on getting rid of this impulse to no end. The only thing safe were the clothes on her back and the humans she could live inside the gaze of. The ones oblivious to her little issue. She scanned the bar for anyone worth the shelter. Some biker men and elderly truck drivers stared ahead at the brown liquor in their glasses as though inside it was a memory playing like a movie. She saw herself smashing them on the ground, one by one, each glass shattering, but took a shallow breath instead.

Where did it come from? This desire to destroy whats practical felt like some fight her soul would never let her give up.  “Intermittent Explosive Disorder” is how it was categorized, but she never liked that term. It didn’t fit. She felt no charge from throwing things out or cutting up credit cards or touching the painting at the museum. It was inertia, habit. Impersonal and mindless. Whatever it was inside her that made her do it, had no agenda besides chaos . The chaos came so naturally to her as though it was just the way she laughed. Everything necessary was to be let go of. Her mind made her believe that seeing her mother before death took her would somehow cure this affliction. The chaos agent would resign out of some biological need for survival.

She poured half the beer out on the bar and before the bartender could see, grabbed her wallet and keys and left. On her way to her car, the dumpster beside the joint called to her. She opened the lid and lifted her purse to drop it inside. At the bottom of it was a raccoon sucking the blood from a maxi pad. The raccoon hissed and showed its bloody teeth. It’s reflective eyes startled her out of her fix. She dropped the lid back down and hugged her purse close to her chest and hurried into her car.

The raccoon’s bitter eyes traveled her mind to a date she had years back with a man who would growl at her in bed. She could never decide if she liked it or not. The growling seemed to fall short of something else. If you growl why don’t you bark? Where are your claws? There was no gimmick besides the growl which made her smile politely and look away from his eyes. He didn’t seem to enjoy it either. He needed to do it in order to have sex, but it was not a pleasurable additive for either parties. Just a means to an end. So she passively smirked, while the man growled like a vague storybook beast. Before he woke up, she erased her number from his phone and left the house. She made sure to leave his front door wide open. The chaos in her insisted.

Her moms breathing was strained as though her throat was comprised of rusted over pipes that blew ancient dirt up and down into her lungs. Her apartment at the old folks home was sterile and cheerful, ordered and clean. The woman saw the emergency necklace around her moms neck. She saw the plastic blinds shielding her mom the from the sun and the decorative sign that reminded her mom to “Laugh and Live”. She saw the towel on her chest in case she drooled. Her moms eyes rested on her wordlessly. The impulse to rip the necklace off of her came and went fast. The urge to yank out her IV also passed. She sat on her bed with her hands on her moms feet tucked tightly under the blue sheets. She wondered why dying people were given such cheap blankets.