The Diner

I was sixteen when I swallowed my first soul.

Well, fifteen turning sixteen if you want me to be precise, and it seems like you probably do. It was my birthday when it happened, but I was born very late at night, almost midnight, and all this happened earlier, at the party, just before dinner, so I wasn’t quite sixteen yet. We always had dinner at five-thirty when I was growing up. I guess it must have been around then. My dad was out back at the grill, cussing and yelling because my cousin Billy had gone inside for a beer and left the burgers to burn. My mom, and my dumb kid sister, and my grandma had all gone out too, to try and calm him down.

I was inside the house, sulking, because I had to wear this horrible dress. It was big and twirly — pink tulle, with a satin bow round the back. I thought it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen when I first saw it at the department store over on Fifth. I’d begged for it for months and months, but that had been when I was fifteen. Once it was my birthday, BAM, I felt too old for it. I thought it was ugly, I didn’t want to wear it, but my mom wouldn’t let me take it off, saying how it was too expensive for me to be a brat about it.

We had this fish tank at the end of the hall, across from the stairs. It was one of those big, fifty gallon ones stocked with goldfish and a deep sea diver that spit out bubbles. They were my sister’s fish and she treated them more like her brothers and sisters than me. Maybe I should have been jealous of them, of how easily they won her affection, but I liked my sister about as much she liked me so I just let myself enjoy them. I was standing by the tank that night, watching them while I waited for the yelling to stop outside. Just watching, until one of them jumped right up out over the lip of it and onto the carpet. I know I should have done something. I know. I should have scooped it up in my hands, or in that little net my sister used to use to get the fish out and put them in a bucket when she had to clean the tank, but I didn’t. I froze up and all I could do was watch as it flopped around, spreading its damp over the shag.

You have to understand it was an accident, that first time. I didn’t mean to do it, crouched over that little fish, breathing, just breathing, as the soul separated and got sucked up into my mouth.

I couldn’t eat for a week after that, not that I didn’t try. I mean it was my birthday dinner, and my dad finally did cook up the leftover hamburger meat from in the fridge to eat, but I couldn’t keep it down. I started having these episodes, too — what I guess you might call a panic attack today, although that wasn’t it. I would be doing something, anything really, and then out of the blue I would feel like I couldn’t breathe. And my mouth would open and shut like it was out of my control, and my eyes would roll back in my head and my body would feel strange and rigid and I would spasm once or twice. And then I would be fine again. It scared the hell outta my mom. It scared me too, but it was also exciting since it was something new, something I’d never felt before, and I decided I liked the fact that it was new more than I was terrified of it.

By the end, it had gotten kind of annoying, actually. My sister had noticed the fish, at the very end of the party, and she cried about it every day while I was getting those episodes. I think, subconsciously maybe, she sorta knew what had happened and it would upset her whenever I started gulping and spasming, just like that stupid fish. Not that she felt sorry for me, but whatever.

I didn’t swallow another soul until a few years later. There were probably opportunities, but I hadn’t —

Three does sound about right. I guess you’re allowed to ask questions but not me?

Alright, whatever you say. You’re the boss.

So, I didn’t swallow another soul until three years later. This time it was the neighbor’s dog. I say neighbor, but Mr. Heiss — who we all called Old Man Mower — lived five houses up the street from us and he didn’t have much by way of neighborly good will. He was the sort of old guy that we saw every day from when the grass started growing in spring to when it turned yellow and died in the fall, but not at all the rest of the year.

He was fastidious about just two things: his yard and his dog. It was one of those little yapper dogs and none of us ever thought it much suited him. I think it had been his wife’s dog, or maybe his sister’s, or maybe it showed up on his front porch one day and he’d decided it would be more work to take it the pound than to just keep it. Whatever the case, he doted on it half the time and the other half the time he fussed over it being out in the yard. There were rules, all sorts of rules, about where the dog got to do its business and when. I’m pretty sure he rotated it around the yard, kept a grid in his head to keep the amount of piss per square foot below the threshold where those yellow grass spots start to show up. You know what I mean? Sorry, I’m sure that you do. You seem like you know all kinds of things about, well, all kinds of things.

It was summer when it happened. I was home from college, and it was right around when I was deciding if I wanted to go back for a second year or not, so I was constantly going out for long walks around the neighborhood. I’d make these pro and con lists in my head, rattling off what I thought was good and what I thought was shit, and even though the shit column always seemed to end up longer, I’d put the decision off for tomorrow. See, it was the same situation as that dress I’d gotten for my sixteenth birthday; when my mom caught wind of what I was thinking, she wouldn’t let a day go by without bringing up the loans and the extra shifts at the factory and the bottle recycling. Even when I accepted that I didn’t want to go back, I knew my family sure as hell didn’t want me around, not when they’d already drained a couple thousand to get me out. Which left me feeling awful sorry for myself and for having people who wanted a certain kind of future for me, and left me with nothing to do but trudge around the block with blisters peeling on my heels and all the skin peeling off my nose.

It was on one of those walks that I noticed Old Man Mower’s yapper dog sort of bobbing around and stumbling a bit. I could tell right away that something was wrong with it so I quit walking and watched it for a few minutes. Old Man Mower was known to yell at anybody he deemed suspicious, no matter how old you were, and I’d been getting screamed at enough at home that I kept my distance at first, watching from the other side of the street. After two or three minutes, not long at all, it sort of laid down, or fell over, right at the edge of the grass and the sidewalk, and I could see a stream of dark liquid spreading over the concrete. Spreading like roots from that dog. It might have been beautiful if it wasn’t so disgusting.

I was halfway across the street, stepping over a big pothole, when I felt something come over me, something almost like a flinch — like my whole body tensed up for a second and remembered the fish and remembered the cold and the panic and the strangeness of it all… You know, you and I must be a lot alike. Both friends to those who have walked in the shadow. It’s heavy on us. I can see it even now, curdling on your shoulders.

I don’t think I knew what it felt like back then, but I must’ve felt something because I kneeled right down and let that yapper dog’s soul leap right up to my lips. I almost choked on it, it slid down my throat so fast. And once it was swishing around in my belly it was like nothing else mattered. I walked home and told my mom I was never going back to school, but I wasn’t staying there either. She got this cold look in her eye, real cold, the sort of look that would have froze me in my tracks any other day before that one. But I had that dog’s soul burning up inside of me, so when she asked me what I was going to do I looked at her straight on and said I was going to eat.

I said, ‘Mama I love you, but I’ve been so hungry all my life. I’ve got to go and eat now, and you can’t stop me.’ What’d she say? Oh, you’ll laugh at this, the southern belle in her. She said, ‘Bless your heart, darling,’ and took a bottle of Johnnie Walker with her out to the porch.

I guess that probably was the start of her drinking. I didn’t know it then, though, you have to believe me. I thought everything was fine, otherwise I would have been back to see her before the drink took her all the way. I was there for that part, the end. It’s different, when you know the person. You feel it more. But that’s skipping ahead, and I get a feeling you want me to tell it slow, in the right order and all.

After I told my mom I was leaving I did leave, but I didn’t do it with much of a plan except G-O. Get outta… In those first few weeks, I was squatting half the time and living in my car the other half. It was a beat up thing that really had no business running, with parts from about a dozen different old junkers smashed together. One of the other squatters at the abandoned rail yard used to call it my zombie car, which was pretty accurate because it would die, all the time, but it never seemed to die for good.

It wasn’t all that long after I got the dog out of my system that I swallowed my next one. Two, actually — this young couple who’d gotten in a car wreck. I can’t remember what had happened exactly, if I’d gotten into some argument with another of the squatters or with the policeman who came by on his beat, but either way I’d taken off in my zombie car to cool down. I was taking the turns fast, kicking up dust — you know how country roads are. Everyone drives ‘em fast, especially around the corners, and there’s not much in the way of guardrails except for where some other poor fool has gone off the road before, and you see those spots as more of a challenge or a testament to your own driving expertise than anything else. That’s why I didn’t notice the smoke until I was nearly on top of it. I had to slam on the brakes, hard — I mean, it was right there. The front half of their car was all smashed in, glass everywhere. And the smoke — it was a bad one. Real bad.

I’d hopped out of the zombie car and gone running to see if they were okay, didn’t know they’d already gone. Looking wasn’t enough either, so I was trying to pull them out, trying to get a response, anything.

Didn’t have a phone, no. I couldn’t call anyone, couldn’t do anything. You have to believe me. If I’d known what those two were like, I might never have got closer, close enough to — well, don’t you know what I mean?

You’re gonna make me say it, aren’t you?

Well. It’s like — it’s like a scrape. Or cutting a string with real sharp scissors. I reached in them — not with my hands, but with my… thoughts, I guess you could say. I don’t know, I’ve never had to explain all this before. I’m sorry I don’t have all the words in order. This must be driving you crazy…

Well, anyway, they sort of resisted me a little bit, before they went down. And this time, I could feel things, emotions and things like that, which is how I know what happened to them. They weren’t even scared, in the end, but I sort of was. I was scared feeling it and seeing it, in my mind, because I was also seeing them after, seeing them all bloody and slumped over. And that taste… You know the one. Like tomato skins and iron — not pleasant, particularly, but alive. Definitely alive. It’s a sticky flavor, the kind that gets all up behind your teeth and hangs onto your tongue no matter how many times you swallow cool water.

I nearly died myself, during that long month where all I could taste was tomato skins and iron. I picked fights with everyone, threw things from the smashed out windows of the upper stories at the rail yard. Fell through the floor, not once but twice, the rotted wood giving way beneath me. Thank God I thought leather was cool then — or maybe that was from them? Huh. I never thought about it that way until just now. It doesn’t matter, I guess, whether it was them or me. Maybe I was just outta my mind a little back then too, and with those two burning up in me I thought it was never gonna pass.

But it did. One day I woke up clean as can be. Not a speck of them left, not even at the back of my throat. I know I said maybe I wouldn’t have gone to them if I’d known what it would be like, but since I couldn’t undo it, I kinda felt like I had to embrace it. Like, if I could swallow the souls of those two, then I could keep anyone down, and all of a sudden my life felt like it had purpose. Because beneath all that rage, and that sorta ‘fuck everyone and anyone’ attitude, those two might not have been scared, but they sure were lonely.

Drunk on all this newfound meaning, I tried being good, so I looked for loneliness. I drove halfway across the country to go to nursing school. It was the only program that would take me. I hated everyone there, hated the doctors most of all. They were all convinced of their goodness, assured in it, not like you and me. We know goodness is something you gotta work at. So I left that behind, too. I spent a few years bouncing around, town to town. I’d blow in, visit a few scuzzy bars, make some money hustling pool, then stay a couple of nights at a cheap motel. During the day, I’d visit the terminal ward at the hospital. And if they had one, I’d visit the nursing home. I’d sit with people. Tell them stories, maybe play cards with the few who had that kind of energy left. When my money was spent and I’d swallowed those who were ready to go, I’d leave.

That’s how I came to find my mom. My dad had left her by then, and she’d moved a couple states over to live with my sister. But my sister was a lot better at taking care of fish than she was our mama, so she dumped her in this assisted living center after a couple of years and only came to visit once a week. I had no idea any of this had happened, not until after. We didn’t even get to talk that day. Now, I kinda think she knew I was coming, somehow, and had been waiting for it, because as soon as we locked eyes, she gave up and went. You know. You believe me. You’ve seen that look before, haven’t you?

I almost didn’t notice it. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was her yet, it all happened so fast. And I’d swallowed a lot of souls by then, built up a reflex for it. Her soul didn’t taste like much, or maybe it just didn’t taste all that different from me, so it was slight, at first. But once she was down, I felt this great big wave swell up, and her life was flashing before me, worse and more vivid than those two daredevils from the wreck, stranger than that first fish soul. I saw inside her. Saw how she saw me. Saw how much she loved me, and hated me, and was so scared for me all the damn time even though we hadn’t spoken in more than a decade. It was too much, so I got selfish.

The years following mama’s death are a bit blurry. Sometimes I swallowed as many as five people in one day, trying to get the ghost of her buried. I started getting these horrible migraines that would knock me out for days on end. It’s all the noise, I guess. That clamoring. Everyone wants their turn, wants to be felt, to be held a little. When I was sick like that, I would wake up off in some woods somewhere, laying next to a trickling creek, anywhere mayflies or mosquitoes would breed. It took me longer than it should have to realize I was pushing myself too hard, that I’d lost sight of my purpose. All that running had made me tired. You know the kind of tired I’m talking about, that bone deep, soul deep tired.

That’s how I washed up in the big city, thirty bucks to my name and all kinds of knowledge sloshing around in my head that wasn’t mine. That’s another thing I would never have guessed back then, when I was sixteen and still green. Even when the episodes stop and the souls settle, they leave little bits in you. So I worked odd jobs — driving taxis, fixing sinks, washing dishes, taking the graveyard shift. I’d swallowed so many souls by then that I found myself familiar with just about everything I tried. I was the everyman’s woman. All those souls had built me up into something new.

You can probably guess the rest. I mean, look at me. I got one of those good paying corporate jobs in a high rise building with lots of windows and lots more cubicles, the kind my mom always dreamed of for me. It turns out some of those old folks had been good with numbers, so I am too. I saved enough to buy a pretty little apartment in a quiet neighborhood. Not too far from the hospital, you know. I could never give up my real job. The nine-to-five just pays the bills. The rest of the time, I’m still out wandering, looking for lonely souls at the end of their line.

Well, it’s been nice talking with you. Really nice. I almost wish we had some more time, but my train will be here in a few minutes.

I’ll see you again, sooner than later, I’m sure. Next time, coffee’ll be on me.