Secondhand

by Brett Biebel

Denis Shchigolev

We’re still married, but my wife hasn’t forgiven me for Michigan City. I left her in an Airbnb. She was five months pregnant. My phone rang and rang, and I let it go, and she sat on the floor and cried, worried sick. The place we were staying didn’t have Wi-Fi. It was more like glamping than anything, just a two-room shack with a kitchenette and a TV with a DVD player and a digital antenna, plus a monster king-size bed. You could tell all the money went to the thread count. We figured we’d be at the beach most of the time, eating takeout, satisfying strange cravings, so what did the amenities matter as long as we could sleep. I couldn’t sleep, though. There were these wildfires raging in Ontario or someplace, and the air quality was bad. They told us about it on the news. We monitored it over cell network. Being outside for two hours was like smoking a full cigarette, and what kind of mom would do that to her future kid? Sometimes it got down to where an hour was only a tenth of a cigarette, but even then.

“Would you let me light up,” she said, “and only take one puff?” and I could tell the answer was supposed to be no.

So, we watched the only two movies in the place. The Remains of the Day and Dead Man Walking. The owners must’ve been into executions. I guess Indiana death row is at the state pen in Michigan City. There was a recipe book full of famous last meals. Timothy McVeigh ordered two pints of mint chip ice cream. John Wayne Gacy had KFC. Some guy in Texas asked for fifty eggs, but they didn’t give it to him, on account of the symbolism and all. Turns out, some states, you can only order what the prison kitchen has in stock, so there’s all kinds of ways to deny a request.

In Indiana, though, the rules were open. Still are, as far as I understand it. The deal is, you can request a last meal from a restaurant. They call it a special meal. You eat it, like, the day before, the theory being it’s more meaningful that way. Less chance you lose your appetite or puke it back up or whatever. Some people share it with inmates or guards. One guy gave his to the homeless, and I guess some of them refused to eat it due to superstition. They thought it would bring bad luck. I asked Sher what she would do, and she squirmed or adjusted because maybe the baby was kicking. She said, “I don’t know, but I’d probably want something vegan.”

We were eating a rotisserie chicken on the bed. I could see the grease on her chin. My mouth was a pillar of salt.

“You realize the irony?” I said.

“Nobody cares about me, though. Eating chicken in bed. Last meal, everyone’s going to hear that, so you might as well make some kind of statement.”

I couldn’t tell her nobody would care about the politics either. They’d probably just laugh at you. Or think you were being some kind of smartass. Maybe I didn’t believe that then, but I do believe it now. Being alive. Being an adult. Seeing how all statements get lost in the interests of the lurid.

The guy they killed while we were there was named Ashley. The things he did I don’t even want to share. They were not sexual. They were violent. The victims were multiple. The remorse was ambiguous, if even that. It was only the third night of the trip. We were supposed to stay a week but ended up cutting things short. I didn’t know what was happening. The sun filtered in bright and at 6 A.M., and Sher was sleeping all peaceful hands folded, so I put the TV on real low volume. All we usually got was local news. The anchor looked like he was nineteen years old. I swear he still had acne. The reception was kind of shitty and kind of retro, and something inside me liked it. The kid told us Ashley wasn’t dead yet. Lethal injection to be administered that night. He said, “Ashley’s special meal was a large cheese pizza from Papa John’s, extra garlic sauce. Sources inside the prison confirm he ate three pieces. The fate of the rest is unknown.”

“Mm-mmm-mm,” said the co-anchor, who must have been Homecoming queen two decades ago. “I would’ve taken some! You know I love the garlic sauce.”

The kid laughed awkwardly. “Papa John’s is not an official sponsor of this show,” he said, half-choked, and then there was other news to read. The wildfires. A local hospice facility on trial for fraud. All the wars and presidents who spoke in simple declarative sentences, letting syntax pass for truth. None of it added up. My only focus was the impending execution.

I thought about it all day. Into the night. Sher napped. We had sex once. She told me I could take a walk if I wanted, if that felt safe, and I did, to the top of some dunes. The air smelled like a campfire. It was thick, blurring the view of the waves. On the way back, I bought Sher a pint of ice cream and a decaf coffee. The ice cream was not mint chip; it was Rocky Road. She was reading one of the baby books. I let her read it. Held her hand. We ate sandwiches and around maybe eight, I asked if she was still hungry.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Anything in particular?”

“Pizza,” she said. “Cheese, mushrooms, if you don’t mind.”

“All good.”

“You pick the place.”

“You got it,” and off I went.

I’m a pizza snob. Guilty as charged. Local places only. I like the way the Quad Cities puts oregano in the sauce. The parlors that put your pie in a bag. You can feel the grease stains as you pick it up. If you don’t put something underneath, it’ll leak onto your car’s upholstery, and you’ll never manage to extinguish the smell. I like that, sensing how it turns stale. It’s a ritual. One you can’t get with a faceless national chain, but, that night, I caved. I ordered Papa John’s. I drove out there and talked to the girl at the counter while waiting for my pizza.

Her nametag said Ann.

“Were you working last night?” I asked her.

She scoffed a little. Must’ve thought I was flirting. I wasn’t. “Not me,” she said, “Took my boyfriend to the zoo. Why?”

“That guy they’re killing over at the prison. He ordered pizza from here. I heard it on the news.”

“What?”

“You know. The execution. There’s, like reporters out there. Some of them seem almost national.”

“Jimmy!” she yelled, and from the back came a skinny guy with cross tattoos and silver hair. “Were you here last night?”

Jimmy sniffed. He wiped his hands on his apron. “Yeah,” he said. “Slow night. Maybe a dozen orders during the dinner rush and one or two before. Why?”

“This guy wants to know.” Ann’s thumb jerked in my direction. She didn’t look at me. Come to think of it, she really didn’t look at anything, just kind of vacant and at the register.

“I was just saying about the execution,” I said. “Guy ordered from here for his meal or whatever.”

Jimmy nodded. “I didn’t save the receipt,” he said. “But pretty sure a trooper came to pick it up. Asked for extra garlic sauce. Wasn’t in the original order, but I threw in a couple of containers no charge. Figured he deserved it, right? Order’s ready, by the way.” He pointed to a wiry rack. Apparently, it had been sitting there for a while. Next to Ashley’s, maybe, on top of it, only displaced a little in time.

“Did you feel weird making it?” I said, unable to help myself. Jimmy was halfway back to the kitchen. He shrugged.

“I don’t know. I didn’t really put it together until now, I guess. I make a lot of pizzas. They all gotta be done the same way. You start thinking about one over another, gets you all kinds of fucked up.”

I thought about Sher, back at the place. She hadn’t made the first phone call yet. On my way out, I heard Jimmy and Ann talking about the zoo. How they lit it up at night and you could see bats around the lampposts. The bats, Ann said, were the very best part, only I couldn’t confirm because the zoo was closed. I didn’t think it was open the night before either, not unless there was some kind of special event, and even if one had been on the schedule, there was the matter of the fires, the bad air. Children outside and puffing slowly on the equivalent cigarettes. Ann was a liar, I thought. We were all liars. Sher called once. Twice. I drove past the zoo and down to the lake, left my phone on the sand.

The water was cold. I waded out fifty, sixty, eighty feet past the sandbar, bobbed and dropped until my feet couldn’t find floor. There was a new moon, waxing crescent, tiniest sliver. The thing people don’t realize about Lake Michigan is how clear it is. An ocean you see into, your toes grasping at nothing, barely keeping you afloat. The smoke stung my eyes. I coughed a little. Yeah, I knew Sher would be scared. I knew I should go back. I couldn’t, though. A man was going to die, or maybe was already dead. A baby was nearly born. A few human shadows stalked along the shore, and I wondered where they were going. Where they were from. I held my breath, inhaled deep. I floated, counting fractions of cigarettes. I must have been at three-fourths. The AQI was 284. I promised myself I’d go home after a full one, but then stayed well into another. Filling my lungs. If the wave was evil, what was the point in caring about a few extra drops?

I repeated that line to Sher when I found her after midnight. Down on the floor, curled in a ball. She breathed quick. She breathed slow. She spat salty tears at me, and they stung like anger and tasted like overheated something. Fear, or it could’ve even been love. The silent days followed. Voiceless and pacing, but she didn’t banish me to the couch. We slept in a bed become continental, three plate tectonics grinding into mountains whose passes were narrow and vital. They were there, but I had to wait for flashes of light. Still. Sometimes, I have to find them in the dark.

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Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction (48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock) and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many print and online literary journals and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.