Jackie and I sat at that bus stop for about an hour before I could convince Jackie that the bus to the zoo wasn't coming. “I was really hoping to see the penguins, or maybe a camel.” What a lie. Jackie didn’t care about the animals, he just wanted to get out and away. Jackie was an escape artist specialized in picking locks and hopping trains, and was capable of flying into second story windows to greet you when you’re trapped. Jackie looked down at his big toe, which stuck right out of the hole in his generic black sneakers. He’d been wearing the same shoes since high school.
When I met Jackie, or as any therapist who doesn't understand the artistic process might say, “created” Jackie, I was a fucked up kid who desperately needed an imaginary friend. Only problem was, as gods do, I created Jackie in my own fucked-up image, so he always had holes in his shoes and smelled like stale cigarettes. He used to walk along the train tracks with me, looking for half-smoked cigarettes. He would sit on my window sill and tell me that all problems were escapable, if they were even real at all. He was my companion animal. Someone for me to bounce my perspective off of when I was alone.
Unfortunately, time passed and life built up in me the same way that gunk builds up in a rusty pipe. It was bad enough to be a grown ass woman with an imaginary friend, but to have an imaginary friend that is still stuck in the past, still wearing those same torn up clothes, still smoking whatever shorties he could find on the ground, was too much. Even in my imagination, I found myself with a stray to take care of, a theme that had followed me throughout the long line of men that had stopped in my bed like a motel.
It was time.
“Jackie. I have been carrying you around like a backpack full of rocks. You will only look at me when you smile, and when you are upset, you turn away. It is time.”
And because he could read my mind, I didn’t have to ask. Jackie answered “Leave my body here on Colfax. I’ll take the guillotine.”
This shouldn’t take long, I thought.
I rolled out a guillotine from behind the ally. Jackie willingly lowered his delicate neck into place. We stood there on the corner of Colfax and Steele, waiting for the light to change.
“Hey thanks.” He said. “This is a good way to go.”
“With all the brushes with death you and I have shared, kiddo, I’m glad you’re going out in style.”
The light changed and the cars started towards us. I pulled the rope and the blade sliced down with finesse. Jackie’s head rolled and bounced down the curb into the road, where a light blue Dodge Caravan rolled over his head as if it were made of playdough. Warm blood gently squirting from his neck, I rolled him and his dirty trench coat into the street, where the wheels of all the cars smashed him into the ground. Jackie was part of Colfax now.
I lifted my head to the sky and let out a howl. I let out the pain and the disgust and the weight of Jackie, I let out the loss of a friend and a coping mechanism.
I had only made it about half a block, when I started to notice how light I felt. My feet lifted off the ground, and I began to float away like a balloon, alone and exposed and free.
©2020 by Shelsea Ochoa. All rights reserved.