Page 30 - WTP Vol. V #4

D Christina FuLtOn
Alligator Alleyway
ieter Mendel was the type of guy who couldn’t
she sobbed.
help but heed advice from broken blend-
ers and Wikipedia well into the early a.m. When hypothetical margaritas came out all wrong and rusty he’d rev up his search engines. He needed
a stretch of road to meet him halfway between his last rendezvous with his anti-psychotic meds and his wife’s crying. Alligator Alley sounded like Florida’s G-spot, and he was definitely going to go all the way.
He found it amazing that she made those exact same noises during sex and everyday conversa- tion. Everyone at their office referred to her as the “Crying Gamer.” They had left their cushy California careers to start again at the wild-
card company Legacy Games, and she was the weepy sound designer there, with a tongue ring and pancake breasts. He was the swizzle-stick tweaker of the graphic-design team, specializing in disposable villains. Theirs had been an office- party romance that led to the next level and him understanding that there was more to her than a drippy set of baby blues. She never asked him to change, but he found himself wanting to change for her. Emily always offered him a glimpse into the world beyond all the games and game overs.
“Where are you off to?” his wife whispered, as he was rummaging through their closet for his favor- ite pair of Sonic the Hedgehog sandals. She was sitting up in their bed surrounded by used tis- sues. A puffy-faced angel who loved Metallica, lost causes, and Seinfeld re-runs.
“Nowhere special...I’m just going for a drive.”
He lingered in the doorway and watched as one of the subterranean monsters got lost in her black, matted hair.
“You look a little off-kilter. Are you okay, D?” Her shrill voice tripped over his temporal lobes and some familiar white noise broke loose.
“Lucky bastard,” he whispered, turning to leave. She hadn’t let him touch her, not since those nurses wheeled her out to the curb like frumpy luggage.
“Yeah, I’m good,” he yelled above the static—one only he could hear, when he went off his Thora- zine. Ever since they lost the baby, he’d been skip- ping doses—though he told himself he was only forgetting to take his pills. The days, hours, had begun to blur together.
The box announced to the world in scrawled red Sharpie that it belonged to Emily. It had been quarantined by the front door, ever since they’d returned home from the hospital with- out the pay-off of something that took Emily al- most six months to design—without their son whose sex they would not know until after two hours of induced labor; at that last sonogram before they would no longer be able to detect a heartbeat, three trained sonogram technicians couldn’t paint a genital specific color for every- thing on that black-and-white digital display. What he would always remember though were the gray outlines of his baby’s hands. Balled into tight fists.
She clucked her tongue and nuzzled back into their vintage Dig Dug sheets. He’d wanted the Deluxe Resident Evil Set, but she detested single- shooter realities, opting for something more War- craftish. It had been their first argument as a mar- ried couple and their last involving game-related allegiances. Dr. Lee, his therapist/pill pusher, told him that a compromise was the only way to avoid any level of “Marital Kombat.” They both agreed that classic eighties Namco was neutral territory.
“If you insist on leaving, please take the box to the Goodwill station behind the Toys R’ Us,”
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