Parting Shot by Ashley Farmer

Winner of the 2017 Los Angeles Review Fiction Award, judged by Bryan Hurt

I love this story for its quick and slippery wordplay and how the logic of language intoxicates the story, twisting it in directions that surprise and startle. But even more than it’s quickness, I admire the story for its intelligence and moments of earned wisdom that bring the story to an abrupt halt and make me sit, for a few seconds, with a difficult truth. One of those moments comes when the narrator leaves the party she’s attending and drives an often flooded road alongside the sinister-sounding Witch Creek: “They say a witch makes the creek flood, because of course she does, a woman alone in the woods ruining things for men, making the world dangerous. Never mind how close to the riverbank some man paved the street.” The narrator of this story is often like this witch of legend. She’s isolated, bereft, alone in a wilderness of men, taking the blame for their indiscretions, all the while they bring ruin down on themselves. Though grim as this sounds the story doesn’t fully give way to darkness. “There’s electricity in this snow,” the narrator says, “I wonder how I haven’t felt that before?” There’s electricity in this story steering it toward light.  -Bryan Hurt

The senator’s name is Patrick Maloney but the bros call him “P-Money” and I, in my dark, private head, call him “Prick.” What Prick calls me is his assistant, although I’m not it. He calls me “Twiggy” in front of constituents, orders me BLTs for lunch to “put meat on my bones” even though I don’t eat meat. Today, he’s lamenting a lack of old-fashioned ladies in our home state as I rewrite his memo. “A shame,” he says, the big baby baiting me. He bites his pinky nail and spits it into the carpet. I keep typing, clicking, picking at the keys, sucking air, waiting him out as he paces behind me. Waiting is one of my tricks. I picture a beach where I’m swimming, kicking out into the warm blue sea. See, I’m one of the ladies he’s talking about and I’m seething even though he tells me I’m sweet. Prick likes how fast I type and how I correct his mistakes without making him feel dumb. But mostly, Prick likes everything I don’t.

And for me: a memo is the only thing within my control, its elegant, factual language, because I live in a windowless room with a roommate although I’m nearly too old for that now and I work sixty-six hours per week for barely more than minimum. When I’m awake, I’m awake inside a serotonin squeeze. When I sleep, it’s a half-sleep filled with Prick Maloney talking at me. When I have sex dreams, they’re atop mountains of memos where I wrinkle and rip edited sentences. Anger boils in my belly but I still haven’t mustered the courage to refuse his greasy sandwiches that show up each day at noon delivered by a driver who earns as much as me. I chew and swallow until my body protests—something else I can’t control.

What to know about Prick? He’s experienced. He’s a careerist. He’s anti-. Prick is anti-what? You pick. He is known for passing out in his tighty-whities at night while his housekeeper cleans his kitchen and picks up his kicky novelty socks. Known for bullying. Backbiting. For a good bait-and-switch. Prick likes watching the blood drain from the bros’ faces even while they ass-kiss him. Little Prick is actually big, and when he paces behind me he reminds me of my dad.

See, Prick says he wants to watch out for me.

Prick warns me to stay away from the bros.

Prick says, “Trust me, I once was one.”

Prick swears a BLT tastes better with pickles and when I tell him pickles make me sick he tells me they’re an acquired taste, like working in politics.

But I have my own pickle this evening: my period is late and two pee-tests indicate disaster. I spit-up in the sink and think about what to wear to the work thing tonight. Then I call my sister to tell her the news. She tells me to have a drink.

See, my sister gets me. She trains horses, or rather, she trains people to ride horses, to do pony tricks and win cash prizes. It takes money for her clients to be winners, so she knows what it’s like dealing with the naturally rich, the folks who arrive in the world that way. Prick had money since the day he was a naked baby. Sister and I were not raised rich. Our family would say that’s relative because you can be rich in love, I guess. I’m glad Prick isn’t my relative, that no one in this podunk campaign office is.

My roommate is from Beijing, stuck in this city instead of D.C. where we all wish to be, thought we’d be, believed our destinies and degrees would bring us. She speaks Mandarin on the phone in the middle of the night and drinks gin. Whom does she talk to and what does she tell him? All I know is that she works in policy and thinks the senator is her enemy. “Prick is a dick,” she says, because she sometimes says what I’m thinking. I search out her booze beneath the sink near the bleach. I promise in my head to pay her back for it. I pour gin in a glass with some blue-flavored Gatorade and it tastes like the opposite of magic.

Hot throat, weak knees. My black dress slack around my clavicles, my bird neck. I stand in front of the mirror with the blue drink and examine my belly, try to sense a bump or flutter but of course there’s none: it’s too early for that. And what do I hope I’ll feel besides this creeping fear? I hope to feel nothing, which is what I’ll have to figure out quick, what has to happen. Our home state hasn’t made this easy and neither has the senator. My heart does its flutter thing so I think about swimming in the ocean again: it would feel so strong to go away like that because I’m always strong when I swim, but instead I have this thing tonight. “Things” are what we call these work things and honestly these things could be anything. Mostly it’s small-talking with the people who do pony tricks.

Prick opens the donor’s door, lets me in. See, it’s not even his house but he acts like it is, says, “Welcome,” like it should be my privilege. That’s so him. So what I’ve come to expect. He takes my jacket but then a housekeeper arrives to grab it. I always have more in common with the help at these things, which is probably why the senator never brought me to his office in D.C. though he promised he would when he hired me.

The room is filled with the bros and the bros are filled with bravado. They half-love the senator, half-despise him. I imagine most of them think, Why not me? and the more idiotic ones think Soon, it will be. Their cologne fills the room. Their bowties look alike and they’ve finally stopped noticing me in the office, the only woman in their orbit too familiar to be visible. Okay, bros. Fine by me, I think. I go from dim room to dim room, walls covered in art and books—flowers, horses, more horses, southern history with cannons and slaves—and I thread through clusters of loud men in search of the ladies and there are few of them. Most huddle in the kitchen, all of them polished and expensive and thin. Oh, their perfume. Oh, their luxury, even the sad ones, even the bored ones, especially the bored ones, like the hostess who tells a story about her kids sneaking scissors and cutting each others’ hair. She picks at this bouquet and it looks like she’s fixing it but there’s nothing to fix. I never learned the names of flowers but these are elaborate and white, huge like anemones. I can practically hear them breathing like they’re alive right there even though they’re actually dying.

An hour tops, then I can leave this thing. That’s another of my tricks: watch me disappear like the magician’s assistant.

§

Want to know a secret? The secret is that Prick doesn’t remember me, my parents dropping me off, my slippery feet. Me padding barefoot through his kitchen trailing Cherry, his daughter, who went to the rich brick high school named after one of her ancestors. Cherry whose mom had custody and who barely ever stayed with him. Me dripping water in a bikini, getting the tile wet. Me using the good towel with silver threading. See, they had a private pool where I would swim with Cherry and her hair swirled while she kicked like a mermaid. We raced and I was quicker. Quickest. I tried to teach her all the strokes: breath, back, side, but she didn’t care. I tried very hard at things and Cherry would laugh and sing, never bothering.

Except one night I dared her while her dad slept on the black leather couch near the TV. I didn’t know Prick then except that I knew he was important, which interested me. He had no pants on, which made Cherry blush but I brushed her hand as we slipped through the sliding glass door so she knew she didn’t have to feel silly. It was all silly anyways: the bottle of limoncello, that other liquor that tasted like licorice and made us dizzy. We sucked it down and tossed the bottles in the shrubs filled with lightning bugs.

Our backs. The grass. A locust summer and hotter than hell when you can hear the bugs buzz like telephone wires. Our cheeks were red then, I guess, and Cherry dared me back and said, “Naked, unless you’re chicken.” I’ll do most things people ask, so I left my suit on the concrete, steered clear of the pool lights. Cherry said, “You’re lucky you’re so skinny.” Cherry with her blond hair swirling. Then she kissed me, then I kissed her back, and then we raced and she never could catch me, not even laughing on the lawn, not past the dark hilarious shrubs, not at the trampoline where we laid down and the moon floated and we talked inside it until dawn.

But the senator caught her one day—with a girl, with booze, probably both, none of us knew—and then there was no more Cherry at her fancy school, at any school, not at the mall food court in the afternoons, not anywhere in our town. Instead, there were rumors of a Swiss boarding school, of rehab, of cruise ships where they make you do Christian chores until you turn straight and repent.

So what’s the moral? There never was one. But her absence taught me about living invisibly since Cherry wasn’t very good at it but girls like me could be. So I did, tried at least, keeping my secrets hidden under the bed, in the backs of cars, in the basement closet where no one might notice. Because if there’s anything worse than being an invisible woman, it’s being found out, getting caught. Red letters and all. Being seen.

§

Outside this donor’s expensive windows the rain is hardening into snow: I can feel it in my bird bones. I think about calling someone, anyone, to confess about the pee-sticks, to tell them it was one of the bros though I don’t know which, but that I know what has to happen next. It’s not logistically easy and I’ll have to miss work and the seconds are ticking and the weather is turning, snowflakes landing in my coat collar, melting on my neck as I walk to the car.

They say not to drive the short road along the long river because it floods almost nightly, on time like a clock. But it’s the faster route and I am fast and I have to be at work again in nine hours, so I drive it anyway. It’s called Witch Creek, this road, which everybody knows even though there’s no sign for it. It’s a name we have here in pony country, though none of the horses are wild anymore. They say a witch makes the creek flood, because of course she does, a woman alone in the woods ruining things for men, making the world dangerous. Never mind how close to the riverbank some man paved this street.

The only difference between me and Cherry, I think, is that Cherry got caught and I didn’t. Hadn’t, at least. Now it’s different, right now, right here in the snow blowing sideways. I’m caught. Now I feel it: this dangerous chemistry happening inside me and it is the worst thing, worse than working in politics, and so I grip the steering wheel and feel the squeeze take hold again, the dark woods pressing me on all sides, the road slick, the sky heavy up there with its weight and consequences. I grip the wheel and grit my teeth and tomorrow I will take care of things and maybe the day after that I will say “No thank you, Senator. No thank you, permanently.” The road curves right then left towards home. Towards sleep. Towards more snow.

And get this: it isn’t freezing water or a witch that catches me. Instead, I see an animal charge the car hard, the passenger’s side, horns crushing up against the window and through. I think wild horse before I get my bearings. I think, How did he find me? I think it came toward me deliberately and my hair is pricked, my skin. Then the car is light like a leaf and there’s no control for me in the world. No sound, no crash. How many times will I spin beneath this black sky? I hold the wheel like the reigns of something I’m trying to tame. Then glass, then grass, then a mess of mud and sky with so much white coming down now.

I’m not hurt the way I brace myself to be and it’s so still like a photograph. I hear the dying animal breathing, but it’s me. I hear his horns rattling the ground while he twists in pain, but it’s the car, some piece of it settling at the side of the road. Through the brush: no deer, though he is out there. I search, but I don’t want to find him. I crack branches but it’s slippery. I think maybe he escaped, not too hurt. And maybe if he’s down, he just needs time to rest before he gets back up again. Don’t birds’ brains recover when they hit glass? I remember that from biology. The world is resilient.

I call my sister. My bones aren’t broken, I tell her. But there is something growing inside me.

The truck, a pick-up, swerves dipshit-quick around the curve, almost clips my crashed car, his headlights blinding me. “He,” I say, because I know. “He” because in this accident I’ve developed a psychic ability. “He” is right, this guy in jeans, hulking, who worries over me, says he’ll call an ambulance. “No,” I tell him. “Really,” I plead because he’s not listening and because I have zero insurance. He looks me up and down as he dials, my face, my hands, my feet, and I feel like I’m on display in these lights, like I’ve done something wrong and a cop got me. He touches my shoulder and I brush it off, but it’s just to move me out of his way and then he’s down in the brush looking for the buck.

He sniffs, this guy. He smashes down the brush with his boots. Yells, “Found him!” and I picture the animal all majestic, wild, tall in this snow that’s getting heavy, fat flakes that will change the landscape by morning. Then the truck guy comes back, says “I’m sorry” and I don’t know why because I’ve done this to myself. He walks to his truck and I think Good, let him leave, let me have this peace because tomorrow is going to come. Instead, he opens the door to the cab and removes a rifle.

“Wait,” I say and it comes out so loud that it startles the dark up, makes the wind kind of blow, I swear, scaring the both of us.

Whose voice was that? I think. And so I yell it again and it echoes off these woods, up the road, to the windows of the house where the bored wives and bros and even the most unkind people are being polite, the senator laughing as ice clinks in his drink. I use my mind to will the buck to run. Get up, I think, and then I see that there is glass, little chips, spread all down the front of my coat.

Well, there are many ways to be a woman and almost all of them are in spite of something. Is it morning yet? Where is Cherry now, I wonder? We were the exact same height from the tips of our toes to the tops of our heads and now she is a woman like me in this world. I want to ask her about her exile and what her name is now. I want to ask my sister what the ponies think, if they really like performing for the people who pay for it. I want to ask my roommate who it is she tells her secrets to when neither of us are sleeping. There is electricity in this snow. I wonder, how have I not felt that before? There is electricity between my legs. There is blood. Glass and glass.

And then I realize that I haven’t heard the gun yet.

And then I realize that tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

Then a shot tears open the night.

Ashley Farmer is the author of the collections The Women (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), The Farmacist (Jellyfish Highway Press, 2015), Beside Myself  (PANK/Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014), and the chapbook Farm Town (Rust Belt Bindery, 2012). A recipient of fellowships from Syracuse University and the Baltic Writing Residency, her work can be found in places like Santa Monica Review, The Collagist, Buzzfeed, Gigantic, The Progressive, Nerve, and Flaunt. Ashley lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and serves as a fiction editor for Juked.