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Chicken and Broccoli
by
Peter J Graves
The back seat smelled like shit. I plopped the groceries down and scanned for an old diaper. It was there, among the rubber-nippled bottles and candy wrappers. I picked it up and hucked it into the trash can on the corner. The car door screamed on its hinges as I slammed it shut. The moon was out but it didn’t reflect off the car’s surface. Even the street lights were absorbed into the dull green. I hated green.
The buildings around the Path Mart were derelict. The windows on 124th street gapped glassless and dull. An old man sat happily on the stone steps drinking long loving gulps from a bottle wrapped in brown paper.
As I rolled out of the parking lot, I loosened my tie. It was green. Why did everything have to be green? The parent teachers meeting had gone late. It always did. But not too late for me to take a little time off. It was only 7:30. The evening was cool, and Martha wouldn’t get curious about me till after 9.
I lit a Pall Mall and dropped the match out the window. I would have to drive to Jersey with the windows down to air it out. Martha would pitch a fit if she knew I smoked in the car. It’s bad for the baby after all. And she was right. It was bad for the baby. Everything was bad for the baby. Sugar was bad for the baby. TV was bad for the baby. Anchovies on toast were bad for the baby. Being alive was bad for the baby.
I looked briefly at the picture of my wife and our baby that hung from the rearview mirror. She had lost a bit of her figure because of the baby, but she was still a very attractive woman. Her brown eyes stared out of the photo and little Mikey smiled dumbly at something outside the frame of the picture. Under the photo in big black letters, it read, “The Williams family,” even though I wasn’t in the picture. I took a brief look at my reflection, the crooked nose bent sharply left, and the thick grey lips stretched back over jutting teeth. It stared back at me as if it didn’t know who I was.
A traffic light turned red, forcing me to stop. A group of high school girls walked in front of the car, jostling, bouncing, spinning like a dust cloud. “Why is that man staring at us?” “He must be some sort of pervert.”
Some sort? Which sort was I? The tired sort? The ugly sort? Or just the typical sort? That was probably it, the typical sort.
The light was green, but the girls were still in the street. I laid on the horn, and they glared at me with all the evil that teenaged girls possess. It was enough to make me shrivel. I punched the accelerator and sped around them and away.
There was a group of buildings on fifth and 115th. They looked abandoned. The only visible life was in the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor. There were always a few people in there but nobody was ever eating. I parked the green car, and like a black hole, it immediately sucked in the glow from the street lamps. Every bit of light that touched its surface was lost forever in the void.
Charlie saw the car but didn’t rise from the table. He waited for me. I walked into the restaurant and up to the counter. A young Chinese girl stared at me. “What you want?”
“Umm. Chicken and broccoli.”
“What rice?”
“What?”
“What rice?”
“White”
The girl turned and yelled in Chinese. I moved away from the counter and sat at Charlie’s table.
“Mr. Murphy,” Charlie said, showing me a row of shiny gold teeth. “I ain’t seen you in a long time.”
“It takes time for things to heal. How’s things with you?”
“Can’t complain, my man.”
We sat quietly for a moment, Charlie grinning the whole while. The fluorescents flickered and the smell of greasy pork hovered in the air. Finally he spoke again. “You wanna go upstairs or are you here just for the grub?”
“Upstairs, Charlie.”
We walked through the kitchen and to the back stairs. The floor was covered in a slick slime and bits of food. Out the back door, where the trash lay in a heap, rats frolicked freely, gaily.
We ascended a set of simple wooden stairs that creaked as I stepped.
“You want the same one?” Charlie asked as he opened the door on a very comfortable looking apartment. It was lit by the soft glow of lamps, and the air was heavy with smoke. Three young girls sat, damn near naked, on a soft green couch. They looked totally bored.
“Yeah, the same one, Charlie. How is he?”
“He’s just fine. Healed up fine.” Charlie then shouted something in Chinese. A young girl that I hadn’t noticed before appeared then disappeared down the hallway. Charlie turned to me. “Two hundred dollars, Mr. Murphy.”
I removed the money from my wallet and handed it over. It didn’t matter. Martha would never know I spent it. I had been saving it a few dollars at a time for the past three months.
“Same room,” Charlie said and trotted down the stairs.
I moved down the hall in a daze. My heart raced and spikes of adrenaline shot through my stomach and out my asshole. The hallway was dimly lit, but I could see the light from an open door. I approached, entered and closed the door. I removed my clothes and put on the old pair of jeans that were hanging there. There was no shirt for me to wear, but there were a pair of brown work boots that I slipped my feet into. They were a bit too big.
They advertised Tommy as being 15 years old. He wasn’t. He looked more like twenty to me, but age wasn’t what was important. It was his skin. It was so pale and smooth. His hair was black and combed neatly and to the side. His little black eyes sparkled at me as I neared him. He was nude and his small cock lay dormant in the nest of his balls. A smile split the flat features of his face.
I cocked my arm back and landed a fist square on his jaw. His beautiful white skin turned red, then blue. He fell backwards off the bed and lay limply on the floor. I had a moment of fierce disappointment when I thought that I had knocked him out. But he slowly lifted himself back onto the bed, his cock so hard it pulsed.
I hit him again and blood trickled from his button nose. I lifted him off the bed and threw him to the floor, where I kicked at his smooth ribs until I heard that satisfying crack, and he cried out, tears spilling over his eyelids. He stroked his dick as I bent over him and punched him in the head. With each contact his head smacked against the floor. Blood poured from his nose and mouth and pooled in a sticky goo on the floor. I wrapped my arm around his neck and choked him, holding him close to my chest, his blood smearing on me. As he began to lose consciousness he came. An arch like a pearl rainbow appeared in the air then vanished, mingling with the blood on the floor.
After I showered and changed, I walked back through the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant. The woman at the counter shouted, “Here your food. Five dollar.”
I paid her and took the bag that was printed with a big green happy face and the words “thank you.” Charlie said nothing to me as I left the building. I walked to the green car and got inside. It smelled like cigarette smoke and shit. I glanced at the picture hanging from the rearview. If Martha wasn’t too tired, I figured I could get a little tonight. I would give her the Chinese food as a bribe. Chicken and broccoli was her favorite. It was a good idea.
I said fuck it and lit another smoke and took off with all the windows down. As I drove away, the car sucked in all the light around me, leaving a long green black corridor of empty space.
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© Graves, 2006
Peter J. Graves is a thirty one year old ESL teacher living in New York City. He has a B.A. in English from SUNY New Paltz and has been published in such literary magazines as “Fortunate Fall and “Synapse Fire”. He has recently returned from a two year trip in Asia where he traveled through India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.