My Chest Bumps Like a Dryer With Shoes In It | Fiction

The following is a story about a famous American author written by Diesel Johnson, a young writer based out of Lawton, Oklahoma. Our team hopes that you will enjoy this piece, and we look forward to publishing more guest features in the future.

~ Brayden Johnson, Editor of OTT

David Foster Wallace grips his steering wheel firmly, the weight of his arms pressed forward and down onto the wheel. There is a small pistol in his glove-box right now–about eight inches wide and six tall, 9mm–sleek, black, and rattling as David’s Ford Explorer barrels up and down the rollicking hilltops and only-kind-of-paved roads of flyover Middle America. Sweat is pooling on the sides of his nose, his glasses slipping right down the bridge of his oily, red nose every few seconds. The sweat collects in small pools around his neckline and some in the deep pockmarks that riddle his face. It is 3:32 AM on a Wednesday morning that feels no different from Tuesday night to David who has been driving for hours straight and is running on something very-quite-substantially less than fumes. Perhaps whisps or something. David is currently trying not to let his ex-everything, Mary, out of his sight, which has become an obsession so totally consuming as to reach the point where each blink fills David with a horrible dread, which makes him wish he could blink one shark-pupiled bloodshot eye at a time like a reptile or some strange insect.

David is driving NW and not entirely sure which state he is in. He is filled with some quiet fury– a righteous thing that, to him, makes his quest for Mary’s life feel less like vengeance than absolution for some great deal of wrongs that she never really committed. David knows but is still filled almost entirely with the fury anyways. He imagines the huge bloom of white fire inside the shell as he puts fatal pressure on the trigger. He can smell the smoke already whispering its way out of the end of the little pistol that still quietly rattles in his glove-box which could barely fit Mary’s faux-leather handbag, back when she was there to stuff it in the glovebox with a perfectly gruntled shove, much less a pistol. He bought it at a pawn-shop that hung a hand-stitched confederate flag in its window, which discretely sold him the pistol with its serial number scratched off for a mere 250 U.S. sweat-slicked dollars under a flimsy verbal agreement to a pale and visibly jonesing David who clearly was not in a good state physically or mentally on the condition that he would use it exclusively for home defense or whatever which David clearly was not going to, but who gives a fuck? Certainly not the guy in the wife-beater with his glazed-over yellow eyes and the scritch-scritch of his dull pocket-knife peeling the serial numbers off the damn thing.

But so, there wasn’t a whole lot of room in the glove-box and the pistol was sitting pretty snug when David, hands shaking violently, shoved it deeper and so does not know how it rattles with such consistency and fervor, as if there were not a nook or sweet spot for it to get lodged in so it would SHUT the HELL Up! so David could focus and David was DAMN Well Sure there had to be some nook somewhere that would catch it. And so the continuous rattle of the fucking thing was some unluck the Universe was using to convey that he was not at all in any sort of Right with any Higher Being–except maybe the wrath of an Old Testament God–which David already knew and did not need any further reminding of. The weight of all the dark head-clouds and That Fucking Rattle! made David conscious of his own weight, breathing, blinking, and etc. so David was not only having to endure the rattle, but now his body was on manual so to speak and his clothes suddenly felt like they didn't belong on his skin. Hell, his skin didn’t even feel like it belonged on his skin. David was thinking that his car couldn't make it another fifteen minutes no matter how much he could wish or how many positive psychic waves he could muster. He felt the very slight heft inside the jacket pocket of his puffy navy-blue windbreaker that contained a white flick-lighter that was maybe half used-up and covered in dark-gray fingerprints from David’s unwashed fingers, a dark, snot-green pipe that had snowflake-like yellow circles made of who-knows-what deep in the glass, and a fairly decently sized, now-half-empty baggie of methamphetamine, which was why David was not exhausted at all whatsoever. Far from it, or so he told himself.

It is 3:41 now. David’s anticipation of his next hit is certainly not helping his already shot nerves and if David was not white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel and trying to tune the harsh static of his mind to a cohesive image of Mary crying and supplicating and begging for her life before finally admitting that she really truly did cause everything and a little mental cut to her explaining she never should have left David between sobs while his hand (not shaking or scabbed over at all in his imagination), then he would be working his hands to that puffy navy-blue windbreaker pocket to start working on a few more hits which would be almost as perfectly sweet as Mary’s tears when he finally caught her… Needless to say, it would not be very good for his hands to leave the steering wheel to prepare a bowl. Even more so now because David was careening up these black hills like a tangent line and couldn't see more than 15-30 feet in front of him with his brights on, which was just far enough to see Mary’s sputtering, lurching blackish-grayish car ninety percent of the time, barring the ten percent when she would sail down the hill in front of him and he was filled for the briefest of moments with a dread that when he came down the hill, she would be gone. She would have disappeared into thin air. But of course, before David could even get down the hill, he would always see her headlights shining up the next one. And every time he would see the dented ass-end of her car carooming into view, a well-muscled hand that crawled out of his soul and into the deep, red insides of his chest would let go of his throbbing heart. The feeling was half because he knew then she could not get away from him but also because the sight of her always stirred something inside of him for a brief second which felt either like falling from a great height or a white dove soaring across a huge distance or maybe both. David was not entirely sure which.

The little thin-legged spider deep in the ancient-reptilian part of his brain was pulling on some string of neurons that was making him want that next hit almost more than he wanted Mary but Justtt…Not Quite There, Spider, and better luck next time. All the hills are so wide and huge. David thinks they must be in one of the Dakotas or something. David also thinks that having driven to the Dakotas is Impossible but he’s not certain. A Bump! made the gun rattle again and he had forgotten about That Fucking Rattle, GODDAMMIT! And now the rattle and the feeling of his own weight and skin and blinking was only punctuated by a feeling of some slime and grit on his teeth, the probing tongue in his mouth almost feeling one wiggle here and there which lead David to the fear of them f a l l i n g right out. Tooth decay is not an entirely unwarranted fear for a methamphetamine addict, but certainly an unwelcome one for David, especially now. He could see mental images of himself gap toothed or with those awful little black nubs and FINALLY!

Her car sputtered into a slide down the next hill and stopped finally when it couldn't coast up the next hill. Within seconds, her feet were already smacking the poorly-paved, desolate highway. David thought her huge eyes must be scanning for any sign of life to no avail, searching for anything else. David was leaning over, frantically scratching at the approximate location of the glove-box handle and not even looking as his car lurches forward and veers off the empty highway into the headlight-lit wastes all around him. He pretty much pries the glove-box open and he almost forgets to put the car in park before he’s crawling awkwardly over the center console, the pistol pressed into David’s sweat-drenched gut, which would not bloom into yellowish-purple bruises and howl and ache until much later when David was really coming off the meth. David throws the door open with his scab-covered arm and hops out of the passenger side and fires into the vast expanse of black sky in front of the still running Mary who stops so suddenly the inertia brings her to her knees before the scream fully leaves her throat and claws its way into the empty night air.

David can hear her sobs from 30 yards away as he runs best as he can, legs many hours stiff from the driving and muscles tense from the meth and the everything. His eyes bore into the cowering Mary, hands over the back of her tousled hair. His finger twitches just a little. David cannot do it. David has absolutely no idea what is going to happen now. David knows only that there is no scenario in which it is good or what he wants; only that he loves her.