Imagine a bomb chained to your wrist.
It’s been there most of your life, a noise akin to a heart monitor sounding day and night. A countdown. A countdown, by the way, that you can’t see. Look at your bomb, hold it up like a watch. All that’ll stare back at you is a blinking red light and that barking beep to accompany it. They are reminders that this bomb will go off. You just don’t know when.
That’s what waiting to die is like.
A bomb sifts through your veins by the name of illness.
You cannot unhinge it. You cannot destroy it. You cannot run from it.
Time, Disease, and Death are rueful mechanics that way. They enjoy crafting nooses out of fear, and they love playing games. Shadows their dresses, they curve over your shoulders with eerie fingers coaxing you into the dark, taking your body, your mind, and anything they please with it.
Time, Disease, and Death are the greatest thieves in the world.
Or they were.
Then we came along.
“Now,” Sony says, wearing sunglasses with a price tag still dangling from her temple.
“Now?” Neo looks up from his book. He raises a lip in disgust, the mere thought of action off-putting.
“Now,” Sony repeats, chin up, chest high, like the captain of a ship heading to war. “I’m going in.”
“Won’t we get caught?” I ask, looking around the gas station empty of all but three idiots and the register attendant flipping through magazines.
“We’re definitely getting caught,” Neo says. He shuts the book only for Sony to smirk down at him through the peripheral of her soon-to-be-stolen sunglasses.
“Why would we get caught?” she teases.
Neo snorts. “We always get caught.”
“Today is different. Today is on our side,” Sony proclaims, taking a breath, deep and dramatic. “Can’t you taste it, Neo? How sweet the air is?”
“We’re in a candy aisle, you idiot!” Neo’s wheelchair creaks when he throws his head back to look at me. “Sam. Tell her she’s an idiot.”
I would, but I value my life.
“Um, no–”
“Sony, you’re an idiot,” Neo says, grabbing his pen and slamming it onto the notebook page in his lap, scribbling 4:05 pm: Sony is an idiot.
Neo is our scribe- the one who records our great deeds. Granted, he didn’t exactly agree to the title. He didn’t even agree to come along on this mission. But when your spine is hook-shaped, you can’t escape the shackles of friendship. The wheelchair groans when I pull it just out of Sony’s reach.
“It’s a wonder you need back surgery at all, baby.” Sony doesn’t have a title per se. She’s the giver of titles, our leader, doubling as the devil on my shoulder. With hair the color of fire, she wears nothing but toothy, shameless grins. “That stick up your ass could surely serve as a spine, no?”
“You talk a lot of shit for someone who can’t go up a flight of stairs,” Neo growls. I pull his wheelchair a little further back.
“It’s a gift,” Sony sighs, her one lung filled with ambition. “Now watch me work, and don’t break my concentration.”
Neo and I watch as Sony marches to the front counter, her dirty white sneakers squeaking against the tiles. The devil doesn’t forget to sneak a lollipop into her back pocket on the way.
Neo grumbles, “Klepto.”
“Excuse me!” Sony puts her arm straight up over her head, waving her hand around in front of the cashier. He gives her a sidelong glance that becomes a double-take.
Sony’s pretty. The kind of pretty that’s brutal, bright-eyed, and heavy-handed. But I’m guessing his stares have more to do with the breathing tubes trailing the space under her nose and around her cheeks.
The cigarette box she points to behind the counter just digs her grave.
“Just this, please,” Sony says.
“Miss, I–” the gas station attendant interrupts himself, looking at the cigarettes and then back at her. “Are you sure? I don’t think I could give these to you in good conscience.”
“He’s staring at her chest in good conscience,” Neo bites like he’s about to chew on the fist holding his head up.
“Oh, no, sir, they’re not for me- um,” Sony recoils, dipping her head. “My friends and I, we–” The devil is quick to tears. She presses a hand to her lips. “We don’t know how much time we have left. Neo, the boy there. He has to get surgery tomorrow. Cancer.”
She points over her shoulder to Neo and me, the attendant making eye contact with us. Neo and I instantly look away. Neo goes so far as to pretend he’s browsing for chewing gum by looking at the ingredients on the back.
Sony sniffles dry air and wipes at tears that haven’t fallen. “We just wanted to go to the roof like old times, rebel a little,” she says, shrugging her shoulders, laughing at herself. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t make it. He’s such a good soul. He lost his parents in a fire you know, and his puppy! I–”
“Okay, okay!” The cashier grabs the cigarettes from the back and shoves them forward. “Just take them. Go on.”
“Why, thank you,” Sony chirps, taking them without a second thought and prancing out the door.
In shock that even worked, Neo and I chase after her. He manages to swipe a bag of gummy bears, tucking it between his leg and the armrest. Once we’re out and the door shuts behind us, we both exhale our jitters onto the sidewalk while Sony takes giddy steps.
Neo does as he’s bid, writing in the notebook, 4:07 pm: The idiot has successfully conned a boob looker into giving her free cigarettes.
Sony flips the pack in the air and catches it in her palm. “What a sucker.”
“I don’t have cancer,” Neo says.
“No, you don’t. But cancer just saved us twenty bucks, which is the only good thing it’ll be doing anytime soon.”
“Sony,” I whine.
“What? The cancer kids love me. They always laugh when I run after them and keel over from lack of air. Quid pro quo, yeah?”
“You sure they weren’t crying?” Neo says.
“Quid- pro- quo?” I ask, syllables broken.
You’ll come to learn I’m not well versed in commonalities, things everybody knows. Sarcasm, irony, idioms, sports. Such complex things elude me till Neo explains.
“It means something for something in Latin,” he says. Neo knows everything.
“Yeah!” Sony chimes in, making all sorts of motions with her arms. “Like when you kill somebody, so they kill you. Like karma! That’s how quid pro quo works.”
I look at Neo. “Is it?”
“It isn’t. Is there a reason I had to be here for this?” he asks, his wheelchair suddenly creaking, the weight disturbed by something slipped into the cubby beneath it. Neo’s brows crinkle. He turns as much as his back will allow, looking down to see a case of beer bottles hidden beneath his seat.
Behind Neo’s wheelchair, our mission’s brawn has arrived. He looks more man than boy, tall and beautiful, dark skin and hair, a skyscraper really. With his hands tucked in his pockets, he gently shoves the six-pack further into its hiding place with his foot.
C. Coeur. His mother is French, his father Haitian, both pretentious namers. Coeur means heart, which isn’t fitting. C’s heart is broken. Literally. He’s also the worst thief in our bunch. C is kind. Kind to the point of paying for things we’ve stolen. He used his brother’s ID to get the beer, but the lack of guilt in his eyes means he most definitely paid for it.
“How’d it go?” he asks, stationed at Neo’s handles.
Sony’s quick to show off her spoils.
“I saved twenty bucks with cancer!”
C cocks his head to the side. “On cigarettes?”
“And gummy bears,” I say. Neo tosses the bag over his shoulder into C’s chest.
“C’mon, C.” Sony puts her hands on her hips. “What would we be without irony but boring cliches, yeah?”
“Not using a wheelchair patient as a mule?” Neo tries to roll himself away, but C holds onto the back like you’d hold a shirt collar.
Neo rolls his eyes. He takes out another notebook from the side pocket, this one with the front torn off. As we start making our way across the street, back home, he adds, one by one, today’s conquests to our Hit List.
Cigarettes (the cool ones in bond movies.)
Beer
A lollipop and crappy sunglasses
Gummy bears
An afternoon outside
A heaping pile of jitters
We’ve only been stealing for a short time, Neo, Sony, C, and I. It’s been years since they’ve been in and out of the hospital, but it hasn’t been long since we became full-fledged thieves.
When Neo, Sony, and C go home, they don’t go home for long. Disease is greedy. It takes pieces of you till you no longer recognize yourself, and Neo, C, and Sony don’t recognize themselves outside of the hospital anymore.
Whether you’re sick or not, the night creates mirrors out of windows. In the past, it showed my friends images of corpses in the glass: skeletons with bones unwrapped by flesh, organs falling through their ribcage, blood seeping from the mouth. They trembled at the foretelling, their fingertips grazing the surface that entranced them. Diagnoses, pills, needles, and so many new mirrors they never meant to find encroached on their lives. Their reflections became their realities.
So rather than meet the new versions of themselves made vulnerable by the beds they slept in and the gowns they wore, my friends turned off the lights. They climbed a staircase and met on a rooftop. They let their fingertips graze the sky, no barrier to stop them from touching the stars.
Let’s steal the world, Sony said. Even with a low burning flame, she was brave. Let’s steal everything we can before we go.
Everything? C asked.
Everything.
Everything’s a long list, Neo said.
Time, disease, and death steal everything. I said. Why don’t we steal some of it back?
That was the day our Hit List was born.
So far, everything isn’t ours yet.
I lied to you back there. It turns out we’re quite terrible thieves.
Stealing is an art form, and we’ve yet to learn how to stroke the brush. Neo’s too sarcastic to woo strangers, too grouchy. Sony’s a wildfire, so loud it’s impossible to hide from justice. C is too elsewhere, always wrapped up in headphones and Neo’s poetry.
But it doesn’t stop us from trying.
“Baby, you are a pillar,” Sony says. The hospital building across the street looks down at her like a scolding parent. Sony ignores it, pride and comradery licking the underside of her teeth. “Without you, the mission would fall apart. Who else would keep track of our glorious histories?”
“Plus, you make a great shopping cart,” C adds, petting his head.
Neo smacks him away. “Ableist.”
“Cheer up, Neo!” Sony pats his back. “They’re sticking a metal rod in your body tomorrow.”
“Look Coeur, traffic.” Neo groans, pointing at the road. “Push me into it.”
Too busy chewing to speak, C shoves a handful of candy into Neo’s mouth before we make our way home.
Sony jumps the white lines of the crosswalk like skipping stones over a stream. C pushes Neo right behind her, two ducklings following in a row. I’m the tail end, the narrator. They always reach the finish line before I do.
Neo carries our Hit List in his lap, a glint of light catching on the metal spirals, fleeting like the sun decided to tease it. I look up to find it, staring beyond the line of cars that branch off after the intersection.
My heart drops.
Just past the cars, a river cuts the city in two. Its bridge is all that connects either side. A bridge I’ve known my entire life that creates an ache in my chest. Instead of laughing strangers and children throwing coins into the water, I see snow across the railing. I see the dark swallowing my memories.
Every glance I give that bridge, the sounds of my sobs and the love I lost shake in their graves. I go to look away, leave the past on its own, but something else emerges behind it.
Yellow.
Just a glimpse of it.
The gray cowers, strands of color carried by the river’s breeze. Did the sun descend to earth and decide to spend a day among its subjects?
I crane my neck to get a better look, but there are too many people on the bridge; the couples, the tourists, and the children block my view, and cities are impatient. A honk pulls me back to where I stand, my friends waiting for me just ahead.
“Sam?” C calls.
“Sorry.” I scurry the rest of the way. As we step inside the hospital together, my chin catches on my shoulder, the bridge too far to hurt me. I keep looking back till my reflection ghosts across the glass doors.
“Well, well,” Sony says, lollipop between her teeth. “Look at the smuggler crew returning from a day at sea.” She tucks the cigarettes in her sleeve once we reach the atrium.
It’s an old thing, falsely joyful, as most children’s hospitals are. Fancy balloons and faded color tiles attempt to brighten a space where many enter or leave, feeling dim. There are posters and banners on the walls about treatments and real-life survivor stories, but those are old too, nurses and doctors clocking in and out to complete the scene.
“Now, quick!” Sony says. “Let’s get everything upstairs before–Eric!”
Our floor’s most notorious jailor (nurse), Eric, has a keen sense of timing. He raises a brow at Sony’s tone, his foot tapping away at the ground. His bullshit detector is a honed weapon and when he gets mad, I wouldn’t wish his wrath upon actual prisoners.
“And right under the idiot smuggler’s nose, history repeats itself,” Neo narrates. “Should I say I told you so or rat you out for kidnapping me–” C stuffs more candy into his mouth while I open the book from the side pocket and put it in his face.
“One of you care to tell me where you were?” Eric asks. His under-eye bags and dark hair match in color, his arms crossed on his chest.
“Eric, Eric–first of all–are those new scrubs?” Sony asks, pointing smoothly up and down. “They really bring color to your face–”
“Not you.” Eric puts his hand up, silencing her. Then he looks right at me. “Sam.”
Now I really wish I was invisible.
“Just getting some fresh air?” I say, looking at the ground, scratching the back of my neck.
“Mm,” Eric hums, completely unconvinced. “Did you just forget we have an entire floor dedicated to that?” He’s referring to the gardens.
When Neo’s back still functioned, the four of us would hide in the bushes up there. We made a plan to live our entire lives in the garden and pretend we were woods-people living off wild berries. It worked for about three hours, but then we got hungry and cold, and C was close to tears at being unable to charge his phone to listen to music. We came back covered in mulch and smelled of soil.
Ever since then, Eric hasn’t been too keen on letting us out of sight.
“Well!” Sony almost falters to answer him. “Excuse us for needing a change of scenery.”
“Alright, enough.” Eric swipes his arms through the air, the four of us huddling closer together. “Go upstairs. I’ve got better things to do than tell your parents you went on another escapade. Get!”
When a jailor sets you free, you don’t wait for permission to run.
C hurls Neo’s chair forward as we trot to the elevators. Sony presses the button with the sole of her shoe. Once we reach the top floor, C picks up Neo from his chair, cradling his skinny frame, careful of his spine. From here, we have to travel up stairs to get to the roof. I grab the wheelchair while Sony skips up the steps. Halfway through, C and Sony need a short intermittence.
Sony closes her eyes and leans against the railing. Half her chest rises, deep and quick, but she refuses to open her mouth to breathe. Such an admittance of defeat is not a satisfaction she would give to a mere rise in altitude.
C does the same, Neo’s ear pressed flat to the center of his chest.
“Does it sound like music?” he asks, his voice nearly gone.
“No,” Neo says. “It sounds like thunder.”
“Thunder’s nice.”
“Not when there’s a storm between your ribs.” Neo taps the scars of blood vessels climbing C’s collarbones. “Your veins brew lightning. It’s trying to escape.”
C smiles. “You really are a writer.”
“Yeah.” Neo shifts for balance, ear called back to the beating. “Breathe, Coeur.”
This is ritualistic too. A moment of silence for half a pair of lungs and half a heart.
Sony is the first to open her eyes and start up again. She kicks the door to the rooftop wide open, arms stretched, reaching for the horizons on either end. A whistling tune of an unconvicted criminal leaves her along with a few giddy foot taps.
“We made it!”
“We made it,” I whisper, putting Neo’s chair back down and adjusting the breathing tubes at Sony’s ear. C gently sets Neo down, removing some pieces of paper from his back pocket and handing them to Neo.
“You liked it?” Neo asks.
“Yeah, I did.” Neo and C are creating a novel together. Neo is the writer. C is the inspiration, the reader, the muse, the one with ideas he can’t always put into words.
“But I was wondering,” C says, still reviewing the chapter in his head. “Why do they just give up at the end?”
“What do you mean?” Neo peers over the pages.
“You know, the main character. After they find out their love has been lying all this time, they don’t yell or get angry or throw things like you want them to. They just… stay.”
“That’s the point,” Neo says. “Love is hard to walk away from, even if it hurts.” He absentmindedly caresses the bandage on the inside of his elbow, the cotton still guarding a fresh needle prick. “Try walking away from someone who knows you so well they ruin you. You’ll find yourself wondering how you could love anyone else. And anyway, if I gave you the ending you wanted, you wouldn’t remember it.”
Neo doesn’t just read stories, he holds them. He doesn’t just write stories, he becomes them. Most of the little things he writes ring true, give a certain chill, but then again, most little things he writes get erased or tossed away. That’s how it’s always been.
Sony places a cigarette between Neo’s lips, then another in mine. Gripping the cylinder firmly in his mouth, Neo cups a hand to shield it from the breeze. The lighter flickers till the embers catch Sony’s fire.
We’ve never actually smoked before. Or drank. Neo doesn’t inhale, rather, he observes, as I do, lets the scent tingle his nostrils, and watches the smoke rise, becoming one with the clouds. C and Sony don’t sip the alcohol bubbling at bottle caps. They lick the foam, tongues slapping the roofs of their mouths.
Our forbidden targets were ours the moment they lay in our hands. We’re greedy creatures, but not ungrateful. You don’t have to partake in destruction to admire the weapons.
Neo sniffles, caressing that book that never leaves his side. His copy of Great Expectations. It’s a constant, like a beauty mark or the shape of his nose. And it’s bent at the spine, just like him.
“Do you think people will remember us?” Sony asks, staring at the sky, toying with her tank. C caresses his scars and the lightning in them. Neo shifts protruding bones against his seat.
Injustice or tragedy, my friends are going to die.
So what is there left to do but pretend?
“I don’t know.” They all look at me. “Our ending doesn’t belong to us.”
Sony smiles. “Let’s steal our endings then.”
“That’s why we came up here, right?” C piles on. “We said we’d plan it today. Our great escape from the hospital.” Neo glances his way. The possibility of today, but grander, stirs between us. C shrugs. “What’s stopping us?”
The door creaks open.
“Here we are. You’re not supposed to come up here, but sometimes the kids like to–” Eric’s voice startles us. C nearly breaks his bottle by stepping on it while Neo and I toss our cigarettes so quick we almost set each other’s hands on fire.
The second we’re on our feet and turned around, Eric is already seething, but amidst the chaos, time slows. A familiar melody strikes a single note, turning all heads in the orchestra.
I go silent.
Yellow light emerges behind Eric’s frame.
And a sun hides behind him in the shape of a girl.
