In An Alley Behind It All
by Robert Nazar Arjoyan
You know when you’re on the road and you make a left or a right and then all of a sudden you get stuck behind a car with STUDENT DRIVER plastered on its bumper? How you slow down and break and drive and maybe cuss at them a little? I think this is going to be kind of like that so please, bear with me, huh?
It’s my daughter who’s the writer, OK, and I’d bet good money you know her name. The great horror author, all those scary stories they’re making into scary movies? Bingo, that’s her.
Me? I’m just Hrach. Armenian for eyes of fire. Badass, right? And it fits now, after everything I’ve seen.
My daughter believed I hadn’t read any of her things, but I’ve read them all. Her first to her last. It was better for her thinking I was dumb about her work versus her knowing I hated it. I mean, she knew I hated it, but only broadly. Hated the idea. My parents brought us to Hollywood in 1980 and ever since I’ve been busting my ass, forty plus years I’m busting my ass, and “writer” wasn’t what I wanted for my kid to jot down on forms under OCCUPATION.
But here I am, writing. Stupid. Apooshi mek, as my old man used to holler.
And what am I writing about?
I guess it’s about the corpse.
Like I said up top, the Abelyans immigrated to the United States in 1980. May 1st, in fact. Mom, Pop, one brother, a sister, and me. I was thirteen years old. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if we stayed put, stayed home, one hundred percent none of this would’ve happened, if—
We’re going over one of those bumps, huh, I’m slowing down for no reason. Don’t honk, don’t honk, I’m going.
Let’s speed up. Hollywood High, freshman year.
Even though LA had a big chunk of Armenians in the early eighties, getting acclimated was still hell. Come to a new country, don’t know the language, the customs, nothing, and you’re expected to do homework and get good grades, help the family by getting an after school job with a Downtown jeweler, and mingle with people who look like no one you’ve met before?
It’s a lot.
Hollywood was fucking mean in those days, too, man, I’ll tell you firsthand and free of charge. People think glitz and glamor but really it was guts and garbage. Eh, I figured it out. I hustled, and I didn’t take crap from anybody, not even when they were in my face. Especially not then. If somebody from a different group fucked with an Armenian, it didn’t matter, you tied your Nikes a little tighter and you jumped with both feet kicking. So it was when some Mexican kid swung at this asshole named… I think his name was Panos, and I didn’t like him too much, but that didn’t matter. Armenians, we’re the shit on the shoe of the world, that’s how I see it. Persians, Turks, Russians, and now, what, Mexicans? Fuck that. We stuck together. We had to. Nowadays maybe it’s not as unified as it was, maybe there isn’t a need, maybe Armenians have become more selfish. Damn, I know I have. Jesus, I guess writing can honestly unlock s—
Sorry, sorry. Didn’t signal there, did I? Don’t ding me, we’re back. Vroom!
So this Mexican swings at Panos, Panos swings back, and before you can spit out your sunflower seeds there’s a brawl on the steps of Hollywood High, under the mural of all those smiling celebrities. I get in a few swipes, crack my knuckles on a jaw or two, and some get their swipes at me, but this is LA and Armenians are still pretty new in numbers. Mexicans, though, I mean, we’re in Mexico, really, right? Like Turkey is really Armenia. So there’s a whole lot more of them than us and after a minute or so I just book it down Selma, sprinting east. I look back and see a kid in a torn up Iron Maiden shirt gaining.
One I punched.
Red lights, green lights, cars, no cars. Didn’t matter. I just ran and somehow avoided becoming roadkill. Looking back on it, nothing could’ve touched me that afternoon, I could’ve stopped in the middle of the street and danced Kochari while drivers swerved and killed each other before grazing a black hair on my olive body.
Who knows.
The son of a bitch was getting so close that I could see blood flying from his nose and dotting the angry mummy on his shirt. I was more of a Pink Floyd/Queen/Boney M kinda guy, Iron Maiden wasn’t a thing in Armenia, oh, and Harout Pamboukjian, of course, the Armenian Elvis. He was all over Hollywood then, man, the guy put on one hell of a show—
Not important, my bad. I told you, this is new for me, writing. Ask your daughter to help, you’re thinking. Well, it’s too late for that.
With me still? Good. Let’s keep cruisin’.
Back then we lived in a one bedroom apartment off Gower near the Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, on Harold, and I didn’t want the kid to know that, tell all his buddies, so I cut north to the 101 but this guy wouldn’t quit, man, he was pissed. Motherfucker had whipped out a boxcutter, not a pocketknife, an honest-to-God boxcutter, and it felt like his heat was catching up to me, a sharp rage which would be enough force to push me on the cracked sidewalk and send my face scraping on glass and gravel.
I spotted a tarped gate, the latch up, and just went for it like I was the goddamn landlord. Found myself in a narrow alley between an apartment building and the freeway overpass, another slit in the city littered with junkies and bums. I played hopscotch over bodies sleeping or drugged, hoping the Mexican would trip and break his ankle in this miserable backstreet. So I turned around to see if my wish had come true.
But of course, it was me who tripped.
My feet got tangled in an abandoned tent and I went down hard, the fall broken by a damp mattress. I can’t speak on what the Soviet Union was like for a grownup but I don’t ever recall anything from my childhood remotely as gross as that alley, the smell and sound of that mattress. And I visit Armenia every year without fail, and sure, it’s seen better days, but I’ve never, not even once, been met by anything remotely as base as that alley. I don’t know if that’s about America, or me, or Armenia, or—
Hey, don’t give me the finger like that. Student driver here, remember?
Anyway, I guess the sight of my sorry ass in that sorry place was enough to give my pursuer pause, the bastard doubling over and laughing, calling me a maricon. The disgusting stench was so overwhelming, as was the toll of all that running, that my throat was pumping like a clogged toilet, which, by the way, there was one of those in the alley too. I was gonna spew my cafeteria pizza when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
First I swallowed the vomit, then I swallowed a scream.
There was a corpse under me on the bed. I’m sitting on a man visibly dead.
Not saying he looked like he was dead.
He was dead.
“Off.”
Maman kunem, man, it’s so hard to picture that yolky face, to hear that stale voice, for no reason other than because it’s so easy. Do you get that?
“Off.”
The world I’d come to know from behind my eyes stopped making sense. Everything suddenly looked flat, like scenery on a stage. And I felt as if someone or something from far away was laughing at me, laughing at this.
“OFF.”
Third time’s the charm, so I did what he said.
The Mexican chasing me, his name was Rigoberto Puntilla, I checked in my yearbook, figured I shouldn’t keep calling him that given what happened next.
“Want me to kill him?” he—it?—asked me in Armenian. Satkatsnem?
It was the faintest whisper floating up from black teeth, a rat-chewed tongue barely grazing his vermin lips. The dead man’s cheeks and nose were braced together by the thinnest skin, like parchment paper Mom would use for baking baklava, and these fragile features were sprayed orange by some hoodlum’s flyaway graffiti. He looked like a clown who’d quit.
“I can kill him. That’s all I can do.”
Rigoberto stood upright, his own face as slack as the cadaver’s beside me but ignited by understanding. If the corpse spoke to me in Armenian, I’d wager Puntilla heard that shit in Spanish. My balls shrivel up just contemplating that.
The hanging threat of murder radicalized Rigo so he lunged at me with his boxcutter elongating like some nasty secret nail.
Listen, I’d been in America for about a year, an angry year, and I wasn’t quite yet a man, even though I was supposed to act like one. There wasn’t too much distance between me and the fairy tales I’d grown up on back home, little stories where some guy catches a fish and is granted a wish, stories older than the country I was in now, a country where I’d fallen on a talking skeleton.
“Do it!” I said. “Kill him.”
Rigoberto began to shout his protest, just the start of a sound from the bottom of his throat, and then he dropped as though his spine was plucked loose. Like a blade of grass. I saw dust shoot up at Rigoberto’s impact, only to resettle slowly on his crumpled limbs.
I waited.
Waited for Rigo to move, for the other homeless to react, for my assassin’s follow-up, and as I waited, that pulverizing sense of unreality grinded me hard. But I had the night shift at Sav-On and couldn’t miss it, not for anything, not even this awful mystery. My family needed the pay, of which they let me keep about sixty percent. Not too bad for an Armo in East Hollywood.
Streetlamps flickered on like they were as afraid as I was while traffic overhead kept its turtle’s pace and there in that alley one dead thing had made another dead thing. I looked at the corpse again, hoping for a final word, but he was gone. Whatever had flipped his switch on had already flipped it back off, and as I made my way to the bus stop I saw his starved face imposed on everyone I passed, stained orange by indifferent spray paint.
That was the first time I saw him.
Rigo didn’t come to class on Monday, or Tuesday, or the rest of that week. Me and my wife, ex-wife, we met in La Conte Junior High before going to Hollywood High, but we started dating after the Rigo thing. Elizik loved horror movies and insisted I go with her to all these goddamn things, but I never would. Why should I? And then to have my daughter start writing those novels? You can imagine why what happened happened.
They found Rigo in that alley sooner or later, those details are fuzzy for me, and his death was chalked up to another LA mishap. Shitty kid, shitty city, shitty fate. No police knocked on our door or visited me at work, not a single cop staked out my locker or the Tommy’s Burger I so loved. For the rest of my tenure at Hollywood High — go Sheiks! — I avoided that alley like the plague, even though it pulled at me often. Wouldn’t you? It fucked me up, asleep and awake. But whenever I did feel that powerful pawing, I said to that seduction what the corpse said to me.
Off.
*
1980 became 1984.
We graduated together, me and Elizik, and a year later a priest blessed us husband and wife. Nine months after that, our daughter arrived and turned me into a father, sliding out perfect in every way only to become my great shame. Isn’t that sad? At this point in our lives, we were living in Glendale. A lot of Armenians had begun moving to Glendale from Hollywood, the surrounding hills so reminiscent of our ancient geographies, and while many of us learned how to be American, a good deal of us taught Glendale how to be Armenian.
For a long while there, it was amazing. I started making good money as a real estate agent, Elizik worked as a hospital admin and had ambitions for an MBA, and our daughter was getting excellent grades at school. My people often declare lav asenk, lav linenk. Let’s say all is well and all will be well.
The stuff that happened in the alley? I put it behind me, a memory spackled by adulthood.
Who was Rigo?
Some punk who got too big for his britches.
Fuck Rigo.
No problem.
But I won’t lie, whenever anyone really rubbed me wrong or if my girl came home crying because some little bitch in class made her feel bad, I saw the corpse on the moist mattress, his barely-there face spattered orange like a pumpkin sunning until spring, those wormy lips and that nibbled tongue. I let my mind wander to his miracle, the offer of his single deadly wish.
The second time I saw him was when Elizik kicked me out of the house. This would be a little after our tenth anniversary. So much for lav asenk, lav linenk. My parents had surprised us with a nice shindig, invited my best man, the maid of honor, the whole wedding party, along with a whole bunch of kids that weren’t around a decade prior. Crazy how much life changes in the blink of an eye, how much you see, and how much you stop seeing too, that’s–
Hell, I was doing OK for a second, wasn’t I? Finding my groove in the story, as my daughter used to say. Then I go on the wrong road and get us lost. Back on track.
So yeah, we’d both been cheating around the ten year mark. Who knows who did what first, when, where, blah blah blah. Thing was, the person she was fucking was a pal, and me, I was just seeing hookers. No hang ups with hookers.
One night, man, me and her got into a huge fight and we were seconds away from kicking the shit out of each other so I said fuck it and packed a bag for a room at the Roosevelt. My daughter wasn’t supposed to be awake but she told me years later that she’d heard it all, every scream and curse, and that when she finally did fall asleep she heard it in dreams. Anyway, I’m in the room at the Roosevelt trying to regulate myself, when the cocksucker fucking my wife calls my cell. I don’t answer, I can’t. I’d known this man for a few years. We weren’t best friends, I didn’t really ever have one of those, but we played cards together, smoked cigars, drank. He was a pal, like I said. The call stops then starts up ringing again. It was either answer or have this shithead call all night, so I answered.
“What?”
And that was all I got out. When he started saying sorry, bro, I just hurled the phone across the room and it exploded next to a framed photo of Sinatra. More of an Aznavour guy myself, but that’s neither here nor there. I could feel my temperature rising, and the night was cold, so I bolted downstairs onto Orange Ave. I could see Hollywood High from where I was pacing, just around the bend, their football field lit up bright white. This, coupled with the surging urge to fight, delivered in mint condition a portrait of the alley and the corpse living there.
The seduction came over me, that sour voice from a chink in the city where all natural law was reworked by some other maker’s hand. It’d be about a thirty minute walk, tops. Twenty five if I moved fast.
So I moved fast.
East on Hollywood, my swiveling shadow manipulated by the ugly light of every passing lamp, leading then following. I sprang over a vagrant masturbating next to the star of Orson Welles, then I turned left on Argyle, the memory of my marathon with Rigoberto projecting itself ghostlike on the path. I was certain that if I looked back, he’d be trailing me, lolling like a limp puppet on long strings, unspined.
Well, well, I’m getting the idea of this writing crap, huh? Maybe I see where my daughter got all that talent.
I saw the gate, no longer tarped, and feared the alley had been filled in or built on, but no, it was still a shitass alley. How else would it draw me back? I pushed open the creaking gate and I felt like a character in one of my daughter’s stories. She started young, too young if you ask me, thanks to none other than Elizik. The only source of illumination in the alley was freeway ambience from overhead, a dirty mix of red and white and yellow. I squinted and saw many mattresses, many bums, but…
But he wasn’t there.
I remember sighing and immediately regretting it, the foulness of that forgotten place cramming itself into my lungs. Walking back to the Roosevelt did not sound appealing, so I called a cab from a pay phone near the Hollywood Records building, and while I waited for my ride, I interrogated myself. Was I really ready to have that man killed?
No, to kill him.
The son of a cunt had made me a cuckold, that’s no small thing.
So I wrestled with the question in the taxi’s sticky backseat, turned it over while I rode the musty elevator to my room, and finally arrived at that crucial YES when I touched the doorknob. I felt content, like a hunter who has an animal in his sights but doesn’t pull the trigger.
Sleep appetized me at that moment, a quick shower then some TV in my king bed before knocking out. That’s how I saw myself back then, see, a king. A damn king. Well, now I know better, don’t I? I ain’t a king.
I’m just damned.
When the door opened, I was slammed by a wall of breath so horrible that the vomit I’d held back twenty some years ago burst out of my mouth in stinking projectiles. I saw the bed and instead of a neat, housekept job, there was only a moldy, unkempt mattress managed by a shifting cloud of flies. Reposing on that toxic hazard was my corpse, his face still speckled spray paint orange. I could imagine his nose and cheeks imploding, just collapsing with a wet slow fold should the flies land there. I prayed for them to leave him be. The corpse’s eyes rolled down in their wide lashless sockets to fix on me kneeling atop the carpet in my puke. And it wasn’t smooth, that southward motion, no, it was akin to a jolting pair of ball bearings desperate for oil. Bright lights from across the street flooded the room but did not find reflection in the corpse’s eyes, those dull, dry, dead eyes.
“Want me to kill him?”
That same question asked in the tone of aid, the decent sort of help anyone would offer a man in need, but delivered by a voice which seemed to emanate from a broken speaker buried in the arid well of the corpse’s mangled throat. And hovering above, I could again hear laughter from far away, the gentle delight of some joker watching their trickery blossom.
“I can kill him. That’s all I can do.”
The first time this thing and I crossed paths, I was an immigrant, my home no longer mine. Now, this second time, I was again without a home. Identical rage, immortal apparently, suffused my veins and spoke for me.
I took a very long shower and by the time I was dressed, the corpse was gone and the room was once more the room. I ordered a hamburger, wolfed it in six bites, and got under the covers.
On this occasion, the police did in fact visit me. They asked me some questions, but they never took me Downtown.
Found out the next day my old pal died fucking Elizik, probably while I was polishing off that burger.
You don’t fuck another man’s wife.
*
The divorce was quick. We split most things down the middle, including our daughter. Elizik kept the place in Glendale and I got a spot in North Hollywood with a pool. One night during an early weekend with me, my daughter and I filled the jets with soap and the whole pool transformed into a giant bubble bath. We couldn’t find each other in all those bubbles!
Oor es, Dad? she giggled.
Where are you, Dad?
Jesus, I don’t deserve a shred of mercy.
And no, I’m not going to apologize for this particular detour because it’s my favorite moment with her, probably the handful of minutes where I was the best dad I’d ever be.
When my daughter later died, I stopped being mad, disappointed. When she died, I wanted to switch places with her. But, like I said earlier, it was too late for that. She’d found her own success, her own life, one that I didn’t care for or approve of, and the fabric of our relationship, more worn with each flowing year, had become as thin as the corpse’s skin when for a third time he asked me if I wanted someone killed.
Elizik had thrown a grand dinner for our daughter’s latest book release. This one had its movie rights sold before it even had a publishing date. Big star and hotshot director, they were at the restaurant too, halfway through filming. I showed up, got wasted, hurled a plate at my grown daughter and left. We were at Carousel in Glendale, just walking distance from the old house, so I shuffled my way there with a spinning head. I think I wanted to go in and trash the place.
Fucking idiot.
As I approached the bridge that spits you out into the suburbs, I saw him, like I knew I would. There was a crevice where the bridge grew out of the hill, a steep slope straight onto the 134 freeway, and the corpse was tucked there on his grimy mattress. I ran across the road and almost got hit by a Beemer, and I truly wish I did. I wish it ran me down and squashed my skull and ripped my sinning tongue free from my hateful mouth.
But I only ever had one wish available to me, and as before, I know I could’ve stopped in the middle of Louise Street and squatted to shit and the car would’ve swerved clean through the stonework of the bridge and sailed to a fiery death before even so much as skimming my droppings. The antic laughter inside the sky wouldn’t want the fun to end, would it?
I made it across the street unscathed and got on my haunches beside the corpse. His face was even more orange than before by virtue of the lampposts haloing us. Drunk sweat slathered my skin, scalp to scrotum. I don’t believe I’d ever seen anything look so thirsty, that poor thing, kept on ice for entertainments beyond any human comprehension. I wasn’t revolted by my corpse anymore, the pus of his eternal wounds like lava in the light. I’d known him longer than I’d known most people in America, most people in my life, period.
“Want me to kill her?”
There was reluctance in his voice, like a gravel crusher that didn’t want to work. Or maybe that’s what I wanted to hear. He coughed maggots.
“I can kill her. That’s all I can do.”
My daughter.
“Yes,” I creeped, quieter than him.
The only reason I didn’t jump off the bridge directly was terror that I’d see her, that she’d be waiting for me, and no matter what I’ve seen, that would be the worst sight of all.
Story goes she just dropped at Carousel in the middle of the dance floor. Elizik blamed me, and she’s not wrong. I didn’t go to the funeral, I haven’t been to her grave. But I have read her books, I have watched her movies, the ones produced after her death.
Why’d I do it?
I think maybe I was mad that she was just playacting at what was terrifying, making up things that don’t really hold a candle to the cold fact of fear. Or maybe I had certain thoughts about what women should do, who they should love, how they should work.
Either way she’s dead because of my bullshit. I killed her, along with two other people.
Soon to be four.
I visited Armenia again, got back just yesterday. I saw the corpse while I was there. In a cemetery, fittingly. I had gone to lay flowers for my grandparents, all four in the ground before we moved to America in 1980, my God what a long time, and there he was on his mattress in a heap of uncut yellow grass. I didn’t even give him a chance to speak. I told him we’d meet on Argyle, the alley where we were first placed in each other’s lives, each other’s deaths. He nodded, but his neck was so weak, the petrified head just hung like fruit on a puny branch, hung as if he were crying.
So, I think my driving course is at its end. Let me put the signal on and pull up to the curb. I’m going to print this out and set it on my desk before driving down to Hollywood. I’ll leave the keys of my Benz on the windshield for some enterprising young man to steal. I’ll push open that gate and go to my corpse. I’ll smile at his orange-studded face while satisfied laughter soundtracks our final meeting – or maybe it won’t, maybe the thing designing such nonsense fates is bored, or itself dead. In any case, it will be the last time my corpse sees me, and it will be the last time I see him, or anything for that matter.
My eyes of flame extinguished at last.
*
“Well, what do you think?”
Hrach looked up from the iPad, plump fingerprints impressed upon the screen, and searched for a response. Nareen sat on the couch with her legs tucked under her fanny in the fashion of a fawn.
“Dad?”
“Why— Nareen, you made me kill you.”
“Yeah.”
He waited for more but all she gave him for his patience were shrugged shoulders.
“At least change my name.”
“But then the whole ‘eyes of flame’ thing won’t work.”
Hrach slid his glasses down his nose, a millimeter from tipping and tumbling, and stared daggers. Nareen had been met by this pose before, as if her father could see better without them.
“Hey, well,” she began, pointing at his spectacles, “the character doesn’t wear glasses. That’s something, right? And you and Mom, you guys never cheated on each other.”
“No, but we did separate.”
“And now you’re together again!”
The back-and-forth of Nareen’s preceding nine years had become routine, not unlike brushing teeth in the morning or praying before bed. Wednesdays and every other weekend with Dad, the rest of the time spent with Mom. But now, with her parents reconciled, these past few months with the old trio under a new roof have been anything but routine.
Maybe next semester she would dorm.
“So, I’ll ask again, Nareen: why?”
“It’s a story, Dad. I just… I listen to the story.”
“Listen to the story.”
Hrach clicked his tongue, ran a hand across his tight haircut, and then lived up to his name, as if his eyes were indeed made of stripping fire.
“So basically, if this is what you think of me, why show it?”
Because it’s easier than telling, Nareen wanted to say.
“Do you realize people will know this is me you’re talking about?”
“Who, Dad? What people? It’s just for class, man, relax.”
Nareen scoffed and after a heated passage of seconds, Hrach redirected his scrutiny again to the iPad, to the words there on the screen. He scrolled through Nareen’s pages as his fangs pecked one another.
“Oh, this pool thing,” he said. “That never happened.”
Nareen crinkled her full eyebrows, identical to her father’s. “Yes, it did.”
“When?”
“Actually, let me rephrase that: it almost did, but you didn’t let it happen, so I made it happen.”
The familiar silence allowed Mom’s teleconference to bleed through the unfamiliar walls.
“See? You didn’t kill anybody, you didn’t cheat on Mom, and you didn’t let me have a giant bubble bath pool party. The guy in the story isn’t you. Nothing to worry about.”
Nareen stood, her legs unraveling and shaky.
“Thanks for reading it, I guess.”
“Sure.”
Nareen grabbed the iPad and shoved it into her backpack.
“I have class all day today.”
“What time will you get out?”
“Around ten, but I’m going out with a friend after.”
“Who?”
“A friend, Dad.”
“Woah, I’m just asking. I can’t ask?”
“Not when you don’t like my answer.”
“Oof, lav eli, Nareen, don’t be so sensitive.”
Hrach turned on the TV and began to swipe through shows on Netflix. More his speed, this, versus literature. His character reading Nareen’s books in the story she’d written was just wishful thinking, the abiding hope of any child, mature or juvenile, fictional or real.
“Say bye to Mom for me.”
“Be home by midnight, huh?”
Nareen just wanted to leave, so she agreed. He’d be asleep before then so there was no purpose in arguing.
“Can I give you one note, Nar?”
She halted mid-stride, the little runner by the door bunching up at her sudden stop.
“I think the father/daughter stuff needs work.”
Nareen wondered what being Hrach was like.
She got to UCLA an hour later and read the first part of her story in class. It seemed to drum up interest, oohs and ahhs at the intended spots, so Nareen decided she’d send the story out to some magazines during lunch. Really give it a shot.
“Hang on,” she said to her keyboard-poised fingers.
The father/daughter stuff needs work.
Hrach, the editor.
Nareen scanned her story, and yes, closer to the end, the father/daughter stuff could fatten up some. She ought to really give Hrach a solid excuse to—
“To kill me.”
In many ways, though, she was dead to him. That’s how he made her feel, at least. Rare were the times he championed Nareen, saw her eye to eye and said good job, baby, I love you. His friends’ daughters, they were dating nice Armenian boys, studying to be pharmacists or paralegals, setting tables only to clear them.
Nareen? She liked girls, loathed the kitchen, and was interested in nothing but writing.
Nareen projected herself into the future she’d created, one in which she was partying at Carousel with her troop, marking another giant step forward in her impressive career. She imagined dancing on the floor, Harout Pamboukjian blasting through the speakers, spinning her wrists and propelling her legs, tummy full and heart content. Twirling in a field of giddy light, engulfed in the fever of a lover, her dazzled vision jumping from one happy face to another only to land on a scowl.
Her father.
What else is that but filicide? The insidious drip of venom dissolving even the strongest of skins. A parent’s pride soured to poison.
G’na merri, ari sirem.
Go die, and then I’ll love you.
Christ, Armenians went head over heels for idioms like this. But the worst part was that they bought them whole. Perhaps that’s why the character of Hrach killed her, so that he could finally be able to do what dads are meant to do, even if only in fantasy.
“Want me to kill him?”
Nareen jerked her head up to identify the voice but the dining hall was a blur. How long had she been crying? For a freak second she thought the speaker was her skeleton, that vocal carcass, but it was merely a young man from creative writing standing at a respectful distance.
“What did you just say?”
“Love the way you killed him.”
Nareen glared at the boy, his image clearing as mist burns from a windowpane
“Your writing, the story you read, it was dope— hey, is everything cool?”
“Yes, thank you, sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t fuckin know, man.”
Nareen wiped the stealthy tears and took a huge bite out of a turkey sandwich. Slow down, her mother would say daily, when it was just the two of them. No one’s coming after you. And with Mom, there never was. They’d stroll Blockbuster and Nareen would ever gravitate to the scary section, her and the VHS of IT, two magnets of the same pole, pushing and pulling, repelling and attracting. One Halloween, they rented it and spent three hours with Pennywise and the Losers Club. Next day, Mom gave Nareen her tattered copy of the book. It was the biggest book Nareen had ever held. Nareen wanted some little kid down the line to see her own creations with a similar warring captivation, a battle in which temptation triumphed.
She looked through the story once more, the bottom third, and permitted her fingers to caper across those twenty six chattering letters, a finite system which promised infinity. She drained the venom, alchemized the poison to prose, and felt better in minutes. When she ultimately sent the story out, Nareen rose impermeable.
A horror cinema class followed by philosophy, concluding with Armenian Studies, and there she was, free on a Friday. Nareen ambled to the parking lot, the cool evening refreshed by scents flying from treetops. She looked forward to a late meal with Elsie, lovely Elsie, puzzling out if the similarity to her mother’s own name was a dealbreaker. Elsie, Elizik, Elsie, Elizik, or if her father’s pigheaded perspective would scare Elsie off, kill their fresh relationsh—
Nareen sucked in a scared rush of air, fragrant though it was, for behind a bank of vending machines, around the building’s corner, she could see the edge of a mottled mattress and the shape of movement under a billowing blanket. The lusty boom of Nareen’s heart drowned the world’s hollow orchestra as the diseased bedspread was shucked off entire and an emaciated anatomy was hinted at within those dark folds of night, some kind of inert promise coming to life.
A death wish.
Nareen put one foot in front of the other and lurched toward the haunted scenery, deaf to the scuff of her sneakers, deaf to her shrieking soul, deaf to everything save the sound of fulsome laughter swelling eerie from somewhere far away, far away, in an alley behind it all.
Robert Nazar Arjoyan was born into the Armenian diaspora of Los Angeles. Aside from an arguably ill-advised foray into rock n roll bandery during his late teens, literature and movies were the vying forces of his life. Naz graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and now works as an author and filmmaker. When he isn’t writing, Naz is likely couchbound with a good book, jamming with his fantastic son, gutbust laughing with his wife/best friend, or farting around in the garden with his purple clippers. You can read his stories in Maudlin House, Bullshit Lit, Ghoulish Tales, Cleaver Magazine, Hobart, Roi Fainéant, Apocalypse Confidential, JMWW, Gone Lawn, The Hooghly Review, and River Styx, with more besides and on the way.
Find him at www.arjoyan.com or on socials @RobertArjoyan
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