Oliver Benjamin
The battery was dead but he managed to push the car out by
himself and jumpstart it. No one saw the antique Rolls-Royce pull
out of the garage and purr down the street. Bean tried to figure out
where to go. His plane tickets were now worthless. The whole world
had seen his face on television. Leona, their only ally, had become
their enemy.
There was one place he knew he could lay low. The graveyard. He
used to go there with her sometimes. He still had a key. One of the
only keys he had ever owned.
He drove cautiously down the lonely metropolis formerly full of
people, through the empty streets of Hollywood studded only with
fire crews and news reporters, through billowing clouds of smoke
and fear. Even the junkies and criminals seemed to be off the street.
Civilization, it appeared, had been wiped out. Arriving at the
graveyard, he parked his car beside the orange metal door.
The skeleton key slipped easily into the lock and he pushed the
barrier open wide. A squirrel stood before him, chomping on an
acorn. Bean hurled a pocket knife at it, pinning it to the soil. One
would not soon go hungry in this garden of the dead. He took the
acorn out of the dying squirrel’s paw, tossed it in his mouth and
looked around. Nothing had changed. This was this place where he
used to love her sometimes. Where they sometimes hid from the law
together.
Where, he was surprised to discover, they were doing so again.
“Holy…” Bean exclaimed. He could see her perfect breasts, her
perfectly flat stomach, her pallid face just above the waterline. Her
hair moved about like an enormous spiraling galaxy, her skin
uncharacteristically white.
Bean took his clothes off and descended into the melancholy
swimming hole, washing the dried blood from his face before
greeting her. He put a hand on her head, held her hair. She opened
her eyes and looked up at him calmly, as if fully expecting him to be
there. The toad she once thought a prince.
“Bean,” she said.
“Sprout,” he replied, “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, “Just waiting to drown.”
‘Well you’ve picked a good place to do it,” he said. Saline leaked
freely from her inflamed eyes, threatening to turn the small pond
into a dead sea.
“You look like shit,” he said.
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