UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “In the Process of Disappearing .”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This story is a prequel to the events in issue 1 of IN MAPS & LEGENDS. I’m publishing it for the first time right here, now that our first 9-issue storyline for MAPS is complete, as of this week.

More details at the MAPS website. Enjoy!

In the Process of Disappearing

“So that’s it? You’re just ending it like that? At a freakin’ Hardees, Kait?”

Looking down at her tray of cooling fries and the untouched chicken sandwich , along with the wreckage of greasy papers and cardboard strewn across Jeremy’s tray, not to mention Jeremy himself—his shocked face growing red across from her—Kait realized that this was all a really, really bad idea.

But when do you ever have a roadmap for breaking up with someone?

This was way overdue, she thought, reaching out a hand for poor Jeremy before he made an even bigger scene than he was currently making.

“It’s because I haven’t made it yet, isn’t it?” Jeremy avoided her touch and scrubbed his unshaven cheek with a dry, scratching sound. His dishwater-blonde hair now hung in his face, and with the dazed look on his face, he looked more like Shaggy from Scooby Doo than the handsome guy with the fire in his eyes she used to know.

And there was something else about him lately. The way he stared off into the distance while she talked to him. Like he wasn’t really there. As if he were in the process of disappearing.

“No Jeremy,” she said at last. “That’s got nothing to do with it at all.”

“Right,” he shot back, staring at the greasy, torn papers on his tray. “Right.”

Poor Jeremy, Kait thought, and then she stopped that train of thought. I never used to think of him that way. Back when he was fun and full of stories—at least fifty percent of them true, as far as I could make out. I used to enjoy trying to figure out which were which. But not anymore.

“You’ve been beating yourself up so much the past few months,” she began, determined to set things straight before he completely fell apart. “I can’t keep defending you from yourself. I know your friends from grad school are getting agents and contracts and all that. But from what I’ve seen of the publishing industry with my job, it’s pretty cutthroat. Your time will come.”

“Oh God,” Jeremy said, running a hand through his lank hair, making it stick up at wild angles. “If I’d just sold that novella, or that chapbook of poems, this wouldn’t be happening…”

He’s not hearing a word I’m saying, Kait thought. She fought the urge to pick up her tray and smack him over the head with it.

“No,” she said. “It’s what you’re letting happen to yourself. You’re giving up on yourself, right when you’re so close. And—” she took a deep breath “—I think you’re drinking too much.”

Jeremy sat up straight at that, eyes wide.  Kait half-expected him to say “Zoinks!” just like Shaggy in the cartoons. But he just opened and closed his mouth twice, and then swiped his tray off the table. As it clattered to the floor, he pushed himself up out of his chair and stood.

“This,” he said, one hand on the table, the other squashing her chicken sandwich flat, “is the last time you’ll ever see me, Kaitlin.”

* * * * *

By the time she got back to the House almost half an hour later, Kait was starving.

She was also feeling shaky from crying all the way home, not so much for the scene in the restaurant. It’s the loss, she realized, of my initial vision of him as someone who’d let me into his world and teach me all the wonderful things about his life. And then I could let him into mine and do the same for him. We started off that way, but things got sidetracked somewhere.

And he was the only guy I’d dated since moving here that I’d told about Grandpa.

“Wish I hadn’t told Jeremy about him now,” Kait mumbled as she pulled into the gravel drive leading up to the big brick two-story building set back a hundred feet from Jones Ferry Road.

Rubbing her growling belly, she walked around the wide black boulder poking up out of the brown grass ten feet from the north entrance to the House. If it hadn’t been mid-July and ninety-something out here, she would’ve taken a seat on that boulder and waited for LaVonne to get back from her dance class. But the twenty-foot-wide rock—which they’d nicknamed Behemoth’s Knuckle for the way it jutted up out of the ground, like part of a massive fist—would be hot to the touch from the blazing Carolina sun beating down on it.

Inside, Kait thought, to the AC and whatever’s in my fridge.

Out of habit, she patted the Knuckle for luck, on her way to the second floor of the red-bricked, barn-like House that had been broken up into sixteen apartments. The black rock felt hot enough to cause blisters if she held her hand there for more than a second.

She saw the blue plastic bucket, like the kind a kid would use at the beach to collect shells, as soon as she made it to the top of the steps. A bottle stuck out of the top, and half of the ice in the bucket had already melted, leaving drops of water on the ground in the stifling hallway.

A bottle of Prosecco. Chilled.

“LaVonne,” Kait whispered.

A weight lifted from her shoulders, then, as she grabbed the bucket and brought it sloshing down the hall to LaVonne’s apartment.

Her friend’s door was open, and happy Cuban music—all trumpets and guitars and whooping and hollering—spilled down the narrow apartment hallway. The music competed against the clanking hum of the room’s AC window unit.

“La,” Kait called out, brandishing the bottle of bubbly wine, “you shouldn’t have.”

“Oh yeah I should’ve,” LaVonne said from the bright blue interior of her narrow apartment. She had just blown out the match she’d used to light a trio of red candles, and a trail of smoke drifted from the match up to her dark brown face. La was tall and thin, a dancer, and Kait felt short and pudgy in her presence, though she’d never dare admit that to her friend of over five years.

“I just had my talk with—”

“Don’t say his name in my place,” LaVonne said. “We’re not talking about him today. This is all about you. I skipped my dance class for you, so don’t cross me, girl.”

So Kait spent the rest of her afternoon ignoring her deadlines for work and talking to LaVonne. I haven’t spent near enough time with La since I met Jeremy, she thought. And here she is, letting my blab on about my maps and hiking and my life.

“So,” LaVonne said after turning down her music and settling back onto her creaking papasan. “Where you gonna go now?”

Kait sat up straight, surprised by the question. She’d been half-dozing, thinking about the look of shock on the face of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named-Here back at Hardees. The two tall windows of LaVonne’s combination living room and kitchen had darkened as they chatted.

“Go?” Kait said in wavering voice. She really wished she’d eaten something since breakfast hours ago. “What’re you talkin’ ’bout? I’m not going anywhere.”

She’d lived here, in the comfortably familiar surroundings of the House, ever since her senior year of college at UNC. Buts something about the events of today, even touching the burning hot surface of Behemoth’s Knuckle, felt like a chapter ending. In the books she drew maps for and illustrated for her job, the hero would be ready to head off on the big adventure in the following chapter.

“Leases come due next month on the fifteenth. You gonna stay here another year, and deal with having to drive fifteen minutes just to get to Chapel Hill and civilization?”

“I was just gonna renew for another year,” Kait said. “Why not?”

Waste another year, Kait thought. Why not?

“Well, I’ve got something in the works,” LaVonne said. “A touring company wants to take me on, as a backup dancer. Go figure, huh? I have to do this, before I’m an old lady of thirty. Only four years to go, y’ know?”

“Yeah, ya Grandma,” Kait said, laughing, though her vision was doubling on her.

Leaving me? LaVonne? Just like…

“Hey, you’re the one who turned twenty-seven this year.”

“Grandma…” Kait said, then her stomach lurched. No. Don’t want to think about him again. Not Grandma—never knew her—but… Grandpa. God. After all these years, why did he have to pop into my head today, of all days? And for the second time, too.

“Kait?” LaVonne kicked her way smoothly to her feet after she got a good look at Kait’s face. “Hold on, girlfriend. You need some carbs. Something to soak up all that vino. I got ya. Just don’t lose it on my new rug, ‘kay?”

As LaVonne rustled through plastic bags of snack food in her kitchen a few feet away, Kait closed her eyes and felt herself falling back through time, to the day Mom called her about Grandpa, and how they’d given up the searches for him after five days. And Mom had decided not to tell Kait anything about it until it was way too late.

“Did you check the mountains?” Kait had asked. “The remote ones, the ones off the map? Deep in the Smokies. I’ll bet he’s there, hunkered down. He’s got to be there.”

But no one wanted to listen. Thinking about it now, she felt just as furious as she’d been that day almost eight years ago when Mom told her Grandpa was gone. All they found was his walking stick, broken, and his beatup brown hat.

“Gone,” Kait mumbled, and she opened her eyes. Instead of Mom’s cramped and smoky double-wide back in Cherokee, she was back in LaVonne’s narrow living room, three inches away from her best friend. LaVonne was holding a bag of kettle chips under Kait’s nose.

“Sorry,” Kait mumbled. “Just spacing off for a second.”

“Don’t worry ’bout it. Just eat something. Then you can tell me all about it.”

Kait chomped down on a chip. The crunch and the taste of the salt helped wake her up and bring her out of the fog of the past.

“Nah. I’ve gotta get… some work done. It’s due by Friday. Don’t work, don’t get paid.”

“They need to pay you more for what you do. I’ve seen your maps and your covers. You need to push for more money so you can move out of this dump and start living your life.”

This dump? Kait thought. But I love it here. The House backed up to miles of pine trees, gnarled oaks, and stubborn kudzu, with trails and paths cutting through the woods like overlapping ribbons. Kait knew each path by heart after just one hike on it—Grandpa had taught her that little trick. They’d hiked almost every day together from the moment she was five up until the day she left Cherokee for Chapel Hill.

Thinking of Grandpa in his old gray-black jeans and his goofy brown hat with the pointy brim—the clothes he was wearing on the last day she saw him—Kait smiled.

“This place is my home,” she said. “This big old House, and all the cool people who live here. And anyway. Where else am I gonna go? Back home and live with Mom?”

“I know,” LaVonne said, nodding. “But you need to get out. You never have adventures anymore. All you do is work and illustrate made-up adventures from the books you do for work. At least Jeremy used to take you out and go places for his so-called research.”

“Not supposed to talk ’bout him—” Kait tried to interject, but La talked over her.

“You’re wasting away in that apartment. It’s not healthy. I worry about you.”

Kait nodded and pulled herself to her feet with a flush of anger and a rush of blood to hear head. I already have a mother, she wanted to say.

“I really do have to go,” she said instead. Next thing she knew, LaVonne was hugging her hard enough to knock the air from Kait’s lungs.

“I’m gonna miss you,” La said into Kait’s long black hair. “Wish you could come along somehow. I’d pack you in my overnight bag if I could.”

“I know.” Kait blinked back sudden tears. “I’ll miss you too. But this is your big chance.”

Staggering back to her place two doors down, Kait smiled at the drunken, hot tears on her cheeks. I’ve run the whole gamut of emotions today. I think that’s enough adventure in my book.

Armed with a large glass of water and her best inking pen, Kait sat down at last at her second-hand kitchen table and waited for her head to stop spinning. She gazed at the four-foot square piece of off-white cardstock where she’d been inking in the gray pencil marks of a map of another world. She had only one small corner of the map done, and less than two days before she had to scan it at Kinko’s and send it off to New York City.

Emotions and adventures are great and all, she thought, but deadlines are deadlines. My bills aren’t gonna pay themselves.

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook from Amazon or Smashwords.