Fingerless Gloves by Nick Orsini Read Free Book Online

phases: never thinking I’d date again, deep self-loathing, self-doubt, anger, depression, introversion, etc. I used to think those things were reserved for the kids in high school who broke up with their significant other right before college started. I read about breaking up in books and saw it happen to actors and actresses in movies. I even saw it happen to other kids in my town…it was this foreign thing. How could anyone ever really feel bad enough to become a hermit or drink themselves into oblivion. Now, at 25, I can tell you that you never stop feeling those things after a breakup or a divorce or whatever forces itself between you and love. You might not harm yourself or anyone else, but the mark stays there. It’s like stitches in the back of your throat: they dissolve and you might not ever have a scar, but you’ll never forget the moment you first heard that you had to get stitches…in the back of your mouth…and just how terrifying even a common medical procedure can be. Breaking up with Beth Fallow was like getting my tonsils out: people felt bad enough to feed me pudding, and eventually I healed…but I could still tell you exactly what was on television while I lay bedded up in the outpatient section of the hospital.
    Beth was working as a substitute teacher in another town’s school district. Her dream, she used to say while staring up at the ceiling, was to build houses in Third-World countries. Since college, I guess that dream had morphed into her teaching second graders. I know for a fact that every Sunday, she looks at the JobSearcher insert in the newspaper to try to find a staff position in some school district, anywhere in the state. Those jobs are few and far between…hell, considering the overall ratio and the way things have panned out, most professions and professionals fall somewhere between “under” and “un” employed. I imagine her dressed like a teacher, in some generic clothes from a department store…slacks and a blouse …hair pulled back and up …or whatever it is that girls do with their hair. The thought of her like this makes me a bit sad, as if someone really extraordinary were being folded up into a paper football and slid across a table, hoping to catch and stop on an edge. Beth and I speak now and again, maybe once or twice every handful of months to catch up. A phone call from her was still unusual and, more often than not, would either give me the feeling like severed hands were crawling up my spine or that my heart had some air caught in the valves. Given the fact that I couldn’t see the caller-ID on the screen, I answered.
    “I didn’t look great, but I’m sure it wasn’t terrible. James got rushed to the hospital and I’m trying...well… I tried to find out what happened, but I couldn’t. I smoked…ok, I smoked and got a burrito. I’m eating it in our high school parking lot.” This ramble would have continued on and on into the night had she not interrupted me.
    “You’re stoned when your best friend is in the hospital? What the hell, Anton? Can you just stay at the high school? I’m coming over.”  

When I closed my cell phone, my eyes adjusted their focus and I was able to read “call ended” and then, once the home screen lit up: “9:25pm.” The burrito and taco wrappers were strewn on the passenger seat and my mouth was still on fire. I had no idea how I was supposed to talk to Beth when I couldn’t, in reality, feel my lips. I was parked in the center of a parking lot designed to hold everyone who makes a high school run according to plan including faculty, students, janitors, secretaries, and the whole rest of it. As I sat behind the wheel, slouched as low as the steering wheel would allow, with the defroster on for no apparent reason, I watched as deer chewed things off the ground, ignoring the sound of my idling truck. The deer wandered around, flipped their tails in circles, stood on impossibly thin legs and clunky hooves, and got