Ouch!
It hurts so much!
My head is killing me!
The bizarre dream filled with murmurs shattered instantly. Leo Depp, still asleep, felt a throbbing pain in his head as if someone had hit him with a pole — again and again. No, it was more like a sharp object had pierced his temple, twisting it in the process.
Ouch… In his stupor, Leo tried to turn over, hold his head, and sit up, but he couldn't move his limbs. They refused to budge, leaving him completely immobilized and helpless.
Leo struggled to focus and break free from the shackles of darkness and confusion.
After struggling for an unknown time, finally, Leo opened his eyes onto a blur of grey smoke.
He turned to a nearby window, and the moon that could be seen in the frame was blood red.
Slowly he recalled what happened.
'Fuck.'
'What the fuck.'
'Did I die? Is this reincarnation?'
Leo lampooned.
He stared harder at the window. He blinked at it for a moment before he registered that the moon wasn't red, the glass was.
There was some kind of cheap tinted liner stuck on the inside of the pane. He tried to move his head and a sharp stab moved through his right side and stopped him halfway. Ribs. He tried his left leg and it answered with a dull dragging throb that traveled up into his hip. His wrists were bound behind him. His ankles were bound to the legs of a kitchen chair. His phone was gone.
The smell hit him next. Cigarettes. This is where that grey smoke probably came from. Along with cheap perfume. A microwave somewhere was doing whatever microwaves did.
Then the voices.
Two women. They were nearby. He turned his head a careful inch and saw the back of one. Purple hair, stiff, towering. Another at the kitchen counter, pouring something into a coffee cup. Same hair.
The room came into resolution slowly. The apartment was small enough that the kitchen and living room shared a single open space, separated only by a strip of black where the carpet ended. Light purple wallpaper, peeling at the seam by the window. A side table with a doily on it and an ashtray made out of something that had once been a clamshell. A sampler on the wall that read GOD BLESS THIS HOME OR WHATEVER. A floor lamp with a bent shade. A framed photograph above the TV of two women in sashes that he could not, from his angle, read.
Then, Leo spoke calmly, "Where am I?"
The one at the counter, voice like a screen door dragging across gravel, turned, and her face brightened like he'd just complimented her hair. "Apartment, sugar-plum."
"Whose."
"Mine. Ours."
"How long."
"Few hours."
"…Okay."
Leo wished he could rub his head. At this point he wished he could do anything with his body.
He let his eyes close again and let the pain show on his face. Didn't fight any of it. It hurt too much. Then, because the question was actually important to him, he asked, "What time?"
The other one's voice came sharper from somewhere behind him, with the rasp of dishes being rearranged. "Five."
Five AM. Good, it's still Thursday. Tutoring at four. Marge's shoot after. Eleven hours. He could lose two of those to walking and still make it.
'It hurts to breathe. Fuck.'
"…You really are handsome, sugar-plum. Patty was right."
"I didn't say it like that, Selma." Patty's voice, tight, from the kitchen.
"You said 'shame to leave a face like that on the curb.' That's basically what you said."
"Selma. Shut up."
'So I was on the curb. So they hit me, and they decided not to leave me.' Leo groaned. 'And the night had been going so well too. Just my luck.'
…
Selma, the one with the more gravel voice, got the cigarette going off the stove burner and came back into the living room and stood looking down at him with a kind of fond surveying expression.
She was heavy-shouldered, broad-hipped, in a blue dress. Blue slippers. A line of lipstick that had been applied at some point yesterday and not entirely removed. Her hair, the cartoon-tornado of it, was the same purple as her sister's but somehow worse.
"We were at the Lucky Stiff," she announced. "Singles bar."
Patty's voice came flat from the kitchen. "Selma. He doesn't need our life story."
"He asked."
"I didn't," Leo said.
"You were going to. So Patty had three vodka tonics and I had… what did I have, Patty?"
"Too much," Patty called back, evenly.
"Too much. And we're driving home, and you just… walked right out into the road, sugar-plum. You walked right out." With two fingers across the air, she tried to perform the scene of a person stepping off a cliff in a cartoon.
A small, sharp clatter from the kitchen. "You ran the light, Selma."
"And we hit you, and Patty got out and looked at you on the road and she said —"
She paused.
"— 'shame to leave a face like that on the curb.' So we put you in the trunk."
Leo, listening, did not move. He was in disbelief. 'These women are straight psycho. Why was that their first idea?'
He didn't ask another question for a long while. He let them talk around him. He tried to not move much so his pain could subside more.
They argued about whether the eggs were too dry. They argued about whether Selma had let Jub-Jub, who apparently was a pet iguana, out the night before or whether it had been Patty. They argued about whether the man on the news at six was the regular man or a fill-in, and Selma was certain it was a fill-in, and Patty said it was the regular man and his hair was just doing something different, and the argument lasted nine minutes and ended without resolution. Selma claimed the regular man had a wider face. Patty claimed the regular man's face was the same width it had always been and Selma was just looking at the screen sideways from the couch. Selma said she was not looking at the screen sideways. Patty said she was, and then named the angle in degrees, and Selma went quiet for ninety seconds and put a different cigarette in.
Leo couldn't be bothered with most of it. His ribs hurt.
Patty came around the counter with the breakfast plate, which was scrambled eggs, two pieces of toast, and a triangle of cantaloupe. She looked at Leo on the way through. He had not been offered any. She didn't ask if he wanted any. She just set the plate on the coffee table next to her sister and went back into the kitchen for the coffee.
Selma settled onto the couch with the plate in her lap, fork in one hand, cigarette in the other, and looked over at Leo. "You hungry, sugar-plum?"
"Selma," Patty said from the kitchen.
"What. He's a guest."
"He is not a guest."
She forked half the cantaloupe into her mouth and chewed it slowly while looking at him in a way that made Leo not want to know what she was thinking. He kept his face still.
…
The TV came on around eleven-thirty. Channel Six. Selma curled into the couch with a fresh wineglass beside her, the same one she'd been refilling since he had awoken. Patty took the armchair.
'Have they ever stopped drinking since they went out?' Leo felt with the way they drank and smoked they would make great friends with Homer Simpson. The sisters would love him.
On the TV, there was a man with a mullet, a denim jacket, and an exhausted expression. He held up a paperclip, a battery, and a stick of chewing gum.
Leo didn't have much to do. He watched along with them.
He quickly learned the show was complete bullshit. 'How could anyone watch this?'
"That's not how thermite works," Leo said.
Selma turned her head. "Sure it is."
"…No, it's not."
"Sugar-plum, I have watched this episode. He just did it. You saw him do it."
"He used a paperclip."
"And."
"Thermite is iron oxide and aluminum powder. You light it. That's it. There's no battery, there's no paperclip, there's no chewing gum. You take rust, you grind it up with aluminum, you put a magnesium strip on top, you light the magnesium. It burns hot enough to cut through an engine block. That's thermite."
Selma blinked at him slowly. The cigarette had burned down a quarter-inch while he was talking and she had not registered it.
"…Huh."
"Yeah."
"You know a lot about thermite."
"I read."
She kept looking at him for another second, then turned back to the TV with the small smile of private satisfaction. Apparently she liked the feeling of having something explained to her by a man with a nice face. "Well. He made it work anyway."
"He didn't."
"He did. The bridge blew up."
Leo gave up.
He had nothing else to do. He was tied to a chair in a strange apartment with two cigarettes' worth of secondhand smoke now in his lungs and a left leg that was going to need a brace, and the only available activity was talking to whichever of the two sisters answered first. He started asking questions because it was that or stare at the wallpaper, and the wallpaper was already doing enough.
"You watch this every day?"
"Reruns are on channel eight every weekday at eleven. Patty and I watch on lunch sometimes."
"At work."
"At the DMV."
"What time's lunch usually?"
"Eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty."
DMV. Salaried. Same shift, same building. Sisters who lived together, worked together, lunched together. What a locked life.
"How long you been there?"
"Twenty-three years. They put us at the same window for six of those, then they had to move us."
"Why?"
"We got too efficient." She said this with no irony. "People started picking our line on purpose. Backed up the whole branch. They split us up so the other windows wouldn't go bankrupt."
Onscreen, MacGyver did some chewing-gum thing and made some intricate device with some batteries.
Leo took out his grievances on MacGyver since he didn't want to upset his current kidnappers.
"Also wrong," Leo said. "He'd need a 9-volt for that, not a AA."
"Mm."
"You don't care it's wrong."
"He's good-looking, sugar-plum. Doesn't matter."
"You like a confident man."
"I like a smart man." Selma turned her head and looked at him directly, slow, head tilted, the cigarette pointing past her ear. "With good arms. And a face."
She held the look for a while. Patty's eyes, which had been on the show also, flicked up sideways and back down again, pretending like she was not listening for the past ninety seconds.
…
Patty got up, walked to the coffee table, and slid a small plate of crackers and cheese onto it within Leo's eye line but not within his reach. She looked down at him without smiling.
"So you've been asking a lot of questions. Asked about my sister yet?"
"What about her."
"Whether she's married."
"Hadn't gotten there." Leo said sarcastically.
"She's been married three times. Four if you count the annulment. Don't get any ideas."
'I had not been considering it.' Leo wished he could roll his eyes.
Selma, talking around the cigarette, said, "I would absolutely marry him, Patty."
"Selma. Shut up."
"He's polite. He's polite and he's pretty and he's smart. You know how rare that combo is at the Lucky Stiff?"
"I know exactly how rare it is, Selma. I was at the Lucky Stiff last night."
"Right. So."
Patty closed her eyes. "We are not having this conversation."
"Patty, I'm just saying —"
"We are not having this conversation, Selma."
"Patty." Selma sat up a little on the couch, suddenly animated, the wineglass tipping. "Patty, I just… listen, listen. Spousal privilege."
Patty's eyes opened.
"Spousal privilege," Selma repeated. "I've been thinking about it. We hit him driving drunk. And although we could keep him here forever... what if we can't? What happens then? But with spousal privilege, he can't testify against us if he marries one of us. I looked it up. After Disco Stu."
"Selma."
"Patty, we put a man in a trunk."
"I know that."
"I am solving the problem, Patty, like I solved Disco Stu —"
"You did not solve Disco Stu, Selma. You married Disco Stu. That is not a solution."
"And he can't testify against me about anything I did during the marriage, Patty. That is a solution."
Patty was rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Selma. He hasn't agreed to anything. We can't just — Selma! Selma. Get out of that drawer."
Selma was already in the kitchen drawer, rifling. "I think there's a marriage license in here from when I was gonna marry the guy from the bowling alley —"
"That's an application, Selma. You can't even fill it out without him at the courthouse."
Selma deflated with the application halfway out of the drawer. "…oh."
Patty pinched the bridge of her nose harder.
Selma came back over to the couch with the application anyway, set it on the coffee table next to the cantaloupe, and patted Leo's cheek with two fingers. "Don't worry, sugar-plum. We'll figure it out. Maybe later."
"Looking forward to it," Leo said. His voice was perfectly dry. Selma took it as flirting, a smile crept into her cheek.
…
The remaining hour or so passed in a tilting silence. The MacGyver episode ended. A second one began. Selma got a fresh glass of wine. Patty went back to the embroidery hoop and this time actually moved the needle through it twice.
Occasionally, both sisters touched him casually whenever they got up to grab something. Selma running her hand across his shoulders on a trip to the kitchen. Patty straightening his collar with two fingers on a trip back. He kept his face still through both.
"Sugar-plum," Selma said, on her third trip back, "you cold?"
"Yeah."
"Mm. Thought so."
She moved his chair closer to the radiator with one hand on his chest, palm flat, leaning in close enough that he could smell wine and Salem 100s and a base note of cheap drugstore perfume. She did not move away immediately. Patted his chest once, hand flat, and let it linger.
"Comfy?"
"Thanks, Selma."
"You let me know if you need anything else."
Patty, from the chair, watched the whole thing without lifting her head from the embroidery.
Leo was actually thankful because the radiator was eight inches from the kitchen counter, and the kitchen counter held a roll of heavy-duty DMV records twine.
…
Lunch was canned spaghetti, garlic bread, more wine, and even more cigarettes. Selma ate hers from a bowl on the couch. Patty ate hers at the counter standing up. They argued, again, about whether you put butter on the garlic bread before or after toasting. They had been having this argument since forever. Neither side gave ground. The garlic bread was buttered both before and after, separately, by each of them. Leo was not offered any of it.
Patty came over from the kitchen counter and dropped onto the couch next to her sister.
By two PM both sisters were yawning, hard.
It made sense. They had been at the Lucky Stiff until at least eleven the night before. They had then gotten in a car and hit a man and loaded him into the trunk and driven home and dragged him up to the apartment and tied him to a chair, none of which were activities that ended in a regular bedtime. They had been awake when he opened his eyes at five. They had not slept since. They had been smoking and drinking continuously for hours by now, and the last four of those hours had included a heavy lunch and a steady warm draft from the radiator and the white noise of two episodes of MacGyver in a row. By any measure of human biology, Selma and Patty were running on fumes and red wine.
The fumes ran out first.
Selma went first, slumped sideways into the couch cushion with her cigarette burning down between two fingers, mouth open, head against the armrest. Her wineglass was still upright on the coffee table by some miracle of friction. Patty held out longer, until 2:10, then her head tipped back also on the couch.
Leo waited five more minutes to be sure.
Then he started.
He walked the chair backward, half-inch by half-inch, until its back kissed the kitchen counter. Each scoot sent a fresh jolt through his ribs that pulled the air out of him in a thin shaking hiss between his teeth. He had to stop after every second push to wait for the white at the edges of his vision to clear. His shirt was already soaked through at the collar. He kept his eyes on Selma's slumped silhouette on the couch the whole time. If either sister stirred, the chair noise was going to be what woke them.
He felt for the twine roll behind him — a fat cylinder of heavy industrial cord, the kind the DMV used to bundle records, with a hard plastic rim where the last cut had left a sharp exposed edge. He found it. The rim was a small hard ridge against the meat of his bound wrist, and he set the rope against it and started to saw. A half-inch back. A half-inch forward. His mind, which had been calm and observational for the last nine hours, started breaking a little around the edges. He sawed it harder and faster.
The binding gave so suddenly his right elbow cracked against the counter behind him, which shot a fresh fork of pain through the broken side of his chest that was bad enough to make him bite down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste copper. He did not make a sound. He sat with his arms loose for a full ten seconds, eyes closed, mouth full of blood, waiting for both sisters to stay asleep. They stayed asleep. His ankles took two more minutes, the knots had been tied by a drunk Patty Bouvier at three in the morning and they came apart under sober fingers like wet paper.
He stood.
His left leg said no, immediately, and the floor came up at him. He caught himself on the counter with both hands and the impact sent the broken rib through another full white-out that he had to ride out with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw clicked. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose onto the counter.
He straightened, slow, by inches, until he was upright with his weight on his right leg and his left hand braced flat. He breathed. He breathed again. He took the first step.
His left leg held.
Barely.
[A/N]: Can new readers tell me where they found this series? Was it in a recommendation thing in Webnovel or how did you see it? Any response would be greatly appreciated.