Victims

// I Never Caught Her Last Name

By Alex Aloise .
05.06.09 // Victims

It was pouring that night. I was standing under the awning outside the bar waiting for a cab.  After what felt like too-damn-long, a Checker Top came pulling up.  No matter where you are in Mattoon, IL, you can always count on a Checker Top.  Anyway, I got in and just as I was about to close the door, she showed up.  Running into the rain with the type of over-exaggerated desperation on her face that you only see in scary movies, I felt badly for her.  Being the gentleman I was raised to be, I poked my head out the cab and asked if she’d like to share a ride.  She shook her head “yes” without saying a word and hurriedly dashed into the taxi.

She said her name was Riley.  I never caught her last name.  Maybe that was her last name.  I wish I had found out.  We got to talking and quickly discovered that we had a good bit in common.  We both had unfulfilled pictorial pipe dreams.  I wanted to be the next Ansel Adams.  She wanted to see the world through her lens.  It was weird, like she knew everything to say to make me want her.  I’d never had an instant connection like that before.  I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.  She was one of the most breathtaking women I’d ever seen.  Definitely top 3.  And those eyes…god dammit those eyes.  They were a shade of green I’ve never seen anywhere else, almost jade.  They were stunning.  Perfect.  She was perfect.

My place was about twenty minutes away.  I didn’t know if she would be getting out before or after me.  I didn’t even notice when the cabby drove right by my building.  She had me locked into her conversation.  I told him to stop about four miles too late.  When he finally turned around and got back to my apartment I asked Riley if she had much farther to go, fully intending to pay the difference in exchange for her number.  She didn’t say anything at first, only looked out the windows of the cab nervously.  She stared at the Jeep across the street for a second.  Then she looked up at me.  With those eyes.  I asked if she wanted to come in.

It was one of those nights where clocks didn’t exist. Time was irrelevant.  Our conversation continued until dawn.  We kept talking about everything we could think of.  She mentioned something about running into an ex at the bar right before our serendipitous cab ride.  I didn’t put much stock into that last bit.  I had fallen victim to her eyes.  She said she felt “right” around me.  I felt whole around her.  We took pictures of each other.  Photographic evidence of the night we both fell in love.

I kissed her.  She kissed back.  We made love with the kind of passion I’d only seen on screen.  It was our own private Before Sunrise.

Next thing I knew, it was Sunday.  I got out of bed.  She was gone.  She’d left a note: “Thank you. You’ll never know how much that all meant.  -Riley.”

I tried calling her.  No answer.  I tried twice more.  No answer.  I decided to give it a day or so.

Monday morning I got a call about a job.  It was a murder-suicide.  Unidentified blonde white male.  Unidentified redheaded white female.

I’d taken forensic photographs for the Mattoon PD for about two years.  In that time I’d taken pictures of everything anyone would never want to see.

But nothing was worse than taking one last photo of those green eyes.

View Comments / May 06.09 / Victims / by Alex Aloise

// The reason the lock was broken

By Ben Cheney .
03.16.09 // Motels

I stayed in a motel once.  It was March of 1994 and it had one of those shaky beds.  I’m not really into that freaky stuff, so I declined to insert my quarters into the slot.  (But I can’t say I didn’t think about it.  Huh.)

The room smelt like murder.  It reminded me of my childhood.  Growing up in West Texas, murder was as familiar as fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.  I remember one time I smelled murder in the bathroom at the YMCA.  I was taking a break from swimming and I smelled it.  It smelled just like that motel room.  (But I didn’t know that at the time because the YMCA thing was in ’66 and I couldn’t tell the future.  Yet.)

I got sick of the murder smell in my motel room.  I opened some of the packets of free shampoo (they were like ketchup packets placed delicately on the side of the bathtub), and smeared them on my pillow, the dusty TV screen, and under my nose to cover up the smell.  It was shampoo by JADE.  Real nice stuff that smells like a bouquet of daisies covered in bumble bees.  I really like it a lot.

The lighted sign outside the motel that buzzed and snapped with the bugs advertised “FREE COLOR TV”.  I was excited.  I loved color TV.  I expected a Zenith or something with a crisp picture, but instead I got an old wood paneled one with the UHF dials that “tuck, tuck” when you turn them.  I watched a new episode of Baywatch and some reruns of Let’s Make A Deal in a fuzzy excuse for color.

The bath tub was clean, the towels were not.  They gave me two sets with my room.  I guess they thought I would have a lady with me.  Or a hooker maybe.  I had neither.  One set of towels was ripped and slightly brown.  The other set had touched the brown ones and had become brown by association.

The lock on the door was busted so I had to secure myself via the dinky chain on the door.  My guess was that the lock broke during a struggle that led to the murder in the air and/or the brown on the towels.  I hoped I was wrong, because I didn’t want to get murdered in the motel with the shaky bed and the fuzzy color TV and the brown towels.

I knew I was safe though.  Since the YMCA thing, I had learned to tell the future.  I knew that I would not become the new smell of murder that night.  I would walk out of that motel room at 7:30 the next morning with a bag full of complimentary JADE products and the understanding that I would return to that motel again exactly 15 years later to become the reason the lock was broken.

View Comments / Mar 16.09 / Motels / by Ben Cheney