Last Supper
July 15th 2002
As with any group
of strangers thrust together there were difficulties and minor clashes. The six girls may have been through a shared
collective experience of individual terror, but their survival had taken them
to vastly different inner spaces.
They sat around a large table in a
generic family restaurant. Gwen had her back to the wall, an old-school
hard-boiled paranoiac trick. Her eyes
darted about between the girls and the passers by. She pulled a plastic tube of pills from her
handbag. Popped the top loose. Swallowed a couple down with some water. She played with a smoke she’d been forbidden
from lighting and thought about death.
Millie scratched her head and wondered what the hell she was
doing. Scrunched up in her chair, out of
place amongst the cool beauties and the tough chicks. The youngest of the girls, she was in particular
awe of Elisha. Her Hollywood aura. Her confidence. The way she had spun tragedy into
fortune. Her name now an A-list
buzzword. Millie examined the movie star
in her midst. She was shocked to find a
pimple on Elisha’s temple. Such a human
blemish.
Elisha had on big don’t-look-at-me
sunglasses. The type people wear when
they want to be noticed. She wore a
low-cut top. She squeezed her tits
together for maximum cleave. A
twenty-something dude sitting with his girlfriend at the next table fried his
retinas on Elisha’s candy boobage.
Elisha smiled, ruffled her short, shaggy ‘do. She wrapped her thick lips around a straw and
sucked back some cola. She saw Pumpkin
shoot her some cut-eye but didn’t care.
Pumpkin was the girls’ compass.
The closer they got, the stronger Pumpkin felt the weird tugs and
constrictions in her heart pulling her this way or that. The connection between her and Jerome had
been severed some, but vestiges of it remained. She had a half-drained glass of
beer in front of her. She traced lines
in the frost on the glass with her black-painted fingernails. She tried to repress a belch and was only
moderately successful. Tired already of
Elisha and her bullshit, she just wanted all this to be over.
Selina sat next to Pumpkin.
She wore a black hoodie with the hood up over her head. Trying not to draw too much attention to
herself, her facial scars were nonetheless visible. She held up her empty glass of scotch. Jingled the ice cubes against the glass as a
signal to a passing waitress for another.
Struggling to be sociable, Selina found Maggie the easiest company. The drive in them both was a point of
connection.
Maggie sat hunched over the table.
She pushed dark curls away from her eyes. She knew that by the next
morning, the group would be wandering through a stretch of Southern
Appalachia. A mountainous landscape
where murder ballads had thrived in immigrant communities hundreds of years
before. A place where a woman from a
long line of killers birthed her own murder ballad and set it loose in the wild
decades ago.
The girls finished their meals and drinks in the silence of a Last
Supper. Maggie picked up the check. Outside, she hugged each of the girls
individually. She thought about how
remarkable their coming together was. As
the catalyst of it all, she allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction.
They loaded up and, daydreaming of their monster finished, headed
off towards the mountains.
THE END.
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