The Sound of Wind

  **

  The vibrating phone was what woke him. Hugo sat up on his kitchenette floor and stared blankly at the phone. Crysta was calling him. He reached for the bottle of vodka; it wasn’t completely empty, so he fixed that. The phone kept ringing beside him, skittering along the linoleum. He watched it move until it stopped, and then it gave one more hopeless jolt for voicemail. Madeline was in pieces and he could still smell the blood, what was there to talk about? Maybe she was calling to tell him that he’d been wrong, that he’d held the vacuum too long and CJ was dead. Hugo picked up the phone to listen to the message Crysta had left.

  “Hugo, CJ told me what happened,” her voice was soft, reserved, a tone meant to be soothing, but there was really no reason for it, because she wasn’t speaking to anyone, just a machine, “Call me, you need to talk.”

  But didn’t she know? There was nothing to talk about, words would change nothing. Hugo picked up the empty bottle, tested the weight, and then threw it at the kitchenette island to watch it bounce off the wood and roll around in the glass on the ground.

  He used the edge of the counter to climb to his feet. It felt like all the blood rushed out of his body and the air was very heavy. He stumbled along the wall to the bathroom and puked in the toilet. Then he ran the hot water in the tub, watching the steam fill the small room, clouding up the mirror, little droplets of condensation sliding down.

  He could hear the phone vibrating again in the other room. He walked towards it and then he was in the kitchen again, on the floor, his head hurt a lot. This time he’d woken up because someone was knocking on his front door. Before he could consider that maybe it was a bad idea, he crawled across the glass, using the door handle to pull himself into a standing position. He opened the door a crack, bracing himself against the doorframe. It was Crysta. He closed the door and stumbled to the couch, but she came in anyway.

  She dropped her coat and rushed over to the couch, kneeling before it, “What did you do to yourself?” She pulled his hands towards her, palms up.

  He wanted to snatch them back, but his arms weren’t working right. “Go away,” is what he tried to say, but the doctor’s expression told him it hadn’t come out right. She was plucking pieces of glass from his hands. He watched the blood pool in his palms and just when he thought he was going to vomit, his hands felt very warm and the cuts closed; he was sober again. “Go away!” He yelled, but she didn’t go away. He cried.