Air condensed on the window under a hot mouth breathing smoke and cancer, nostrils flared, fingers parting into a mock-gesture of affection with herself, remembering, reminiscing. It’s Monday morning on the train ride into Belmont and everything is gray, gray, gray.

She had been to hell, the circle for those guilty of wrath, the kind only a child’s mind could rationalize. Men and women wandering a waste of sand and shit, every animal they had ever abused gnaws at their ankles, genitals, snapping off fingers only to regenerate as painfully as they were removed. Every bug squished and swatted crawls under their skin, in their eyes, pouring out of every orifice they had, natural or torn open in a miserable fury. This is where you go when you light ants on fire with a magnifying glass. This is where you go when you make jokes about how many points you’d get for hitting the fat bastards in the Walmart parking lot with your truck, secretly wondering if you could just let go of the wheel and close your eyes for one. accidental. second.

She was just getting advice from an old friend.

She met him in the courtyard of a hotel in Mexico. Not one of the nice ones for tourists, the kind people go to to say they’ve been to another country without actually interacting with the country in any way. People got raped in places like these.

She told people she was there to see family but she just wanted to get out of the states for awhile. The air gets too thick to breath, sometimes.

He was smoking pot and she adjusted the straps on her bra nervously, a bad habit. She yelled as a cockroach ran between her feet. She dropped a foot on it heavily and hopped away.

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“It was going to kill me.”

“It was a bug. Not a bomb.”

She looked at him with an eyebrow arched. “Who’s to say? You should protect me.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

She shrugged and he followed her back to her room and stayed for the remainder of the week. Then when she left, he followed her home.

Flash forward two years later in the outskirts of Chicago amidst the dying embers of a relationship gone stale.

“Don’t make me beg,” he sighed.

“Then don’t beg,” she sighed back. “My train leaves at seven.”

“You don’t have to leave. You know I don’t want you to leave.”

“I know.”

Someone pulls him by the arm and he walks to his instrument and she stands in the crowd for a moment, heads bobbing rhythmically like sex in the back seat of a car, before walking out forever. The man on stage, a few uncomfortable feet back from the microphone, wailing pensively. Young players on drums and frets in their twenty minutes on the stage: it is a song played by friends, full of sound and fury, signifying everything.

He packs up his guitar and thanks the venue owner. The air outside is colder than expected. He places a dollar in a homeless man’s hand. He buys a pack of cigarettes. He goes to the bus station and sits on the bench, a one-way ticket to Mexico folded in his wallet.

Somewhere, in Tennessee, the hair on her arms stand on end.