Someone Else's Love Story

Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

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Authors: Joshilyn Jackson
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wouldn’t go all the way down into me. It stuck in my throat, so that I had to take little panting sips of oxygen.
    Then he said one word to me. He said, “Destiny,” and I felt my heartbeat and my breathing stop, everything in me pausing for a tick, because he was telling me he knew. He felt it, too, this thing between us.
    The old lady was trying to hand me her husband’s sweater. I stared at it blankly, then realized I had asked for it.
    “Go get help,” I told her. I took the cardigan, pressing it down hard onto the hole under his ribs. The startling cherry red of William’s bright blood soaked into the lemon-colored cotton.
    My mother used to say Red and yellow catch a fellow, in warning tones when I wore this silly poppy-covered dress. I thought, Now this sweater I am holding on him is the same colors. It’s like we’re already one of those awful couples who dress to match.
    Outside, the cop with the megaphone was saying a lot of things, but it all sounded like garbley-goo, as if Charlie Brown’s teacher heard shooting and was now blatting and blaring, asking Snoopy what the hell was going on inside that doghouse. William’s slow blood, soaking through the sweater, was so very red. I didn’t want Natty to look at it. But Natty was looking away. I followed the line of his gaze and saw Stevie.
    Stevie was super, super upsetting to look at. He was so still. His head was dented in. His eyes were open. He wasn’t breathing.
    Good, I thought, savagely. I only wished I had been the one to put him down like that, down like a bad dog, instead of dangling stranded way up high on an imaginary seesaw, letting every awful thing happen.
    “Natty,” I said. “Natty!” Natty shook his head like he was waking up, and met my eyes and blinked at me. I made a smile shape out of my mouth. “We’re good, baby,” I said. “You and me, we are safe and good.”
    Someone needed to take Natty outside to all the real, solid things that belonged to us—his basket full of Matchbox cars, my sunshine yellow VW, our Walcott. Someone needed to call in help for William. I hoped that someone was. Me, I had to press down hard on the hole, feeling William’s inhale pushing up, like an answer. His eyes were drifting closed.
    “William, look at me!” I said, but he didn’t. It felt important to not let him slip away into some kind of sleep or darkness. I put my face near his face and said, “Say things at me. What day is it?” It was a dumb question because I had no idea what the date was. I never did. I even sometimes got the year wrong on my checks.
    But he croaked out a word. “Friday.”
    His eyes opened and focused on my face. He was still with me.
    Outside, the cop with the megaphone had stopped talking, and the phone started ringing again, muffled under Stevie. I was so not digging that out.
    “Say more things,” I told him. “Where do you live?”
    “Morningside,” he said, talking fast in a gasp on his exhale, adding something that sounded like “Near Shit Park ,” but that could not be right.
    “What do you do? For a job?”
    “Researcher,” he said.
    I blinked. “Like at a library?”
    “A lab. Gene therapy.”
    A scientist? He looked more like a lumberjack, or a forest ranger. “Where do you work?”
    “Geneti-Tech,” William said. I knew the name. That company was huge in Atlanta; their disturbing logo was everywhere. It had the words Food-Medicine-Life wrapped around a winged tomato, like a visual admission of how creepy-far they were willing to bend nature. Hard to imagine William, so tan with all that sun-streaked hair, in some sterile room swathed in a lab coat, cloning sheep.
    “Are you dying?” Natty asked William. He was still holding his paper bird, and now he was looking at the bloody sweater. Red touch yellow, kill a fellow , I thought, but that was a different rhyme, meant to help Natty know which snakes were dangerous.
    William took another of those long, raspy inhales. “I’m just a

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