Thrust by Tom Piccirilli Page A

wouldn't forget and yet, even with the girl Stacy finding him over and over, he had.   He still wasn't ready.   He'd gotten lazy and crazy and it was going to cost him if Singleton spun out of a darkened door and tried to clip Chase's hamstrings.
    By the time he got back to his apartment he'd spotted Barrack again, slipping between   delivery trucks.   Chase was more antsy about Jez coming up behind him than Singleton.  
    Sometimes your ghosts mattered more than four inches of steel under the ribs.   You didn't set your priorities to get you through another year or even another week.   You just hoped to make it alive from one minute to the next.
    He wandered into his building and thought about grabbing his mail but let it go.   He wanted to keep his hands free.   The colorless day followed him inside and he took the stairs two at a time.  
    The lock on his apartment door looked fine and hadn't been jimmied.   He stepped inside already hearing the voices ambling into his head.   At first he thought it was his parents, but soon he gathered his flailing concentration and looked at the ceiling.
    The newlyweds upstairs were losing their shit again.
    Late 20s, they'd more or less left the goth scene behind but had never gotten over the hurdle to becoming full-fledged yuppies, still playing in the middleground .   Hip, liberal, and raging against machinery, but starting to worry about their social security.   At least they both worked.  
    The husband drank too much and did a touch of coke on the weekends, grooving to techno pop that warbled beneath their door in the off hours.   The wife spent her free time waiting for the revolution she'd been promised when she was sixteen.   Sexually liberated and independent but left hurting and wanting for the picket fence and chubby babies.
    She was Mary and he was Howard.
    Chase couldn't get by her in the hall without hearing about some march or protest going on, the latest articles in Elle and The Paris Review .   He liked her energy and her abrupt manner of cornering him as he went for the mail—it was a gauntlet he ran pretty well and didn't mind.   She must've laid in wait hoping to find someone who would listen.   He knew the feeling.   She read poetry but not his.  
    Maybe it hit home harder than he wanted to admit, but he let it ripple off his shoulders as best he could.   He could appreciate the force of her urgency as she swept down the back-lit stairwell followed by her own massive shadow.   He'd stand there, smiling, trying to put her frenetic words into verse.   Sometimes he'd tap his foot, finding a rhythm and going along with it.  
    His mother's name, he thought, it might've been Mary.
    Her eyes would zone past him as she spoke, thoughts skittering from track to track, throwing sparks.   He'd angle in, going nose to nose and trying to bring her back to center on him.   She didn't notice because he wasn't really there, in a way.   Neither was she.  
    On occasion she'd stop in mid-sentence and float off back up the stairs, hands held out in front of her as if she were moving through a thick, sticky liquid.
    It broke the day up.   Chase used to see lots of people like that on the ward.   She was as happy as any of them.
    Tonight, though, Mary screamed.   Maybe God wasn't listening either.   The husband was doing some kind of flake-out up there, sounded like he was pounding his head on the floor, muttering.   Chase had a sudden idea for a poem and grabbed a pad and pen off his coffee table, but even as he attempted to hold onto the outlines of a skittering image, his mind blanked to a comforting snow.  
    He went to the window and stared down at the street, wondering how many of the dead might be walking by.   Jez , his parents, Stacy.   They would crowd the sidewalks and force the living in front of speeding taxis.   He hadn't uncapped the pen but realized he was scratching tiny holes in the pad with his fingernails.   His first therapist in