Page 41 of Biker Boo

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I should’ve told her.

But I didn’t.

Because I'm a coward dressed as a ghost.

Because if I told her, she’d rip herself away and run.She’d laugh, maybe.Or worse, look at me with pity.And I’m not a man who survives that.Not again.

She’s still in there.Just a few yards away, tucked between the half-fallen archway and the stained-glass grave of what used to be a pulpit.Her skirt bunched.Her lipstick smeared.Her chest still rising and falling like a storm hadn’t passed through her.

Because that’s what I am.

Not a man.

A haunted thing that only knows how to burn and break.

Tearing off the mask, I light a cigarette with trembling hands.I shouldn't stay.But I do.Just for a moment longer.Just to watch her as she tugs her panties straight and tries to collect herself.

When she looks around for me, I duck behind the rotted church beam.

She whispers, “Where are you?”

And goddamn, I almost go back.Without the mask.

Almost.

But instead, I retreat.

Back into the woods.

Back into myself.

Later, I’m holed up in the shed behind the old storage barn the club doesn’t use anymore.

Inside the journal, the one I started last fall, I flip past the worn pages of scratched-out poems until I find the clean sheet.

I take out the pen.My hand still smells like her.

I press it to paper.

She moaned the name of a ghost.

And I let her.

Because it’s easier to be a fantasy than a man with blood on his hands.

I scribble harder, black ink tearing the page.

I don’t want her to love a mask.

But it’s the only way she’ll ever love me.

It should be raining, but it’s not.

The sky’s too dry for mercy.

I head back toward the graveyard near the trailer park.Don’t ask why.Maybe because she always walks through there when she’s hurting, or maybe because I’m too fucked in the head to stay away.

I hear her laugh first, then choke on the sound.It’s not her real laugh.It’s the kind she fakes when she’s trying not to cry.

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