"Sort Yourself Out"
Ever since Jackie's boyfriend had started reading about eastern religion, he didn't want to fuck anymore.
"Come on", Jackie imagined herself saying, "let's go!", but she was a girl; instead she didn't know what to say.
Each night he ruffled her hair or kissed her cheek or shook her hand and went to sleep on the couch, saying, "You can have the bed, I don't mind at all".
Jackie's boyfriend looked different now when he smiled: he was trying to look like the statue-of-buddha candle holder in the bathroom. Jackie wished that she'd never bought him that. Jackie hated his contentment, and Jackie hated eastern religion.
Jackie remembered one time in college, Camus had come between her and a boy. She had read halfway through L'tranger and thought that yes, it was all true; after that the boy had meant nothing to her. Now things were full circle.
On weekends Jackie would wait for her boyfriend to get drunk with the guys, and pounce on him, subtly, hoping he wouldn't notice.
The results were always privately humiliating: Jackie might have looked better than ever, but it was all for nothing. Jackie's boyfriend treated her with the coldest warmth imaginable– like a brother, or a trusted uncle. Eventually she was shattered each time he walked into the room.
One day, he apologized to her for everything he'd become, awkwardly, and brutally proud, before wiping a tear from her cheek and going downstairs to sleep like an angel.
Jackie stared into the abyss. She didn't like to hear about how her love had been an illusion of the ego: it had seemed pretty real to her. Jackie didn't like the way things were turning out at all.
Jackie crept out into the night and walked until she was almost lost, in a part of town barren of memories, and she sat down in the cold and whispered to herself reassuring words; promises; threats; explanations– like a crazy person. "Awareness–" sure, right.
Once Jackie had calmed down a little, she went home and shivered herself to sleep in their bed, alone.
The next morning she called her mother, and an hour or so later Jackie was cruelly casual, announcing that she was going to go back home for a while.
Jackie's boyfriend thought that was a great idea.
Hunter
On the day Hunter S. Thompson came back to life, Jessica was on her way to Georgia.
"Clawed right out of his grave" said the man on CNN, and she sat on her suitcase and flipped down the latches.
It was a Saturday morning and Jessica imagined that her friends were going to joke that of course Hunter Thompson would choose to return on a Saturday– if not a Friday, or Football Sunday.
Jessica boarded the plane and it took off, and in the sky above the most powerful country on earth she dozed, peacefully.
Upon landing, Jessica made her way through the Atlanta airport without getting even slightly lost (all airports were the same now), and her friends met her by the luggage carousel.
Lucas asked her how her flight had been.
"Good" she said.
Danielle hugged her and mentioned Hunter Thompson, and Jessica said, "yeah, I heard". Danielle continued that apparently Thompson had died of some kind lung complications that afternoon.
"So he's dead again?" asked Jessica, wishing she hadn't spent most of Hunter's second life flying over Utah and whatever else.
"I guess so" said Danielle, and Lucas said it was probably all just a hoax to get their minds off the war, because who really returns from the dead?
At Danielle's house Jessica was asked again about her flight, and Jessica related a comical story about a woman on the plane who'd had too much to drink, which was entirely untrue.