Author Games: Ace of Spades

Finals: Adam Burke

"You clocking out?" Lindsey asked, refilling a pitcher behind the counter. She snapped her gum three times quickly, as if to make up for the time she spent serving customers where it was unprofessional. Our manager thought most of what she did was unprofessional, really, but Lindsay had the sort of nonchalant air that didn't make it seem like she'd ever get in trouble for making small talk with her friends when they came in or wearing her hair down.

"Yeah," I answered. One hand sought out the knot in my apron strings while the other pulled my card out of my back pocket so I could swipe it and log my time. It was later than I'd hoped to work, but with the electricity bill due, I needed all the extra hours I could get.

Still, one am was late to work in a restaurant. I yawned gently as I fished my keys from my pocket and left through the back door, Lindsey blowing me a kiss as I left in the collected manner she always held. I'd worked for nearly eleven hours, starting at two yesterday. It was 12:48 now, not even an hour into a new day, March 10th.

In the middle of the parking lot, I froze.

March 10th.

My hands started to shake gently, and I clenched them into fists, the teeth of my keys biting into the skin of my palms. I was used to the shaking, but it had been a while, longer than I could remember, since it had appeared.

I supposed if it was going to start again, the one-year anniversary of the Milena Massacre was, in a twisted way, fitting.

I bent halfway over, my fists finding my knees, and breathed gently. Ten, nine, eight. . . I counted slowly in my head, breathing in on the odds and out on the evens, relaxing my body slowly, slowly.

It's been a year.

A year wasn't long enough to forget.

I gasped in more air, abandoning the counting. Sometimes it helped, but in the middle of a parking lot at midnight was not the right environment to recover. I stumbled to my car, my hands barely able to fit the key into the lock, and slammed the door shut, resting my head on my knees. The panic was stronger than it seemed it'd ever been, though the back of my mind was telling me it was just the attack, irrational, that I'd had worse following the Massacre. This wasn't even one of my bad ones - I could still breathe, I could still see, and I could at least think enough to start counting again.

Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. . . I balled my hands into fists again and pressed one against my mouth, fighting the urge to hyperventilate. It took all my willpower to keep breathing deeply, gently, and when my breathing finally returned to normal, I was still shaking. I sat in my car for another ten minutes, squeezing my fists together, waiting for another wave of fear and dizziness to overcome me.

My shaky hands fit the keys into the ignition and turned gently, the heater turning on immediately and warming my legs and the tips of my fingers, which had gone numb. I sat a few minutes more, just to be certain I could drive the few minutes to the apartment, and just breathed as steadily as possible - hard with a shudder that won't go away.

My hands were still shaking by the time I decided it was time to go home, but it was only a few blocks, and I'd been recovering for half an hour. At least at the apartment, I could try to get some sleep.

As soon as I walked in the door, my roommate glanced up at me from his spot on the couch, where the TV was paused. "Hey, A. How was work?"

I shrugged, not trusting myself to talk. Tyler stood immediately, rushing to my side. "Hey, hey. Did it happen again?"

I managed a nod, and he led me to the big green chair. It'd been there since he'd first been in the apartment, which was going on five years, accounting for its unmatchable softness from years of being sat on and having crumbs dropped on it. Ty used it all the time, but he only ever let me sit in when I'd had a rough day, and today qualified.