Last Breath: A Novella

The music got louder as Charlie navigated the broken sidewalk.

With my eyes rolled back and my toes curled…

“Ugh,” Charlie groaned, repulsed by the words and also irritated that she knew them by heart. She hated to trot out one of those in my day sentences, but she could still remember how reviled Madonna was for singing about her feelings of renewed virginity.

Without warning, the music stopped.

The silence tickled the hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck. She had the distinct feeling of being watched as she walked along the uneven path to unit three. The wooden door was warped, painted a dark red that did not hide the black underneath.

She raised her hand. She knocked twice. She waited. She knocked again.

The curtains rustled. The woman’s face behind the glass looked older than Charlie, but in a hard way, like the few years had been spent on a construction site or, more likely, in prison. Her eyeliner was a thick black line. Blue eyeshadow. Heavy foundation reminiscent of the coating of Doritos dust on Charlie’s steering wheel. She wore her shoulder-length bleached blonde hair in a “Barracuda”-era Nancy-Wilson-style feather.

She saw Charlie and scowled before closing the curtains.

Charlie stood on the hot sidewalk listening to the air conditioning units grumble in the quiet. She looked at her watch. She was wondering if she had been given the brush-off when she heard sounds from behind the door.

A chain slid back. A deadbolt was turned. Then another one. The door opened. Tendrils of cold air caressed Charlie’s face. The whining a/c competed with OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” playing somewhere in the darkened room. The woman at the door was wearing jeans and a cropped red T-shirt with a Georgia Bulldog on it. A half-empty bottle of beer was in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Her fingernails were filed to long, sharp points, the polish bright red. She reminded Charlie of the trashy Culpepper girls who had relentlessly hounded her throughout high school. The woman had that look about her, like when the shit went down, she was ready to scratch out some eyes or pull out some hair or bite down real hard on an arm or a back if that’s what it took to win the fight.

Charlie said, “I’m looking for Maude or Leroy Faulkner.”

“I’m Maude.” Even her voice sounded mean, like a rattlesnake opening a switchblade.

Charlie shook her head. There had to be two different Maudes. “I mean Flora’s grandmother.”

“That’s me.”

Charlie’s chin almost hit the ground.

“Yeah.” She took a hit off her cigarette. “I was seventeen when I had Esme. Esme was fifteen when she had Flora. You can do the math.”

Charlie didn’t want to do the math, because grandmothers had buns and wore bifocals and watched Hee Haw. They didn’t sport cropped shirts that showed pierced navels and drink beer in the middle of the day while OutKast played on their boom box.

Maude said, “You gonna keep wasting my air conditioning or you gonna come inside?”

Charlie stepped into the apartment. Cigarette smoke hung like dirty yellow lace in the air. There was no light except for what came in through the slim part in the curtains on the front window. Brown shag carpet cupped the soles of her sneakers. The cluttered kitchenette was part of the living room. The bathroom was at the end of a short hall, a bedroom on either side. Clothes were everywhere, unopened cardboard boxes, a sewing machine on a rickety table shoved against the wall by the kitchen. A large television set was jammed into the corner by the front window. The sound was muted as Jill Abbott screamed at Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless