Hazel couldn’t remember how tightrope walkers held those sticks. Up and out? Squat and close? The snoring sound felt like an oppressive, low ceiling all around her: it seemed like she had to watch her head so she didn’t hit it against the noise. Squatting, Hazel picked up the flamingo by its stick leg and clutched it in front of her chest, which didn’t feel helpful. Now that she thought about it, everything surrounding tightrope walking felt suspect. Eventually she placed the stick behind her neck and draped her arms over the top of it, as though it were a pink crucifix she’d been affixed to, and teetered toward her room.
At some point they stopped to take a micronap on the floor. Then Hazel found it easiest to take a canine approach, gently picking the flamingo up by the neck with her mouth and dragging it to the foot of the porch’s couch, whereby a wash of maternal instinct set in: by the light of the window, the narrow daybed seemed tailor-made for the creature. Hazel turned down the knitted afghan, set the flamingo inside, and drew the covers up to its beak. Its reflective eye was centered perfectly on the pillow. She realized that she too needed sleep and was actually drunk enough to get it; her inebriated brain insisted there was no point in staying awake in a vigil, awaiting Byron’s next move. It was going to come no matter what she did, and at the moment, if someone were to kill her, her brain would probably register the death as a happy one stemming from the pleasant esophageal burn below her ribs.
She crawled in next to the bird and wrapped a protective arm across its girth.
WHAT HAZEL HATED—AND SHE COULD FEEL HERSELF HATING THIS even as she slept—was how her dreams always turned to Byron. Not in a pleasant-revenge way, not even in a central way. He was just there, the most prominent building in the skyline of her thoughts, unable to be moved or overlooked. She could hear him right now in fact, mid-dream, calling her name and asking her to wake up.
“Help!” Byron screamed.
Hazel opened her eyes and screamed as well, first at the beaked pink plastic head, impossibly small on the pillow next to her, then at the ceiling—it was a nightmare, except it wasn’t a dream. There was truly an image of Byron’s head projected across her ceiling. She screamed a third time when the image blinked; its eyes were animate. It cleared its throat. “Hazel,” the image declared. “It’s me.”
Though it covered the full width of the porch ceiling, proportion-wise it was not a perfect enlargement. Byron’s forehead was stretched out like the top of a hot-air balloon, forming the upper two-thirds of his face. The rest of his features and mouth were compressed into an elongated column that shrank down indefinitely to the microscopic point of Byron’s chin.
Hazel glanced around the porch, locating herself; her temples throbbed. Hoping he hadn’t seen the flamingo yet, she tried a few maneuvers to push the bird down beneath the afghan. “Byron,” she snapped, looking upward. It was like her ex was a literal giant who’d come searching for her by prying off the roof of her father’s home. “Either kill me now or get off my ceiling.” At present he looked so cartoony that she could almost forget he was orchestrating her assassination behind the scenes. And face-to-face, Byron was incredibly nonchalant. He would be right up until the moment he had her murdered.
“You left your mobile device at home. No one’s answering your father’s phone. How would you prefer I contact you?” From the darting gaze of his pupils, the subtle shifts of his head and manic blinks of his eyelids, she knew Byron was working. His desk was like a hive; a bizarre honeycomb arrangement of staggered monitors surrounded it, and he could somehow, with a variety of designated eye movements, independently respond to or control each one without moving his hands. “We need to talk,” he stressed. “It’s important. Trust me. You don’t want things to escalate.”
He shifted his shoulders, which caused a new distribution of his head projection—the wooden ceiling fan now appeared to be implanted in his left cheek, spinning around like the most whimsical birthmark of all time. It was too much to keep up with in her nauseous state. Hazel closed her eyes so she wouldn’t get sick.
“Wrong,” she whispered, unsure if Byron could even hear her. Where was his face coming in from? She scanned the room for the source before finally seeing it: a thin beam of light streaming through the back window. “I won’t ever bother you or speak of you. You can forget I exist. I was like a charity case you took on that didn’t pan out. You overestimated my potential. It happens. I’m sorry I failed you but I won’t continue wasting your time, effective immediately.”
“You don’t understand, Hazel. I’d like to be certain you understand before I enact a solution we can’t reverse. This isn’t a secure connection . . .”
“I definitely do not feel secure, Byron. Isn’t this breaking and entering? Your face, you know, breaking in?” She paused. “I know you’re going to have me killed. Can we go ahead and agree on a day and time? I won’t try to stop it; I just want to know.” Hazel saw a quick flash behind Byron’s head—someone was there in the office with him. It had only been a second, but she swore she’d just seen the outline of Fiffany’s head, that Fiffany’s eyes were staring back at her.
“It is in your own best interest to receive some facts. I’ve taken the liberty of putting some basic electronics in a weatherproof safe in your backyard. Its code is the date of our anniversary.”
“I’m not opening the safe, Byron. I don’t ever want to use electronics again.” She managed to be surprised by the flash of anger that crossed his face—of course this was a personal affront to him. But there was a tiny bit of control and comfort in the fact that while he could kill her tomorrow, maybe he couldn’t make her use a cell phone before he did it. “I’m not asking for any of your money, which should prove I’m too insane for you to stay in a relationship with. Why don’t we just go our separate ways? My life will be such an insignificant, invisible thing. I’ll truly disappear. That’s all I want.”