Damon

I shut the car door and was strangely aware of the silence and apple red hood while my head pounded hot pain in sink with my heart. The streetlights bothered my eyes, I reached for the glove box and blindly rooted for a small bottle of Advil which I kept there for occasions such as these. The pills would not come out and I turned the bottle upside down and I rattled it violently like a child might do with a piggy bank. Dry summer heat from previous months had caused the gel pills to mold together, and I was forced to reach inside with my pointer finger and break off a piece of the lumpy medication cake. Two blue glossy oval pills came out stuck together, looking malformed, like conjoined twins, and they pointed different directions, making an X or a cross or a plus sign depending on which you way you held them. I let my throat swallow over the clumsy plastic surface because I had no water.
I had been singing, more than I wanted to with such a headache and I overlooked the fact that my mouth was as dry as parchment paper. The two pills clenched to my throat skin with a maternal grip and I began to choke and tear up. I swallowed over and over again, and used my fingers to try and push the bump in the side of my neck down into my stomach. The pills stayed logged somewhere above my windpipe and while stationed there, felt like a rock climbers pick, slowly perforating a mesh of esophageal capillaries.
Moments passed and I could still breath and now I could taste plastic and blood on the inhales. I needed water. I decided to drive to the gas station 2 blocks down Union Street and used one hand to steer while the other cradled the pills in my neck. The streetlights peaked and ebbed through the windshield like a nervous heartbeat and I wished I had more spit to swallow with. The car humped over a the gas station entry way and on instinct I pulled the gas cap lever near my clutch foot and shook my head at myself in that way you do when you stress turns you into animal and you don’t think and for a moment all your actions seem bizarre, and foreign to you.
The car door was shutting when I denied the old black man change. I locked the door and didn’t look at him, but I saw his hands. I held the pills in my throat and didn’t say anything. Inside the gas station store I grabbed a drink and opened it and drank it. Something cherry flavored, with a twist off cap. I felt a release and the pills labored downwards into my stomach in a sick sort of vanity. They had already done their job; my headache was long forgotten.
I felt the teller stare at me and he received his money. From two dollars, I was given change and I stared at the coins and wondered how babies could ever swallow them and live to not remember ever having done it. I walked to my car rubbing my throat and gripping the small circles in the other hand, when I noticed my gas cap was missing. I stood and stared and retraced my steps. There was nothing. Still longer I stood there, feeling like a spectator, noticing over and over again the absence of the cap and feeling absurd. I looked around me. There was the black beggar standing 10 yards away. I almost didn’t ask him. Then I did.
“Did you take my gas cap?”
“What you mean take you cap? I didn’t take no cap.”
“Do you know what happened to my gas cap?”
“Arragint yer arragint, don’t even look, no good come here in your car… and is arragint!”
His clothes were too big for his body and stood forward, leaning towards me with a crooked eye. He glared at me, and his skin looked worn and dirty. Four large black men come from the corner and walk towards me. They have overheard our conversation, and watched me with dead faces as they walked. In my mind I imagined them all lifting their arms and making a large ‘t’ with their body. I am scared; the moment is absorbed. I am surprised when the first to reach me stops and looks under my car. He is trying to help me find my gas cap. It is an act, and his submissiveness makes me want to cry and vomit all at once. The others make darting glances, sleuth caricatures as dense as Styrofoam, and its obvious they want me to think they are searching as well. I stare up at the painful halogens above and I notice the whiteness. I want to leave. I walk up to the beggar who is still standing and staring at me and stretch out my hand and looked at him wide-eyed.
“Here’s the change I got from inside. I don’t care about my gas cap. I’m sorry I ignored you.”
I walked towards my car; the 4 other men had stopped searching and walked back into the hardly seeable corner from which they first emerged, and I wondered if they even remembered what they were looking for. When I got to my car door I turned around and looked back. The beggar stood there with the same grim expression and didn’t say anything. He pulled up a sleeve which had been draped over his fingers and I saw the glimmer in his hand. He tossed the cap to me with an under hand throw and whispered something low.
“Arrogint, is just arrogint.”