Go Away, Please by Kevin Richard White

It had been two days so we were getting pretty hungry. I couldn’t move anything except my head but my girlfriend could move most of her upper torso (it was from the waist down that she was fucked). So we could do somewhat okay.

It sucked when it got real dark but it wasn’t super cold on account of all the drywall and dust and landmass all around us. As far as luck goes, we never were going to win the lottery but I thought we would have had better odds than this.

She got a hold of a Ticonderoga somehow at one point. She told me to lick the tip because the graphite contained vitamins. It tasted nothing like the Flintstone chewables I had growing up. It’s entirely possible we had some sort of delirium from the pain and the shock. But I’m not totally sure, it wasn’t like I could Google the symptoms or anything.

We also managed to get some rainwater through a tiny bend in the wreckage. She fed me when I couldn’t reach. She’s pretty sweet. We had plans to marry and move out to Oregon after she was done school, but natural disasters kind of change that thing from time to time.

The pain eventually kicked in real hard though. We spent most of our time screaming and yelling, tried to make new words up. We eventually went and subscribed to the bedside-change-of-heart “now I’m religious before death” newsletter. It was gaining a wider circulation in our area, or so I heard from the others that were trapped around us.

I tried to marry her in an emotional moment but she said she deserved a proper wedding. I told her I was going to buy her the prettiest ring once I could get the steel girder off my legs and the blood off my hands. She was sad for a bit but got over it once we hummed our favorite songs back and forth. Tone deaf, maybe, but it made us smile.

Finally, though, someone shone a flashlight through our DIY peephole we made. Cop, fireman, newspaper reporter, it doesn’t matter who it was but someone started shouting questions and more than just light flooded in. My girlfriend didn’t say a word. She hadn’t said anything for a while so hopefully she was just sleeping. I opened my big mouth though and I said it loud and clear for all the people to hear.

“Go away, please,” I said, “I fucking just got comfortable down here now.”

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Kevin Richard White is the author of three novels. His short fiction has been previously published by Akashic Books, Tahoe Writers Works, Crack The Spine, Lunch Ticket, Ghost Parachute among others. He lives in Pennsylvania.