Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Read online

  Foglifter was so impressed by Damitri’s writing that we recently asked him to join our editorial team as an assistant prose editor.

  Miah Jeffra, Co-Founding Editor

  Foglifter

  BAT OUTTA HELL

  Damitri Martinez

  THE SOUND OF Jay’s new motorcycle found me like a fury. It was faint at first, a storm on the horizon. Then I saw him slingshot around the corner, bringing all that noise with him. He hung a sharp left and revved the bike before he skidded to a stop on the street in front of our house. I was already standing on the sidewalk. I could feel the heat and noise radiating off the bike like a small sun. Jay revved it and everything exploded. Those savage pops and cracks, the metal gurgle of pipe, all of it looped around my lungs, twisted around my gut and groin. It filled me up and rattled me. I wanted to challenge that crazed noise with a primal growl, or throw myself into its hot mechanical core. He revved it again and all the trees and leaves, all the brick bungalows and sidewalks lining the asphalt shimmered, threatening to shake loose their rough surfaces and show us the dark stuff the world was really made of.

  “Get that shit off my property!” my grandma yelled from the top of the porch stoop, but we could barely hear her.

  My uncle revved the bike again and again to spite her. The more he did it, the more I wanted to try it myself, to twist the handle and release the wild animal of that noise. And then he shut it off.

  The silence pushed in on my ears and made me dizzy. All the other sounds on the street hunkered low in the twilight.

  Jay unclicked his helmet and pulled it off. He shook his head so his wavy black hair fell to his shoulders. His slender eyebrows were pulled into a scowl. He had high cheekbones and a sharp nose that made him seem meaner than he knew how to be. The few hairs he could grow on his face were trimmed into a neat goatee.

  “Jesus Christ,” my grandma said. “Stealin bikes now?”

  Jay got off the bike in one slick motion and flicked his hair behind his shoulders with a gloved hand. He wore mirrored sunglasses even though the sun was gone.

  “I bought it, vieja.”

  “Bought it?” my grandma yelled. “You don’t have any fuckin money! What’d you buy it with?”

  “None ya,” he said, and started rolling the motorcycle down the long driveway to the shed at the back of the house.

  I looked up at my grandma on the porch. One of her arms was folded beneath her breasts, the other holding a cigarette expelling tight curls of smoke. Her anger bristled and then turned to ember as she mumbled curses to herself. I followed behind Jay, dragging my Adidas sandals so they wouldn’t fall off my feet and the ground wouldn’t fuck up my tube socks. I could still feel the wake of heat from the bike on my bare chest.

  “Fuckin sick, huh?” he asked me in the shed.

  It was a Harley-Davidson, apple red, with a wide leather seat and fringes on the seams. There were two lockboxes on the bike, one in the back and one on the left side, both accented in chrome piping that traced the rest of the frame. The buttons and switches were bright and slick like hard candies. Small chips dotted the arc of the windshield with tiny frowns.

  “Who’d you get it from?” We were both stretched out and distorted in the gleam of the chrome. I was Jay’s twin in every way, except for the hair. I kept mine buzzed close to my scalp and couldn’t grow anything on my face. And I was taller than him by a couple inches.

  “None ya.” He grinned white teeth at me and then rubbed my stomach because there was no one else in the shed. Then he put the helmet in one of the lockboxes and pulled his hair behind his head with a band. He pulled out a rag from a bin on the shed floor and started rubbing the bike like he was trying to reveal another color underneath all the red. I watched him for a while. Then he got up, turned on the radio to the same rock shit I could hear through our shared wall in the house, took off his leather jacket, and resumed his polishing.

  “Get me a beer.”

  I HAD BEEN living with my grandma and Jay for a year before he got the bike. I was sixteen when I moved in. My mom said it was a temporary thing, me living with my grams in shithole Pueblo, Colorado, while she went to go find work in Cali, but I knew it was bullshit and it eventually turned into the rest of my time in high school, just before I dropped out senior year and moved in with my girlfriend and her brother. Jay was my mom’s younger brother, my uncle, but we were so close in age, I dropped the Tio when I was twelve and never called him anything but Jay since. He was six years older than me, but my grandma said you wouldn’t be able to tell.

  “That fuckin mistake. See how he mooches, mi’jo?” She’d be out on her porch, halfway through a twelve-pack of Bud during these confessions, and I’d be out there too, sitting on a ghetto-ass crate right next to her luxury lawn chair. “Coming into my house when he’s not shooting up or getting trashed, thinking he owns all this shit.”

  We would watch the neighborhood come to life, those summer nights. Kids would come flying down the street on those Razors that killed your ankles if you weren’t paying attention. Men and women sat in their own chairs on their porches with their beers and cigarettes, the TV flashing through their worn screen doors to empty living rooms. I’d nod my head at other guys I recognized from school or the hangouts Jay took me to. They walked the streets, careful to avoid the orange light pooling from the street lamps.

  My grandma was a small puckered woman with a shit ton of wrinkles. She swore it was what years of being out in the sun would do to you, but her brothers would tell you it’s because she started sucking Marlboros and dick when she was sixteen and doing it ever since. She worked at the post office and bought a pack of beer after work every Monday. She had bright maroon hair she touched up every month in the kitchen sink, with a dirty hand mirror and the same stained yellow towel draped around her shoulders, like she was some kind of lady to the queen. She drew on her eyebrows with a pencil two shades darker than her hair. She wasn’t that old to be a grandmother, something she didn’t forget to remind us every chance she got—but sometimes she shuffled around with a hunch and played up all the ailments of a viejita, even though it was probably just a hangover. She always had a cigarette in her right hand and swirled it around while she talked like she was writing everything she said in cursive.

  “When I had your mom,” she’d tell me in some variation or another, “I told your pendejo grandpa, ‘That’s it! No more! One’s enough!’ And ten years later, I almost made it, but then—” She flicked her head back toward Jay’s bedroom. “He came like a goddamn devil child and cursed my life. Your grandpa died, your moms moved out, and I was left to raise that little shit all on my own.” She took another drag and blew out the smoke like a curse. “Don’t be him, my sweet Julian,” she’d say, flicking her cigarette in my direction.

  After a while, Jay would storm out of the house smelling of deodorant and leather, the screen door banging behind him.

  “This ain’t a hotel!” she’d yell after him, and he’d flip a bird. Before he had the bike, he’d hop into some stranger’s car and they’d disappear down the boulevard. But when he got his own wheels, he’d fly down the street “like a goddamn bat outta hell,” my grandma would say, and then she’d yell after him, “I’m not payin those bills when you break your goddamn neck!” And she’d suck in more smoke and just for a moment, I’d see all that concern she tried to keep bottled up flare dully like the ash on her cigarette. Then she’d exhale all of it. She started waiting up—saying she was waiting for her shows to come on—till she heard the bike come roaring back home.

  WHEN I FIRST moved in with my grams, I was an angry little fuck. I missed an entire year of school. I got arrested for tagging the bigass wall of the community center with some other boys the world forgot. I even called my grams a bitch one night, but she slapped that shit right out of my mouth like a tooth and I spent the night crying from the pain and from the shame, and if I’m being real, from the fear of losing the one person who would deal with me. I pictured bei
ng like those fuckers on Grant Street, thrown out of their homes and looking for families in crack pipes and broken syringes. She tamed me right up with that one slap, and since then, I’d do whatever she said, no matter how embarrassing or crazed.

  “Hold my purse.”

  “Hold my hair.”

  “Go find your goddamned uncle because it’s after two a.m.”

  But after a while, Jay tamed me too.

  “This is what I do, whenever I get so fuckin sick of myself,” he’d say to me in some stranger’s basement, and then he’d take a hit of something and the world would turn purple and pink and gold. He’d live somewhere like a king for a couple hours before I had to drag him home and lay him out on the dirty futon in his room that smelled like weed and cheap cologne.

  He did some hard shit. I mostly just got high in my own bedroom, and I’d read or draw, like some fuckin nerd. Harder nights, I’d stare into the popcorn ceiling and listen to Prince from some old albums my moms left me before she ditched, and I’d replay some of the images of her before she left. I had this fear of forgetting her face, that one day when I was grown and out of the house and walking on the street, I’d run into my mom and not even know it was her.

  When people asked me about my dad, I pretended that I gave up on that fucker a long time ago, but when I was high, I used to do this stupid game where I’d create memories that weren’t even true. Like this one where I’d picture my mom and my dad taking me to McDonald’s and they’d let me get a Happy Meal. My dad would ask the lady behind the counter for the other toys we saw in the posters, so I’d have the full collection of Disney action figures. He’d say he’d pay extra, and then he did, and then we’d stay and eat inside the restaurant, which meant that I got to go play in the playground with the slides that used to shock the shit out of me or the ball pit that always smelled like dirty socks.

  This was a real memory, or a series of real memories, but in real life, instead of my dad, it was just preteen Jay, already looking grown. But sometimes when I was really high, I could erase Jay and imagine this asshole I never met.

  I told Jay about that one night, and he seemed surprised that I remembered those couple of times when he and my moms would take me out on Sundays. He’d look at me, stoned as fuck, and the memory seemed to pull me sharply into his focus.

  “That was the only nice thing I ever did for your moms,” he’d say, and then he’d take another drag of his cigarette and exhale the memory, tangling it up in the smoke.

  My grandma wielded force in that house, but not over Jay. He did whatever he fucking pleased and my grandma seemed to let him. The more Jay pulled me into his shadowy world, the more my grandma seemed to let go of me, no matter how angry she pretended to be with him or me. When she yelled at me for coming home too late with him, instead of anger in her eyes, I’d see this scared and worried look, like a barking dog who knows the thief will come into the house no matter what.

  I became a battleground. If my grandma asked me to go to the store with her during the day, Jay would sweep me away and we’d go forget ourselves with some stranger’s drugs later that night. I was pulled in both of these directions and we were all waiting to see who would win. But it turned out it wouldn’t matter, because soon after, we never saw Jay and his bike again.

  THE NIGHT HE brought home the bike, we had to wait until my grams fell asleep before Jay could take me out for a ride.

  “Go change your fuckin sandals,” he said to me on the porch. I had my sketch pad out and was trying to draw the bike from memory. The street was empty and the sky was the darkest it would be that night. “And put on a T-shirt.”

  When I came back out, he was holding the sketch pad.

  “I want you to design a tattoo for me.” He tossed the pad in my direction. “I want that.”

  I looked down at my rough sketch.

  “How long would it take you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Not long, if I focused.”

  Jay disappeared around the house to the shed and then rolled the bike out from the driveway. I waited for him out on the street.

  He handed me his helmet.

  “You don’t have an extra?” I asked.

  “We’re just goin around the block.”

  He got on and then I got on, and when he kick-started the motorcycle to life, I felt my balls shoot up into my chest. All that metal felt intent on cleaving my bones apart from my skin, shaking me and shaking me until all that was left was that core part of my body that nobody saw, that part you didn’t want anyone to see, not even when you were looking in the mirror. When he kicked off from the asphalt and revved up the speed, I felt like I was riding someone’s rage. I clung on to Jay, half expecting to fall over the edge of the world with nothing to grab on to except a fistful of stars.

  That night, when we were lying in my bed, he took off his shirt and showed me where he wanted the tattoo.

  “Right below el crucifixion.”

  I stared at his back, which was already half-covered in tangles of dark ink. Roses and brass knuckles took up one shoulder blade and the Virgin Mary took up the other. I looked at the bare spot on his lower back, just beneath the stylized blood drops from the nailed feet of Jesus.

  “Touch it, so I know you know where I’m talking about.” And I did because I always did what Jay said.

  SCHOOL STARTED IN August but my first day wasn’t until September that year. I only went to English and art and sometimes after school I’d smoke on the roof with the other girls and boys the world didn’t give a shit about. I’d watch the football players down below on the field. They’d turn red with sweat, and then they’d touch each other like they forgot they were guys and I wondered how many of them played football just so they could touch each other without being called a faggot.

  The only reason I went to art was that it was the only thing I was kind of good at. And in English, Mr. Diaz was the only teacher who didn’t talk down to us. Late in the month we started reading Greek myths. He told us about Zeus and how he had lots of kids with lots of different women and only paid attention to a few. And then he told us bastards that maybe Zeus was one of our dads, and that maybe one of our lazy asses was the next Hercules.

  One day I tried to steal a copy of that skinny white book we were reading all the myths from, but Mr. Diaz caught me.

  “Now why you stealin somethin you probably woulda gotten for free if you just asked?” he said to me after class. He was tall and dark brown and hard to look at, the way some adults are hard to look at. He always wore a tie and his shirts were never wrinkled. He wasn’t mean about what he was asking me. He was smiling.

  I couldn’t help smiling either since I got caught, but I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged my shoulders and looked away.

  “Okay, Closet Reader. Take it. And take these, too.” He bent down to the lowest shelf of the bookcase behind his desk and gave me two other books. The Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  “Don’t steal my shit again.” He nodded me out of his classroom.

  That night, after I ate the can of refried beans and stale tortilla chips my grandma bought for dinner, I went to my room at the back of the house and shut the door. I turned the lock, even though it was broken, and put a crate of my mom’s records in front of the door. Then I sat on my bed, which was flat on the floor with no frame or springs, just a bunch of musty pillows and a comforter I hadn’t washed in a couple months, and I pulled out the books Mr. Diaz gave me. I fished around my nightstand for a joint Jay gave me the night before, lit it, and then slipped into that lazy space between reading and thinking. I’d take a drag, read a sentence or a paragraph, and then fix my attention on something outside my window, letting the smoke and the words I read twist into new questions or wonderings. Sometimes I’d write down what came to mind in my sketchbook, but most nights I just let it all go back up to the stars.

  That night I could see the moon from my window. It was halved like a fruit. The sky took its time turning dark.


  I didn’t get too far into my ritual before I could hear Jay from the other side of the wall. There was the music. The mumble of voices. Then just the music. Then came the dull rhythmic thud of his futon hitting the space on his side of the wall just above my head.

  It was always a puzzle to me who Jay fucked. I never heard or saw anybody enter or leave the house. I tried to listen one night, with my ear pressed against the stained wall, but the only voice I could hear was Jay’s low timbre and laugh. It wasn’t until one night I was staring out my window that I saw a hooded shadow slip from between the house and the tree. He had been using his window and that made me feel kind of dumb.

  Jay and his company finished and I couldn’t go back to reading. The book was tented on my chest and the joint was gone. I listened to the sound of Jay’s window sliding open and someone landing on the fallen leaves outside the house. A little bit later, Jay came into my room, shoving the crate from the door and knocking it over without picking it up.

  “Fuckin nerd. Why you reading?”

  He was in a black wifebeater and dirty jeans and was barefoot. His tattooed shoulders were wet with sweat. His hair was greasy and pulled back into a tight ponytail.

  He dropped himself at the edge of my bed and grabbed my book.

  “Gods, Men, and Monsters,” he read out loud and then he started to flip through it. “I’m just kidding, you know. Stay in school. Don’t be a fuckup.”

  He tossed the book back to me and rested his elbows on his knees. He tented his fingers in front of his face and tapped them together.

  “Want to go out tonight?”

  I sat up and put the book on my nightstand on top of his drawing.