Before we kicked the door in and shouted into the room for everyone to get down if they knew what was good for them and our eyes had time to adjust to the dimness of the apartment to make out not David and Julia Moss, the couple we’d been following around for the better part of the last month ever since Halloween night, but instead saw a family from Pakistan huddling together on a finely woven rug in the center of the living room praying and crying in Urdu
Before we brandished our .22 caliber water guns and scared the living hell out of that poor family
Before the absolute wrongness of what we had just done began to settle around us
Before we could even begin to apologize for the intrusion and ask the trembling family hugging each other if they knew where the Mosses lived
Before Jenny looked at me, pale-faced, and asked me, “What do we do, baby? What do we do?”
Before I told her to “Just let me think for a second, Jen! Let me think!”
Before I could scratch together an escape plan that would get us out before the family knew what was going on
Before I lowered my water gun, smiled, peacefully lifted the baby doll I held in my left hand, and said “Trick-or-Treat!”, silencing everyone in the room, Jenny included, and drawing dozens of bewildered eyes toward what was obviously a huge misunderstanding
Before I imagined the whole family smiling back, laughing at the absurdity of the situation, and telling us not to worry and that we were free to leave and that they would not call the police on us
Before nothing like that happened and Jenny and I took one step back toward the door
Before our sudden movement sent the father into survival mode and he sprinted for his life out of the room, returning moments later with a shotgun and firing at us, obliterating the vinyl body of our reborn baby doll as I held it by the head in my left hand, sending tiny shards of plastic through my Hawaiian shirt and into my skin along with bits of lead, steel, bismuth, tin, and zinc, through my hand and forearm and shattering my humerus
Before Jenny and I scrambled down the stairs, skipping every other step, and hobbled across the lawn and into the street deaf with adrenaline amidst the utter chaos trailing behind us
Before we finally got into our car and the engine wheezed and wouldn’t turn over
Before we cursed our luck and pointed literal and metaphorical fingers at each other for the other’s obvious lack of foresight and ultimate failed reconnaissance
Before the engine came to life and Jenny put the car into drive, drive, drive!
Before the father emerged from the apartment and fired off another report of his shotgun from his second-floor apartment and took out our back passenger-side tire and exploded our back window
Before I rolled up my window, as if it would protect me, and ran back through our whole plan in my mind, pushing through the heartbeat I felt thumping in my arm and my head
Before I saw David and Julia Moss poke their heads out of the apartment one door down from the twelve-gauge wielding father looking immaculate even in their confused mortal terror
Before I looked down at the number I wrote on the inside of my vinyl-spliced arm and saw a black-inked #17 splattered with blood and not a black-inked #18
Before I had the time to hound myself for writing down the wrong apartment number like I should have so that none of this would have happened
Before I looked over a Jenny and wondered what she must be thinking and wondered if she blamed me for everything
Before I said, “I’m so sorry, Jen. This was all my fault”
Before she told me to keep pressure on my arm so it wouldn’t bleed as much and I felt the blood from my wounds pool in my lap, collect in a sticky syrup on the seat of my pants, and stain the gray, nylon upholstery of the only car between the two of us
Before I said “I pissed my pants! Jen! I pissed my pants!” mistaking the blood for urine and crying “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I’ll clean it up! I’m so sorry!”
Before I caught a glimpse of the plastic baby head still clutched in my palm and wondered for a second—or maybe it was longer—if there was any chance to throw this whole situation into reverse without blowing the transmission to see if things could be different
Before the hue of the world oscillated between cold and hot and Jenny’s muffled voice warbled in and out of silence
Before Jenny managed to drive us four blocks away to the nearest hospital across the street from the Vietnamese restaurant on Center Street but had to pay for parking in the hospital parking garage because there was no available street parking and she had to take us all the way to the top level that looked across the valley as the sun set pink and orange over the lake because every other level was parked up to the gills
Before the pandemonium pulsing around me parted to a noiselessness so sudden and so sublime that a single tear tumbled down my right cheek and was absorbed into my mustache
Before Jenny tore off the sleeves of her secondhand police uniform and applied a makeshift tourniquet to my already numbing left arm
Before I smelled her perfume and her shampoo and she told me to breathe and she tied off the sleeve and said, “You’re going to make it, baby”, and I asked if she was mad at me and if she thought I was going to die
Before she said she wouldn’t let me die and that everything would be okay but she was too late to really stop the bleeding because the paramedics would only arrive after the actual police would order her out of the vehicle mere minutes before I departed from this life
Before I had the chance to tell Jenny how much I loved her and how truly sorry I was for roping her into all of this and I started fading, blinking in and out of consciousness, and my vision doubled and then blurred beyond nearsightedness
Before I found myself staring at the sleeping face of that play-pretend baby still resting in the palm of my hand and imagined what it would have actually been like to be a father: the thrill of being present at every first in that sweet child’s life
Before I lived out a scenario in my head where Jenny and I raised him to adulthood and watched proudly as our progeny unfurled on and on and on before our eyes until we were both nothing but organic matter feeding and refeeding the earth
Before I suddenly saw the artificial lips and eyelids of our artificial baby’s severed head part and it started speaking to me and only me
Before it called me by name and said I was not much longer for this world
Before I asked the child where I went wrong and why things had to end this way and why we couldn’t have just gone to the right apartment, faked an armed robbery, scared David and Julia Moss into giving us the trophy they stole from us from Benson and Marcy Swensen’s 5th Annual Halloween Couples Costume Contest, triumphantly revealed who we were behind our costumes, and proven once and for all that we were the superior couple, that we were the only true winners deserving of that trophy after all these years
Before the child relayed to my mind every conceivable ending to every existing version of me being born, living, and dying simultaneously as being cosmically and thematically the same with very little variance across an endless multitude of dimensions
Before he proclaimed to me in a soft but piercing voice that, according to the ancient, antemortal laws upon which the universe was breathed into being this was how it had always been and would always be until the end of time, amen
Before my heart sank at this news and I almost lost all hope of redemption from living out such a tired, tragic treadmill existence and I begged the child to tell me if there was any other way, any possible avenue of escape, any celestial loophole that could propel me into a fresh-slated reality where the die had not yet been cast
Before the child milled this proposition over in the hollows of its head for uncounted seconds upon seconds, the black, empty sockets swirling in distracted determination deciding my future
Before the abysmal storm of sentencing settled in the infant’s visage and the child declared that there was, indeed, another way but that we needed to act fast
Before the bodiless child sprouted limbs of flesh and bone and reached out to me with a silky-smooth hand, fat with rubber banded knuckles and joints all the way to its pristine, cherubic chin
Before I rooted to the child’s outstretched palm and held firm to its newborn skin heaping all my hopes upon its soft shoulders and I heard Jenny scream for me to stay with her as the sirens approached and eventually enveloped us in a nauseating strobe of red and blue as the moon kissed the sun goodnight in the gloaming behind the mountains
Before I departed hand-in-hand with my reborn child and sailed across the sky at spirit-speed and climbed through cumulonimbus and nimbostratus clouds and the child pulled me through a slit of bright lights and silver sounds straight out of time and space from one plane to the next
Before we passed through countless colors and vapors pouring past our flying frames and the child released a coo that rattled the shapes and figures flitting in my periphery and our bodies bent and folded from three dimensions to two then to one, erupting in a final flash of sparkling sapphire and cinnabar
Before I floated dreamily in a blue, shapeless quietude and anxiously awaited my forthcoming fate and the child’s voice plucked through the void announcing that I owed it big time for this and that what was to be done could not be undone
Before my body could materialize and my mouth could form the proper sounds of gratitude and the tapes of my many iterations across numerous worlds rewound in double time and every single me tremored in their respective bubbles until they all reached a harmonious hum
Before the child winked and said, “see you later”, and mustered a conduit bursting with luminous beams of borelian beauty that warmed my skin and flooded my veins with liquid gold
And before amber bolts of lightning blasted from my fingertips and toes and my very essence was restrung and shot headlong into this summoned second chance, I stood opposite Jenny at #17 Pueblo de Cielo Drive, water gun in hand and sweat streaming from my forehead.
She was Holly Hunter donning a cop costume, and I was Nic Cage with a parrot-patterned Hawaiian shirt complete with sideburns and an honest to God roadrunner tattoo. With our recently purchased reborn baby, we were Edwina and H.I. McDonnough with our little Nathan Jr. from Raising Arizona, and the trophy behind that door was as good as ours.
I smiled at her and said, “Are you ready, little lady?”
She said, “I was born ready, baby!”
“Hot damn! That’s my girl! Now let’s get us that trophy,” I said.
Those were the salad days.
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Jace Einfeldt is a writer from Southern Utah. His work can be found in CutBank, Words & Sports Quarterly, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He and his wife are currently in the process of moving to Arkansas where he will be joining the MFA Program at the University of Arkansas this fall.
twitter: @MeinJace
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