by Jesse Raub
Shuffled #6

Rebekah spent all of election night singing “We Shall Overcome” sitting on her bed in her dorm room.  Her acoustic guitar laid un-strummed on her lap.  It was supposed to be some sort of act of spiritual cleansing for refusing to vote, but she didn’t realize she didn’t know the chords to the song until she started singing.  When her voice went hoarse she called Alex out of habit and boredom since she swore she wasn’t going to turn on the TV.

“Hello?  I can’t hear you right now, they’re — they’re being really rowdy in here… it’s neck and neck and shit’s just wild!”

In forty years, Rebekah thought, nobody will care about this or remember why it was such a big deal, and we’ll all be driving flying cars to the moon anyway.

“Are you coming?” Alex said, after a few seconds of silence on Rebekah’s end.

“No.”

“What?  I can’t hear very well.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” she said.

“I can’t hear you, I’ll just talk to you when you get here.”

She grabbed her coat, set her hot pot to boil some water while she combed back her hair in the mirror hanging on the back of her door.  She poured the water over some instant hot chocolate powder in her plastic travel mug while slipping on one of her snow boots.  Jessica’s apartment was across campus and down the road, and while there really wasn’t any snow, the windchill had been hitting close to negative twenty.  There was an invisible buzz in her room, some anxious sense of the greater universe shifting.

It was a different world out in the cold air, in the middle of campus, Rebekah tried to remember the last time she made this walk after midnight, her first party with Alex, their freshman year.  They stopped under the moonlight and under some pine trees and kissed, all bundled under coats and scarves and hats and the heat from their lips caused steam to rise from the chill in their cheeks.  Or at least Rebekah imagined there was steam.

It had been a year since Alex left college and they amicably split, tying off the loose ends of any romantic emotion for each other by not talking for five months.  He called her out of the blue one day, told her a story of a protest in Montreal where he punched a riot guard in the chin under his face-shield and saw a kid take a tear gas canister to gut, dropping like he’d been shot in the chest.

“They’re monsters,” he said, but it was the way he said it.  It wasn’t fear or anger.  It was excitement that she heard gurgling, and Rebekah knew that the timid, sign-waving, boy she met in her Philosophy class had disappeared into a hull full of wanton aggression.  Regardless, she picked up the phone every time he called, and they would talk about politics or mac and cheese, depending on who started the conversation, talking loudly into the night until one of them fell asleep — Rebekah on her dorm room bed, Alex on some communal house floor near the next big protest.  He returned in late October to bum around campus until the election, but every time they tried to talk it was as if a thick glass plane materialized between the two.

The anxiousness that something terrible might happen returned when she reached the strip of small, single floor apartments.  The lights were bright in Jessica’s window, and good times were being had by all as red plastic cups and high fives went whizzing by.  Rebekah walked up to the door, and stepped aside as two rowdy guys in leather coats burst past, lighting cigarettes as they called out “wait, we’ll be back” to people inside the party.  The sound coming through the door was an immense buzz of loud talking, laughter, crying, and shouting as small visual details separated skin from skin; a red t-shirt, a pair of dark blue jeans, a gray sweatshirt and a black top hat.  Arms were intertwined, lips were parted in smiles, feet were tapping along to some inaudible music carried through a thudding bass line in the walls.

Rebekah stepped into the light and surveyed the room.  She saw no one she recognized, and then through a crowd of people, was the curly brown hair on the back of Alex’s head as he pinned some brunette up against the wall and started passionately kissing her neck.  The woman’s leg wrapped around his waist as he leaned his pelvis into hers.

In forty years, Rebekah thought again, as she took a sip from her hot chocolate and stopped giving a damn, nobody will care about this or remember why it was such a big deal, and we’ll all be driving flying cars to the moon anyway.

She unzipped her coat, set her plastic travel mug on the floor, and grabbed onto the arm of next guy she could find before heading further into the party like it was the eve of the end of the world.

“I Abstain” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“I abstain” is a short fiction interpretation of the Napalm Death song of the same name from the album Utopia Banished, released through Earache Records in the year 1992. It is the sixth story written as part of the Shuffled series, in which inspiration is chosen by random computerized algorithms on a well stocked iPod.