The party was dense, and moving through it, Susan felt like prey. When she had finally squeezed her way back, months had passed, surely, and she felt dazed, floating in her head. Kate was talking to the sweater-vested Coke guy and they were smiling like friends from way-back.
"Chewing. It prevents cancer, everybody knows that. And it aids chewing."
"It dissolves teeth too, though, right?"
"Ha! No! That's an urban legend."
And Susan was creeped out, majorly so. She had a strong feeling she had missed something and maybe not just tonight, maybe she had been missing the point for some time now, maybe she would never get the point. That's just sometimes how it goes.
They hadn't noticed Susan, so she edged forward until they did and Kate said hiya and things were awkward and it was then that Susan decided she was going home and she told Kate so. Kate sort of tried to get her to stay, saying going home was crazy-crazy, it wasn't even midnight, and the Coke guy was grinning creepily and glancing over his shoulder and Susan said she was sorry but just didn't feel well. And soon Kate was hugging her goodbye and Susan was out under the stars, still surely missing something, feeling it in her stomach and smelling it in spent fireworks.
,*,
The yellow shirted man at the door woke her from a dream she had already forgotten. She squinted at the early sun, signed three times and was handed a big, heavy rectangular box. Closing the door she thought first whether to choose coffee or more sleep, then what yellow-shirted company delivers on New Year's Day, then gee, I wonder what this is. She threw the old newspapers on a chair, placed the box on her coffee table and went at it with her thick metal scissors.
Out came a framed ink drawing of an owl. The frame was thick, black wood, but seemed new. The drawing was yellowed by time, slightly wrinkled and torn. The moon was sketched lightly behind the owl and a few tree branches skeletoned upwards in the background. The owl was drawn from torso up and appeared to be standing still, though it was unclear what it was standing on. Its feathers were represented by thousands of tiny triangles, which must have taken forever to draw. Which is why it was off-putting that its eyes were inked so lightly and with so little detail. They stared straight out at the viewer.
Susan liked the drawing and quickly got out a hammer, took it to her bedroom and nailed it to the wall across from her bed. She was standing on a chair, making sure it was straight when the phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Susan. It's Stan."
"Hey Stan."
"Susan. Have you heard yet?"
"Heard what?"
"I've got bad news."
"What is it?"
"Kate was in an accident last night."
"Oh no..."
"The car she was in hit a car that was stopped on the freeway, apparently around a curve... it was hard to avoid."
Susan was having trouble deciding whether to breathe in or out.
"She... didn't make it."
She didn't know what to say here. She tried to think of how she was feeling, but she couldn't come up with anything.
"I'm really sorry, I know you were close friends."
The phone call ended somehow and Susan was laying in bed. She kept thinking she should be feeling something else, but she didn't even really know what it was she was feeling. She knew there was a constant buzzing. The owl on the wall stared at her, its eyes grew.
And it was then that she heard hooting from somewhere just overhead.