Fiction2 Taylor Hebert
writetaylor
Black Velvet in Styx, Mississippi
By Taylor Hebert
Black velvet and that little boy's smile. Black velvet with that slow southern style. A new religion that'll bring ya to your knees. Black velvet if you please. The old tune played braggingly on the radio. KOX9 liked to play the 1989 chart-topper because of Alannah Myles’ reference to Mississippi. Had the radio station know that the singer was from Quebec, they would doubtfully play it with such frequency, thought Shirley. At this late hour, the hematology lab was without company other than the radio. It was only at this time that Shirley insulted the radio’s choices as if they were the incompetence of a colleague. Her only colleague on the graveyard shift was Colleen, and she was barely any merry-maker.
Colleen had been working at the hematology lab three years longer than Shirley. The tedious and menial nature had forced her once-debatably-attractive face to sink into itself. Mouse eared, mousey haired, mouse faced, and above it all, Colleen had pet mice. She saved the sick mice from the third story lab and kept them an annoying foot away from Shirley’s workstation. She fed them bits of velveeta cheese, chicken-in-a-biskit crackers, and tomato juice from her lunch. It was a grotesque but beautiful sight to Shirley, watching Colleen’s thin fingers break up her lunch and feed it to gray and white rats with birth defects, always so lovingly. Some were missing limbs and others had extras. Though they lived for a week tops, Colleen gave them all names.
By day, hematology nurses would attend blood drives, would prep, and examine the donors, and would then draw the blood. By night, they analyzed sample of the donated blood for diseases. Shirley hadn’t set out to be a hematology nurse; she had idly studied plant biology at Vanderbilt University for two years. But everything changed, as it always will. Her father’s contracting business buckled into a crippling debt, and all financial dependence that Shirley could have had on her father shattered like a cold glass filled with boiling water. Since then, Shirley convinced herself that she was satisfied with exploring the blood of Styx, Mississippi. She hated blood. She found it boring and devoid of its often associated drama. Being born, life threatening injury, losing one’s virginity, dying. Blood is associated with so much, but to Shirley all she saw in her test tubes were Cholemia, Histiocytosis, Panmyelosis, Coagulopatihes, Iron deficiencies, and HIV.
Shirley had been working at her lab table and swivel chair for over six hours. It was 10:20 pm. “Colleen, I’m hungry, do you want me to get you something from downstairs?” Coleen pondered this by looking to the left, as always. “A tomato juice,” typical. Shirley hung up her lab coat as she exited, she smelled ripe, as it was early October in Mississippi, and hadn’t showered in God knows how long. She grabbed a squirt of hand sanitizer and rubbed it under her armpits. Aloe fresh she thought smugly.
That morning, Shirley had been working a blood drive at The Church of St. Anselm of the Holy Innocents. Colleen had convinced her to work this particular drive, because it was her church. Shirley could imagine the sadness of Colleen waking up alone on Sunday mornings, her only day off, without breakfast in order to decorate the altar with flowers, plasticky gardenias for preference. She would have ironed her blue linen pantsuit and shined her only pair of loafers before mass. Who was she doing it for? Shirley wondered if Colleen had any company at all, other than her current rats, Hecuba and Ishmaelov. Did anyone ever touch her? Had she ever laid beside a man and felt that his caress could shatter her with one touch as chalk smudged on a chalk board? Had Colleen ever let her words be unwritten with the ferocity of a hyena’s laugh? Or felt the ecstasy of a chemical injection? She was more like a man than a woman.
St. Anselm of the Holy Innocents held a blood drive twice every year. The old parishioner ladies wearing polyester outfits would always allow the nurses to test the homemade cookies that they had made for the recovering patients, and would offer them lemonade and iced tea with shaking-veined claws clad with garish wedding bands that betrothed them to their dead husbands. The drive took place in an old stuffy small adjunct building that used to be the sanctuary before the town of Styx’s Catholic Filipino population spiked. Shirley would wipe the parishioner’s veins with an alcohol swab before applying the tourniquet. Spiking a needle into a virgin vein always wiped the smug, self-righteous look off of the donor’s face. Black velvet blood would begin to fill the bag. To Shirley, it always looked like PAAS easter egg dye. It was at times like this that she would feel like a drug addiction would be so easy. The intravenous process was in her muscle memory, at least she would have gotten a bit of pleasure out of it if she was injecting rather than extracting. At the end of the day, Shirley and Colleen would donate. Colleen threw the needle into Shirley’s arm with carelessness after a long day. It would leave a bruise in the morning.
In the deserted hospital cafeteria, Shirley perused her seemingly endless options of chilled beverages and nutrition bars. She picked up a cold can of tomato juice for Colleen before she forgot, and settled on a box of Raspberry Fig Newtons. The fact that they were out of real fig Fig Newtons bothered Shirley to no end. She would have purchased a beverage, but in her delusional state of mind at 10:20 pm, she thought that her drink money would do no good for a store that couldn’t keep her favorite cookie on the shelf when she needed it. In a window she could see the blue buzz of a mounted television screen. An aggressive news caster was giving the news of an impending hurricane along the west coast of Florida. It was expected to peter out to strong wind by the time that it reached Mississippi. They always said that, and Shirley would wake up to two inches of water in her basement. She had lost the will that pay to have it constantly drained. She had also pondered just turning it into a koi pond, but that too would cost money.
Shirley forlornly returned to her lab work. She was to the Z’s in the alphabet of today’s donors. Zarechnaya, Zatsman, Zimmerman, Colleen. It was her sample. Colleen was diligently packing up her purse for the day while flossing her teeth at the same time. Both were scanning for the impurities. And there it was. It made Shirley’s neck feel like it had been severed by an invisible guillotine. Zimmerman, Colleen—positive. The bite of cookie she had just taken had stopped in her throat and was restricting her ability to breath, duct taping her airways shut. The computer was on auto-printing informative letters for donors that were found HIV positive. Colleen, she thought, Colleen.
The town of Styx, Mississippi was named for the black river that flowed down its main drag during a hurricane. The chemical makeup of Styx’s soil was obscure and ebony like. A one-of-a-kind composition of Earth. In Greek mythology , Styx was the river carried souls to the underworld, and that was what she wished she could do right now, sink away from this world. Colleen, who nursed lab rats, who decorated altars, who sang along to Alannah Myles, all for nothing. There was nothing Shirley could do, nothing she could say. She had hated Colleen, gossiped about her, derided her in front of colleagues, and rejected her invitations. Flushed from her ego, a soul stood in front of the hospital waiting for the bus to take her away.
The hurricane had come, the arrogant little news-caster had lied, and the streets began to flood in their old black ways. Feet upon feet of water rushed over the dike and rose instantaneously over Shirley’s head. Holding on to a floating, wooden statue of St. Anselm, Shirley could see Colleen through the window of the Hospital, freeing the mice for the disaster. And Shirley floated down Styx, and could not bear to look back.
