This Fuckin' Town of Odessa (A Twin Peaks Flash Fiction)
Today is a good day to be someone else. Carrie Page wakes from a pill nap. What time is it? She looks for the clock on the wall and finds time missing. The clock has been moved. Roy took the clock with him when he slammed her down into the bed and forced her to drink the beer with the pills crushed in.
Sunlight streams into the bedroom through broken slats in the cheap window blinds, all she could afford at the Walmart after she moved in...What year was that now? It feels like she’s lived here forever. But she did show up broke without much memory of where she came from and who her people were. She remembers the feeling of being in the room with her father. There’s some fear there. Yelling. His close face whispered in her ear. And terror because she can’t see his face, but she smells him, and his voice sounds like someone else. Her mother is a mystery. No name. No face. No feeling.
Carrie stumbles into the bathroom, adjusts her undergarments, and selects the cleanest dirty shirt from the hamper, a flowery blouse with cling stitches on the shoulders. She looks at herself in the mirror and recognizes the void. Her lucky horseshoe necklace is gone. She’s had it around her neck since she arrived here in this fucking town of Odessa. The sight of her naked neck without it induces a panic that fills her body, the house, all of Texas, and then...
She runs into the living room and stops cold. Roy is dead in the chair, shot through the forehead. What was once his brain has become an abstract painting on the drywall behind the lounger, something a demented artist would compose and seek to frame. A glint. It’s her horseshoe necklace swinging from Roy’s dead right hand. She composes herself and creeps to retrieve it. It’s intact, and she puts it around her neck like an amulet. She already feels better.
There were voices muffled through the Pharma haze Roy put her in with that hillbilly roofie brew. Raised voices. More than two. She remembers Roy was in a panic, shouting instructions at her. Men were here. They came in. There was a fight, and things broke. Then silence followed by loud voices speaking in short sentences. Yelling again. No clear words, though. No intellectual explanation for this situation. There were men here, and now they are gone. There was a shot, but no gun remains. She looked for it.
And where did that horse come from on the mantle? That’s not hers. She would never have put a white horse up there. Carrie stares at the horse for a long time until a knock at the door breaks her trance. She walks to the door but, before opening it, stops and asks, “Who is it?”
A kind but strange voice responds, and it makes her feel better.
