Free Tormented by Robert J. Crane Page A

his car. Maybe they’d forget. Maybe it’d be all right tomorrow. Maybe it really was just a nightmare. These sorts of things didn’t happen to real people. He’d just …
    He’d just wake up tomorrow and go on living. Things like this didn’t happen to him. Exciting things didn’t just happen to him. And he loved that about his life. It was steady. Predictable. Stayed well between the lines.
    Yes, perhaps it was a dream. It was certainly too surreal to be reality.
    Though that thought wasn’t much in the way of comfort, he clung to it with everything he had. Benjamin put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. He needed to sleep. To sleep, to wake up refreshed, and possibly somewhere else. Then, maybe, he could get back to the business of living life. Go to work tomorrow, come home, put everything else behind him.
    Yes, that was what he needed to do. With unsteady hands, he turned the wheel at the end of his street and headed off to find somewhere to sleep, perchance to dream … of a better tomorrow, one in which today had never happened.

9.
Sienna
    When I made it back to my barstool, there was a sweet drink waiting for me with pineapple and a maraschino cherry speared together in the middle of it. I wanted a sip but I held off, still a little put off by my experience in the bathroom. I’d peeked into the men’s room as I came back out of the hallway and found nothing—no sign of a mirror looking through into the women’s room or anything creepy like that, just a normal looking bathroom. Or, as normal-looking a bathroom as you can have with urinals. They sure as hell don’t look normal to me. Or private.
    “Hey,” Brent’s face looked out from behind the curtain separating the bar from the kitchen, “burger’ll be ready in a few.”
    “Is that so?” I asked coolly.
    His forehead creased, but he mostly maintained his smile as he answered. “That is so. What’s up with you?”
    “Why? Do I look like I’ve just seen a ghost?” I asked, trying to mask my irritation.
    “Not sure I’ve ever seen anyone who’s actually seen a ghost,” Brent said, still sticking half out of the curtain like an actor trying to get a look at the crowd before a performance. “You mostly just look cranky to me. Did we run out of toilet paper in the ladies’ room again? Because if so, I’m sorry. Someone keeps coming in and stealing—”
    “No, your toilet paper supply appears to be quite robust,” I said. If he was guilty of pulling this crappy prank on me, he was playing it cool in an epic way. Dude must have antiperspirant like a desert, because most people tend to quiver a little at the knees when I get mad at them. One time, at the Target returns counter, I sent a teenage clerk running into the back room when I “gently” (and accidentally) dropped a malfunctioning tablet through their wooden countertop. I thought it was a very savvy move on her part, actually.
    Strength. I haz it. Control? Eh. Working on it, still.
    “So what’s up?” Brent asked, emerging from behind the curtain. “In thirty seconds or less, please, unless you like your burger well done. Which is a funny way to say ‘burnt to a crisp,’ I always thought. I would have gone with, ‘poorly done—’”
    “Playing pranks on me is not cool,” I said. “And by ‘not cool,’ I’m understating it like ‘well done.’ I actually mean, ‘potentially fatal.’”
    “Whoa,” Brent said, hands in the air in utter surrender. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I would not prank you, and not just because of the fatal thing. I have not pranked anyone since primary school, and it was tossing a worm on Berrie Jansen’s dress in hopes that she’d notice me.” His voice diverged into a strange, quasi-European accent, and he sounded … stressed.
    “Okay,” I said, in measured tones, lifting my head to look at myself in the massive mirror that stretched above the bar, “well, I just had a ghost-story type