Free Los Angeles by Peter Moore Smith

Monique Veronchek had ceased to be
     a person a very long time ago.
    ______
    Things were blurry now, but a little darker at least.
    Pink, in any event.
    I sat in the strip mall parking lot, wearing my mother’s prescription lenses, and waited futilely for the aura to fade. It
     shimmered, flickered, sparkled, flashed. Sometimes, very rarely, the headache didn’t arrive, or the aura turned out to be
     a trick of the eye. It was hard to tell right now which way it would go. I was still blind, but fuck it, I thought.
    I turned the ignition and drove defiantly toward my destination, this time off the freeway, to Orange Blossom Boulevard, nearly
     sightless from the aura and my mother’s ridiculous rose-colored glasses, to the address of someone named Jessica Teagarden.
    As soon as I pulled onto that street, however, I stopped the Cadillac at the curb, swung the door open, and puked into the
     clean concrete gutter. The vomit was gelatinous, formerly Stouffer’s spaghetti with meatballs, which I didn’t remember eating,
     for some reason, and which didn’t contain enough liquid because I had been overly medicating and drinking too much and was
     as dehydrated as a spoonful of Tang.
    I was lucky not to be coughing up orange dust.
    The nausea phase had come suddenly, like an invisible hand had squeezed my stomach from the inside, and the whole contents
     of my stomach were unceremoniously squirted onto the avenue. Disgusting as this may sound, this was a good thing, because
     it meant the overall migraine experience would probably be short-lived. Usually at the onset of the vomiting, the visual disturbances
     clear away like clouds over Zuma Beach. So when I lifted my head and wiped my face on the front of my shirt, the blindness
     lifted, too. I pushed my mother’s glasses onto my forehead, waiting for the next gush of vomit to rise, and looked around
     with clear eyes.
    This was a much better neighborhood than mine. There were a couple of kids playing Wiffle ball on the lawn across the street;
     an orange-and-purple FedEx truck was making its round of deliveries; an old woman power-walked by my car, her gray head bobbing
     like a pigeon’s. No one said a word. I thought the nausea had passed for a moment, and I almost got out of the car, but then
     I felt it again, that pressure rising up from deep inside me, and I retched for a full five minutes more, coughing and gagging
     and drooling like an animal.
    Eventually, though, it stopped, and I was able to pull my head back in, wipe my face on my shirt once more, and look around
     for the exact address. There are usually a few moments of peace, relatively speaking, after I throw up, before the pain behind
     my eye starts to build, and I wanted to take full advantage.
    I took a deep breath, locating the number above a door.
    The house was a stucco duplex with a wide, manicured front lawn, a garden of decorative cacti, an old palm tree providing
     a finger of shade across the facade. I wondered why Angela had moved away from a place like this, if she had actually lived
     here, that is. It was so much nicer than my neighborhood. There were wild palms decorating the lawns, as well as two gigantic
     willows across the street, their long, whiplike tendrils tickling the dry grass in the hot Santa Monica breeze. I could even
     see a set of red swings with a slide and seesaw around the side yard. I pulled up without closing the door, parked the Cadillac
     in front of the walkway, and got out, pushing Mom’s pink-tinted octagonals back down over my eyes to filter the garish light.
     From where I stood, it didn’t seem like anyone was home. I walked across the lawn, stepped up to the front door, and noticed
     a pile of mail in front of it. I knelt down to sift through, finding mostly catalogs like Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma,
     and Sharper Image, some of which were addressed to Occupant or Current Resident, others specifically to Jessica Tea-garden.
    Was that really her