Free Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor

through with blue and some tatters of gathering black. Probably it would storm.
    “What am I going to do?” Roger said.
    “You’ll stay with us,” David said. It was the right thing and because it was the right thing he wasn’t just saying it, he meant it, too, even though Roger made him feel competitive in a way he could not articulate, for a goal he could never quite specify. It buzzed on his tongue like a sharp mint or a blocked word.
    “Of course you’ll stay with us,” Estrella said. Snapcase was driving, a beer between his legs. There was really no question. They were a family. (Nobody had seen Sammy in days. Maybe he’d hitched upstate, or met someone, or gotten busted, except wouldn’t he have called from jail?) Snapcase eased through a red light, then half a block up saw a cop car hiding behind some bushes. It hadn’t seen them. He came to a full stop at the next sign, sipped his beer—in his hammy fist it might have been a Mountain Dew.
     
    At Roger’s follow-up visit, they scolded him about the antibiotics. They told him that alcohol neutralizes antibiotics, so doubling the dose was never going to do the trick. They told him they’d told him all this the first time he was there. Did he want to lose his foot? Roger cast his eyes down and he was very sorry.
    He promised to take the drugs and to not drink, but healso decided not to pay for the rebreaking of his bone. If it became necessary, he’d have one of the guys do it, then go over to the hospital and get it set.
     
    Snapcase wanted no part of Roger’s crazy idea. Sammy, who was home again, said he’d do it, but nobody thought he was strong enough. David told Roger he’d think about it. He said it “intrigued” him.
    “I mean it’s real violence,” he said to Estrella. They were in bed. “I guess wife-beaters and psychos do this kind of stuff all the time.”
    “And cops.”
    “Right. But those people are so fucked up they don’t even get it. That it’s like this totally there thing. This leg. A person. Totally nontheoretical. The Real.”
    “David, those people live in the Real. And so, in fact, do we.” She drew him into the aura of her warmth. “You poor theorist,” she said.
     
    David tells Roger to put up the cash for the bottle. That’s only fair. The whiskey is for courage, partly, but not really. David is looking forward to this. He wants there to be a bottle because to swig whiskey before swinging straight and true seems proper in a grand sense, like knowing just how to act at a funeral or during a riot.
    When the new disc settles into the tray and starts to spin, Roger’s snuffling and hitched breath disappear. Social Distortion fills the world. A guy they know plays in a weekendleague and he’s bringing a real bat over when he gets off work, but for now David’s still swinging the mop handle.
     
    After his friend drops off the bat, David sits and holds it, gingerly, as if it were volatile or imbued with magics. He’s imagining Roger’s bone shattering and how it will feel to do a righteous violence. Estrella says Roger seems depressed, and she’s going to bunk out in the living room with him tonight. Okay, David says. Probably it’s nothing. Even if it’s not nothing, still okay. Stretched out diagonally on his bed, luxuriating like a king (when she’s there they sleep in a sweaty tangle), in his mind he deals blows that have Roger screaming through his bite-rag. Like an expectant father with a wife’s overnight bag packed and ready, David has carefully washed a single tube sock. He keeps coming back to what Roger said on the night he hurt himself. That word. Meat. If all goes well he won’t actually see the meat. Still. It is so red and shiny in his mind.
     
    The swelling is going down. Roger says maybe they should wait another day. David says he thinks they’ve waited too long already, but Roger says he feels different, somehow. He’s always known his body’s rhythms. He feels a rally.
     
    Estrella