Free The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell

all she can see are wooden slats, clothes wadded in the darkness. She rises further, emerges through the top of the bureau. It’s littered with sticks, stones, a glass beaker, an empty rat cage.
    And then, at last, she sees him, sitting cross-legged on the bed, sheets tangled around his waist, his head bowed. He’s focused on working something in his hands, interlocked pieces of metal—a tavern puzzle?—so she can’t see his face, just the crown of his head.
    And what she sees is: he’s had a haircut. The long locks of his that she loved: gone. She’s surprised at how much it hurts, at how quickly it takes on the shape of a betrayal, seeing him shorn like this. She wonders whether Donald was the one who did it: it looks amateur, like it was cut at home by someone who didn’t entirely know what he was doing. She looks at her son’s hair: it’s patchy, uneven, close to the skull.
    Also, it’s green.
    Green-haired kid: there’s a way in which she thinks she could like the change, if only she could find a way through the blockage of hating it. Less metalhead, more punk: maybe not the choice she’d have made but she can see, if she’s being reasonable, that it doesn’t need to break her heart. It doesn’t.
    He looks up and looks directly at the spot where she is and her heart jolts. His face is chalky white. For a fraction of a second she thinks that he’s
dead
, that she’s seeing his
ghost
somehow, and the sudden surge of grief that blasts through her eradicates whatever pleasure she might have taken from being able to look into his eyes again. A rending wail beginsto form within her and it doesn’t fully subside even when she realizes he isn’t dead, isn’t a ghost, but has just, for some reason, chosen to cake his face with white greasepaint. A ring of red lipstick carelessly loops his mouth.
    He’s not going through a punk phase. He’s going through a—clown phase? Why the fuck does he look like that?
    He peers into the spot where she is and frowns, concentrating.
    She flinches.
    The makeup has a slightly rotten quality. Blame the August heat, maybe, but he looks
diseased
somehow. If he’s a clown, he’s the tiniest, sickest clown, a clown that the other clowns might taunt for sport. And why is he a clown anyway?
    She realizes that what he looks like, more than anything else, is the Joker. Batman’s Joker. The sickest clown of them all.
Why the fuck does he look like that?
she thinks again, helplessly.
    A hand drops onto her shoulder. A voice—she recognizes it distantly as Angel’s—says, “Hey. Hey, Ollie,” and the vision of Jesse splinters up and away, and she’s back in Carnage, disoriented and wrenched.
    The first thing she does is vomit. She just opens her mouth and her gut gives one solid heave and everything in her issues out directly onto the bar. Tears spring into her eyes, more purgation. As if her body thinks that it can flush out what she’s seen.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Angel. He rests a hand between her shoulder blades for a quick second, and thenseems to think better of it, moves around behind the bar instead. “Water,” he says, and he makes a glass of it happen, sets it down in front of her. She gulps it as he produces a pub towel and wipes down the spattered zinc.
    “Bourbon,” she says, once she’s gotten through about half of the water and ensured that it’s going to stay down. Angel flicks her a look like he’s maybe not sure that she’s sure what she’s asking. She gives him the flat look that she usually gives in response to guys giving her that kind of look, and he does what she asked. Neat, with a Coke back, the way she likes it. She finds herself a little surprised that he remembered that; she’s only drank with him twice before. She glugs the bourbon down without pausing to taste it. Then she sips the Coke and holds it in her mouth, letting it fizz there until it goes inert, and only then finally swallowing.
    “Are you OK?” Angel asks.
    “I