Epiphany Jones Read Online Free Page A

under my breath, as I watch his sad face lose its blue. His whiskered cheeks softly pump up and down.
    ‘Oh!’ a woman exclaims. ‘Oh!’
    ‘Awesome,’ says YouTube guy.
    Then I guess the crowd realises they should do something so when they tell this story to their friends they can say they played a part. Theyhelp the bum up. They tell him he is so lucky. They tell him to view this as a new day, a new start.
    I’m still on the floor, my hand covered with homeless vomit. No one wants to help me up.
    My fingers are red and scalded. My heart is racing, beads of sweat dot my face, and it feels good when someone opens the door and the cold April wind blows in.
    And when the door bangs shut, she’s on the other side of it again – her raven hair hangs in wet strands before her eyes. Her pale skin is slightly pink from the cold. The place where her ear lobe should be drips with water from the shredded cartilage. And her green eyes stare at me. I mean, right at me. The words from my dream echo in my head: An awakening is needed in the west . Heat radiates from my skin. The little beads of sweat that dot my face evaporate. I’m dizzy and just want to close my eyes, but I can’t look away from the girl. Those penetrating eyes. That mutilated ear.
    Then a towel hits me in the face.
    ‘Here you go, hero,’ the alternateen barista says, moving between me and the door.
    I wipe my hand clean of vomit and when I look up again, my dream figment is gone. It rains in her place.

4
Assassins
    A fter you save someone’s life, people don’t just let you leave. When they think you’re a hero, they want to be your best friend. They pretend like they care about you. They pretend to be interested in you because of who you are, not because of what you just did.
    I sit on the steps outside the coffee house and let the drizzle fall over me. The barista takes a seat by my side. Her eyes are caked with eyeliner, the raccoon. Inside the coffee house a line has formed at the counter.
    ‘On my break,’ she says and lights up a cigarette.
    I wonder if she’s even old enough to be smoking.
    ‘That was really cool what you did,’ she says.
    But my attention has shifted to across the street. I’m watching the figment from my dream as she stands behind a crowd of Asian tourists who’re snapping pictures of one of the big lion statues that guard the museum’s entrance. But then the Asian tourists, they see a WGN-TV cameraman shooting footage of the museum. It must be for their story on the west wing’s renovation Roland mentioned. So the Asian tourists stop shooting the lion and start shooting the cameraman and a very bored looking reporter.
    ‘I’m going to be a doctor when I’m older so I can do that stuff every day. Saving lives and shit every five minutes,’ the barista says. ‘What a high.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I say, thinking of every doctor I’ve ever been to. ‘I think most doctors spend a lot of their time behind desks filling out forms.’
    ‘I’m talking about being an emergency-room doctor,’ she chides me. ‘They’re always running around saving lives every second.’
    ‘I really don’t think they are.’ And I think of the night my father died. Across the street my figment is pacing in the rain and holding a flat newspaper under her arm.
    ‘Don’t you ever watch ER ? It’s exactly like that,’ says the all-knowing seventeen-year-old. And I look into her raccoon eyes and consider trying to explain that TV shows only the exciting parts of life; that the boring shit that makes up ninety-nine percent of our existence is edited out. But it would just be a waste of breath.
    Across the street my figment seems indecisive. When I look at her she looks away. I’m grateful for that. It’s my mind trying to fight off my hallucinations. Still, it scares me that I’m seeing figments again so often. But it’s my own damn fault. I’ve been so lazy about refilling my 486s. And my shrinks have made it