FORTUNE

INTERCONNECTED FLASH FICTION | CAROUSEL TOWN

Tegan didn’t intend to use his girlfriend’s apartment as a storage unit for fentanyl. It just sort of happened that way.

First, he moved in above the perfume shop. He knew it was a cover. Obviously. How many people buy perfume? Definitely not enough to keep a whole shop afloat in a small town. He figured it was a cover for money laundering. Tegan was a smart guy. But he didn’t think any of it would affect him living above it.

Until one day the shopkeeper, a man named Urth, not Earth, which Tegan asked, but Urth, asked if he wanted some perfume samples to give to his girlfriend, Lily. And Tegan wasn’t going to say no. His only qualms were about whether or not his girlfriend was going to think he was telling her that she didn’t smell good enough. Which she did actually. She smelled like Dove soap and church incense and macaroni and cheese. It could really get him going.

But her birthday was coming up, something she reminded him of a lot, and so Tegan tried a few of the perfumes in his apartment – which led to a lengthy fight about whether or not he was seeing other women there – until he gave her a full bottle of a perfume called “Fortune” for her birthday and explained about trying them out and she was so flattered she wore it every time they were together, which was pretty often after that.

The next time Tegan saw Urth, Urth asked if she liked it and Tegan said yes because it was the truth and Urth said he could have as many as he wanted which seemed strange because how much perfume could one woman need, but it was a nice offer and he said thanks. And Urth said sure.

“And can you maybe do me a favor in return?” Urth asked. That’s how it started.

Tegan used to sell his platelets when he was really short on cash. He had a lot of them apparently and other people didn’t. And they regenerate anyway. Go figure.

He used to get a couple thousand bucks for it and all he had to do was sit in a chair with a needle in his arm. He thought it was a pretty good deal, until Urth asked him to keep a couple boxes in his apartment in exchange for a couple thousand bucks and Tegan realized that was the real definition of passive income that people were always going on about.

Tegan never looked in the boxes. When his girlfriend asked about them, he said his landlord was paying him to store them because the back room of the perfume shop was full. And she asked if they were perfume. And again, he said sure. Because it seemed, if not likely, at least plausible.

“Lucky you,” she said. “Let me know if he needs any more storage.”

And he realized he was lucky. He was a lucky guy to have a girlfriend and a living and a nice place to live, even if it did smell so much like different kinds of perfume, it sometimes gave him a headache. He was fortunate.

So he asked Urth if he needed any more room for storage and Urth said sure. And Tegan told Urth about his girlfriend’s offer and Tegan thought Urth would be thrilled, but instead Urth wasn’t so sure. Apparently, he’d need a key to get in and out to exchange the boxes for other boxes at any time. So Tegan ran this by his girlfriend and she shrugged and said it was fine it’s not like she had anything valuable in there and then made a duplicate of her room key for Urth and one for Tegan too, so he could come and go into the motel room where she lived as he liked. And that was even better.

And at some point, all the boxes in Tegan’s apartment ended up at his girlfriend’s motel room and so did Tegan.

And they both had some nice passive income. They talked about Tegan moving in, but they weren’t sure if it would affect his relationship with Urth and the passive income, so he kept his apartment up there, even though he was basically never there anymore.

Tegan was in the diner, eating a Full American Breakfast when he heard someone talking about him, and it was almost like his ears swiveled on his head like a horse, to hear better, facing in the direction of the two women chatting.

“Well, Lily’s apparently keeping some things for that boyfriend of hers in her motel room, with her child there and everything. And Freddie, that’s the motel manager, he’s just not having it. You know, his brother died of an overdose. And he apparently reported it to the police. So I expect that will be sorted out any day now.”

Tegan felt like one of those cartoon characters with his legs spinning as he tried to get out of there as fast as he could back to Lily’s place. He nearly fell on the checkered tiled floor in his hurry, half the cash he pulled out of his pocket, curtesy of Urth, fell onto the floor and he must have tipped a whopping 25% because he didn’t have time to worry about it.

He got to Lily’s place before she did, on account of her still being at work at the church. The pastor was making her learn piano for God knows what reason, and she had to practice a little at the end of each day or he’d be angry. Near two years and she still couldn’t play a thing.

By the time Lily got home from work, Tegan had loaded everything into both their cars and the motel room didn’t have a single bit of product left. He was sweaty and dead beat tired from the ordeal and he decided to lay down on her motel bed and close his eyes, just until she got home and could help him unload it all back to Urth.

He must have slept longer than he wanted to though, because when he woke up, it was to the smell of Fortune, and he found Lily lying in bed next to him, arm splayed on his chest.

He was about to check the clock to see how long they’d slept, until he realized what woke him. It was a strange shuffling sound. But not like squirrels on the roof or rats in the walls.

Tegan went to the window and peered out of the curtain into the pitch-black street, where he could just barely make out in the moonlight, a strange sight. Men, but they looked small from this distance and in the dark, like little toy soldiers. Because what he saw most clearly was the way their guns looked so much a part of them, it was almost like they were welded on.

Tegan didn’t even think. He just started moving.

Almost as soon as he’d slammed the door to the bathroom and locked himself in, he heard them break down the door to the motel. And then he heard Lily’s daughter Leia screaming. He didn’t know a child’s screams could sound like that. Almost like an ambulance siren. Wailing. And then, “Mom,” she screamed over and over again.

Tegan sat on the edge of the bathtub in his boxers as someone, Lily probably, jiggled the handle of the bathroom. Or maybe it was a policeman. Or policewoman. He shouldn’t assume.

He wasn’t sure what he thought was going to happen in the bathroom, why he thought he’d be safe there. He just wanted to be in an enclosed space, even though he knew, if they could knock down a motel door, they could surely knock down a bathroom door.

He sat there for a long time, or what felt like a long time. It was completely dark in there, since he’d never turned on the light, but somehow the sounds coming from the other room felt like light themselves.

When they finally took him away, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. And it was strange, but it was almost as if he saw himself as a child, not the forty-year-old man he actually was, with receding hair and thinning skin. His boyish face glanced back at him, as the policeman, it was a man, handcuffed him and walked him calmly out of the motel room.

And when he got outside and saw Leia sitting in a police car, and Lily in a different one, it was Leia he waved to, like a little boy waving to a girl from his elementary school class.

What was the saying about who fortune favors? The brave, he thought it was.

As tears dripped down his face, staring into her stoic one, he thought she much braver than he.

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