Mira Bomb

Nicholas Wilder Forman

The park where I hung out in high school became a crater after a girl I knew screamed so loud. It blasted her and her radius to pieces and the neighbors said the dirt rained back down for five minutes. They thought it might be hail as it was also raining, and her scream just angry thunder. My girl friends took it upon themselves to play detective about it, I followed more like a reporter. I think it’s an easy role to fill into. You are allowed to be a creep down to a trench coat. First they interviewed me though, because none of them knew her in highschool. I met them at a party where I was pretending to be a girl two years ago. I felt really powerful with my muscles bleeding through my dress. It was raining then too. My full self comes out when it’s wet because I can slide around, in and outside my body. I like to dress up a lot.

They knocked on my door, we were all wearing trench coats. Except theirs were much cuter and cropped. My place was a mess and I love to live in it. I think I learned that in that same park, back then, where all the candy wrappers my friends and I ate the meat of would float on top of the blades of grass, and we’d roll around and wrestle slowly.

“Those are nice coats, where’d you get them?”

“We’ll ask the questions here.”

They pushed me into my cave and came in. I am never awake in the mornings but they are. It’s rare to see them tired. The closest they get is being angry, angry they have to sleep. I felt really embarrassed for them to be in my house. It’s so filthy even though I love it. I never have anyone over. I am always naked.

“So how did you know the deceased?”

I felt gross remembering she was a real dead person. A real dead person I knew and touched hands with even. We shouldn’t have to joke about everything. We shoudlnt have to joke about everythingggg!!!! I clap in my head like I’m on a game show! I want to beat the shit out of Laura and Tamra my girlfriends for making me cry in front of them it makes me so fucking upset. And stupiddd! I see myself crying from afar. And they probably think my crying is apart of the same fucking act they’re doing oh I’m selling them so well I’m

“Oh I am selling this sooo well arent I!!!” I scream into their faces I grab a bunch of my socks and underwear and hurl it at them. I want to learn to scream as loud as Mira I want to be her in that moment I want to deactivate my fucking brain and fuck myself over and over.

Laura grabs my arm. Her hand is cold and one of my socks is on her wrist.

“You loved her didnt you.”

Slip back into into some character that’s “new” but I know her. I met her before. My voice pitches up.

“I will always love myself.”

They look in some kind of way I like, a look I wish could swallow me. Live inside the throat. The only time three people have held thought and hand in one for more than a moment. Tamra puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Why did you do it, Mira?”

“I was just so angry?”

“You don’t know.”

Me again.

“I don’t think she did know. I think someone planted a bomb in her throat when she was younger and it just did what it had to.”

We sit on my couch if you can call it that for a moment. I love to watch time fall around us, because we’re all together now. They both play with my hand in a new and kind of flirty way. I never knew I had hands.

We spend the rest of the day driving, quietly and slowly to her boyfriends house who lives an hour away but it takes us four. We stop for gas ten times and walk around looking at the candy. Just looking and walking. I like to hear both of their boots on the ground. I try to play music that makes them tap their feet in the car.

At John’s house there’s police tape all up around and over. It wraps around the house like it must be radioactive. And it glows with the sun setting. Three cop cars. I push my way through. The cops fall aside like cardboard cutouts. In my John's room his body is blood on his mattress. His face is frozen flesh in a deep terrible sob. There’s so much blood on his pillow oh poor baby John. He wrote on the walls with his blood, in thick letters the Dolly Parton song I will always love you, not the Whitney Houston one. It was our favorite song forever.

Nicholas Wilder Forman is a multimedia artist and writer living in Los Angeles, California. Their work has been published in Expat Press, Dark Entries, ONEA magazine and more.

You can reach them on instagram @nickwforman.