They Got Their Show
It is midnight in Ponderosa and Nick Velasquez can’t sleep. The public doesn’t want him to sleep. It’s been like this ever since it hit all the big streaming platforms. The viewers stay up bingeing and he… well, he has been bingeing in his own way. With a bottle of tequila in one hand and a lit joint in the other, Nick wanders from room to room like a ghost in his own house. He shuffles through indents made in the living room carpet. Depressions from the furniture his esposa, Marcella, took with her when she left. Can’t look at my eyes without seeing our little girl. Nick pulls on the joint, its coal shifting from a deep cherry red to bright yellow in the darkness. He exhales a plume of smoke and walks down the hall, his sobriety trailing behind him. And just when things were getting back to normal. He’d gotten a job at a local taxi company, found a support group with minimal woo woo, hell he’d even gotten Marcella on the phone once or twice but then the docuseries hit Netflix.
He’s been circling the house all evening, like water going down the drain, each revolution getting smaller and smaller bringing him down inevitably to a single point. His daughter’s room. Everything is, more or less, as Carmen left it; Notorious B.I.G posters, a half-made bed and her diary open to a blank page dated June 17th 1995. Stumbling into the room, he squares off with the closet. A four-year-old Carmen wouldn’t sleep if the closet door was left open at night. She got scared that if it were left open, monsters from the dark could just walk on in. So being a good daddy, Nick made a big show of closing the doors and threatening any would-be monsters inside. It became a nightly ritual until at fifteen, her embarrassed protests hit home. Nick takes a swig from the bottle and wipes his mouth using the back of his hand. He’d asked her once why the monsters didn’t simply push the door open.
“Daddy,” she had said, “The handle is on the outside.”
Swaying slightly, it seems to Nick that the evil behind those bifold closet doors is almost