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We’re talking about the way life goes. The four of us are sitting on floor pillows in Bella’s studio apartment, a little room right above the formalwear store downtown, drinking cheap Moscato and passing around a bag of pistachios. We’re trying to stay healthy, but we can only try so hard. This is the way life goes: Bella’s little sister got killed in the shooting at Holliday High School two weeks ago. It’s named for Doc Holliday, a Georgia native who moved out West to become a gunslinger. These are the kind of school names you get in Georgia. People are getting superstitious, sharing a Facebook post that asks what anybody expected from a school with a namesake like that. People are praying more often. You see them in grocery store checkout lines, eyes closed, lips working silently. Nobody touches the tabloids anymore. There’s no reason to look at People when those same grieving mothers are all around you, at the bank and the Dollar General and purchasing family-sized buckets of dark meat chicken from the KFC. Nobody cooks anymore, but everyone’s tired of casseroles. Bella’s sister’s in US Weekly, one of the fifteen dead featured on the cover. She was supposed to be a Broadway star, Bella tells us. She was rehearsing for this musical called The Fantasticks when someone pulled the fire alarm. She had a monologue at the beginning of the play about the wonders of being sixteen: I like to touch my eyelids because they’re never quite the same. She had to stroke her face and spin circles around the stage, her skirt parachuting around her. She was supposed to fuckin’ go places, Bella keeps telling us. We were all supposed to go places, but look where we are. Community college, office jobs. Before he’d draped his bedroom with flags from fallen regimes, the kid who shot up the school had been accepted to some tiny college up in the Blue Ridge Mountains on an ROTC scholarship. Before all the saloons and shoot-outs and the O.K. Corral, Doc Holliday was just a dentist. He told kids to floss more often. He stuck his hands in their mouths, told them to open wide.
Aleyna Rentz’s Doc Holliday Goes West appears in Flock 22.
We’re talking about the way life goes. The four of us are sitting on floor pillows in Bella’s studio apartment, a little room right above the formalwear store downtown, drinking cheap Moscato and passing around a bag of pistachios. We’re trying to stay healthy, but we can only try so hard. This is the way life goes: Bella’s little sister got killed in the shooting at Holliday High School two weeks ago. It’s named for Doc Holliday, a Georgia native who moved out West to become a gunslinger. These are the kind of school names you get in Georgia. People are getting superstitious, sharing a Facebook post that asks what anybody expected from a school with a namesake like that. People are praying more often. You see them in grocery store checkout lines, eyes closed, lips working silently. Nobody touches the tabloids anymore. There’s no reason to look at People when those same grieving mothers are all around you, at the bank and the Dollar General and purchasing family-sized buckets of dark meat chicken from the KFC. Nobody cooks anymore, but everyone’s tired of casseroles. Bella’s sister’s in US Weekly, one of the fifteen dead featured on the cover. She was supposed to be a Broadway star, Bella tells us. She was rehearsing for this musical called The Fantasticks when someone pulled the fire alarm. She had a monologue at the beginning of the play about the wonders of being sixteen: I like to touch my eyelids because they’re never quite the same. She had to stroke her face and spin circles around the stage, her skirt parachuting around her. She was supposed to fuckin’ go places, Bella keeps telling us. We were all supposed to go places, but look where we are. Community college, office jobs. Before he’d draped his bedroom with flags from fallen regimes, the kid who shot up the school had been accepted to some tiny college up in the Blue Ridge Mountains on an ROTC scholarship. Before all the saloons and shoot-outs and the O.K. Corral, Doc Holliday was just a dentist. He told kids to floss more often. He stuck his hands in their mouths, told them to open wide.
Aleyna Rentz’s Doc Holliday Goes West appears in Flock 22.
Aleyna Rentz recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University with an MFA in creative writing. She won 1st place in Pleiades‘ 2019 RM Kinder Realistic Fiction Contest, and 3rd place in the 2018 January/February Glimmer Train New Writers Contest. Her work has appeared in various journals and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently, she serves as senior fiction reader for Salamander and a reader for the Wigleaf Top 50.