Hot Pink by Adam Levin

Eden. How you could mourn the end of something you never had a chance to take for granted.
    Susan starts to shiver, and she shivers till she shakes, and it doesn’t let up when she flops out of her chair. It doesn’t let up when her ass hits the floor of the balcony, nor when the impact shocks her spine. Even after the back of her head strikes a corner of her wheelchair’s footrest, and even after the back of her head strikes the corner again, and her skull pushes in her brain, she doesn’t stop shaking, not for a full seven seconds.
    The breathy honking that comes from Jiselle might sound like weeping, but because she keeps sticking her tongue out and saying things like “Good one,” and “Joke’s up, bloke,” and finally, mysteriously, “Bung-o,” her dying cousin concludes it’s not weeping. And then her dying cousin is dead.
    CHAPTER SUSAN
    SUSAN
    Free-floating three feet over the balcony, disembodied Susan is at once alarmed and relieved that Pedro is not there to greet her. The alarm soon dissipates, however, because disembodied Susan is looking at her disemSusaned body, at her head turned left-cheek-up, the cigarette she dropped at the start of the shaking burning her hair away, and it is gleefully a shame. Susan knows everything now. She knows, for instance, that while Jiselle, who has run inside to call for help, starts to cry, she is silently repeating, “She asked for the fag, I didn’t push it on her,” and, though she can’t seem to express it, or anything else, Susan knows for sure that nothing is inexpressible.
    The hair on the head of the body burns away quickly to reveal a red mark Carla kissed atop a freckle just below Susan’s left ear.
    â€œHow I was pretty, isn’t it pretty to think so, how I was pretty to think so, says Susan, thinks Susan,” Susans Susan, Susaning.

THE EXTRA MILE
    This wheezing heckle, this spluttering raspberry, this vile string of punchlines life. Funny? Sure. But also cruel. “Cruel,” you might retort, if you ever said anything, whoever you are, “but funny, too.” And I’d tell you the half-full/half-empty line doesn’t change the fact of the binary—that you either laugh a lot and feel a little bad, or laugh a little and feel a lot bad. What I ask is, where’s the solace? All I’ve got left is this pool and its sundeck and that gaggle of knucklehead schmendricks over there to hone my timing to a sharper brutality against the shrinking, alter-cocker bones of. Our wives are all dead and we sit around warping. We can’t remember what made them laugh. As know-nothing boys, we wooed them like naturals; as men, we killed them with… what? Not killed them. Failed to save them. They died of neglect and the world was destroyed and we stayed in Florida to learn irreverence. That’s the whole story, a long dirty joke.
    It was time to play cards, so I went to our usual table by the deep end. Everyone appeared to be suffering from mouth pains. After we’d exchanged all our how’s your digestions, my friend Heimie Schwartz asked my friend Bill the Goy, “How often did you go the extra mile for your wife?””
    â€œAll the time,” Bill the Goy said. “Every single time.”
    I pulled the deck from the box by the ashtray and dealt out a hand of rummy four ways. I neglected to shuffle first. I was in no mood to shuffle.
    Our fourth, Clyde the Schlub, who, truth be known, is more of an acquaintance than he is a friend, was stirring Splenda into his mug of iced tea when Heimie put the question to him.
    â€œClyde,” Heimie said, “how often would you say you went the extra mile for your Christina?”
    â€œAlways,” said the Schlub. “Whenever I got the chance.”
    We all knew I was next and that I would answer the same way as the Schlub and the Goy. We all knew Heimie had a different answer to the question than the rest of