Knockout by John Jodzio Page B

catching me. His eyes were open wide and his nostrils were flared. I tried to yell for help, but my tongue wouldn’t cooperate. Jayhole set Strangles down on the ground beside me and I felt him curl around my calf. Even though I was scared shitless, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
    I n the morning, I woke up handcuffed to my bedframe. Jayhole stood across my room from me, flipping through a batch of earrings I’d recently made. I heard Caruso’s music upstairs, the heavy bass of his speakers pounding through the ceiling and into my chest. Jayhole’s scrapbook was sitting on the floor. There was a new picture of me pasted in it. When he saw I was awake, he walked over and pressed his boot into my stomach.
    â€œWhat you need to understand,” he said, “is that no matter where you go, I’ll find you.”
    He pressed his foot down harder, making it difficult to breathe.
    â€œNow you say it,” he told me.
    I thought about Dan and his suicide note. I understood how awesome it might have felt for him to jump from that bridge and fly through the air for a few seconds before he hit that water. How wonderful those precious moments of freedom probably felt before his face smashed into the river and his nose got pushed up into his brain and everything went black and Jayholeless.
    â€œNo matter where I go, you’ll always find me,” I repeated.
    Jayhole bent down and unlocked the handcuffs. Then he went out into the kitchen and fried up one of my stolen steaks. I curled up under my covers. I listened to the bass of Caruso’s dance mix, ooontz, ooontz, ooontz, pounding over and over, never stopping, never ceasing. The pounding sounded so close it felt like it was happening right inside my stupid head.
    II
    M aybe it was Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, but over the next few weeks I learned to accept my situation with Jayhole. Like most abductees, I started to focus on the positive aspects of my current living situation. I had a roof over my head, didn’t I? Other people certainly had problems with their roommates too, didn’t they? Numerous scientific studies have proven that humans can get used to just about anything as long as they maintain proper perspective, right?
    By now Jayhole had started to ask me to do him an occasional favor. Doing his laundry or helping him steal a Labradoodle from his ex-girlfriend’s yard. That kind of thing. I did these favors without asking too many questions because Jayhole asked me not to ask too many questions as a personal favor to him.
    One day Jayhole asked me to run to the liquor store to get him acase of beer. When I got back with the beer, Jayhole wasn’t home and there was a strange man passed out on our kitchen floor. The man’s long black beard was knotted around our radiator. Besides being beardtied to our radiator, there was a balled tube sock stuffed into the man’s mouth and his hair had been cut in an unflattering way. The word “SHIT” had been written in capital letters on his forehead.
    â€œDid Jayhole do this to you?” I asked the man. “Are you another one of his jokes?”
    The man removed the tube sock from his mouth.
    â€œI’m looking for my wife,” he told me.
    The man was about my age and I could tell from the tone of his voice he was very tired of saying this particular sentence. I could tell that he’d said it too many times and now he wanted to say something different or better. The man tried to struggle to his feet. I warned him to stay down, but he got halfway up before the skin on his face pulled taut and he made a sound that reminded me of when Jayhole and I were down by the river and Jayhole kept hitting that muskrat over and over with that golf club.
    â€œYou’re beardtied,” I explained to him. “You’re beardtied good.”
    The man slumped back down to the kitchen floor. I noticed he had a tattoo of a Jesus fish on his left arm. His fish had