Fragments by Stephanie Frazee
Associate fiction editor Olivia Kingery on today’s bonus story: “Fragments” is not just about what could happen after we die, but also about the strange comforts we could find there: new friends, new places, quiet solace, revenge. This story will stay with me way past “Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday?” Definitely past “can-you-believe-it’s-already-Friday,” and maybe, even, when I am fragmented too.
Fragments
I had a feeling about the condition of my life, so I did not shower or change my dress for a week to see if anyone noticed. I bought vanilla lattes and went to the office and ate clamshell salads in my cubicle and people handed me papers and sent me emails and said things like, Can you believe it’s already Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday? But nothing about my disheveled and gamy state. I went unnoticed.
So, I stayed late on can-you-believe-it’s-already-Friday and fed myself into the paper shredder. The good part is that I died. But I did not cease to exist. That’s the shitty part.
Later, the cleaning guy hefted the strangely weighted bag of shredded paper and shredded me into the freight elevator and down to the loading dock. A truck drove me to the mill, where I was turned into pulp, along with a few other shredded women.
Machines mixed us with water and bleaching chemicals. Pieces of us went into low-quality paper products: napkins, brown paper towels, toilet paper, newspaper. Now, parts of us wait in dispensers or plastic wrap. On big days, we pass over someone’s skin and get thrown into a trash can. In an egg carton, I meet a new friend.
Louise tells me some of the things she has been so far. This is her third egg carton. “Just wait until part of you gets composted,” she says. “Being soil. So relaxing. The closest any fragment of me has come to actually ceasing to exist.”
“But this is torture,” I say. “Right now, bits of me are freezing up in a cloud, stuck to a golf ball at the bottom of a brown pond, inside a pigeon’s stomach, and a million other places. How do I do this? How do I feel it all at once and know it won’t ever end?” It’s cold wind across a frayed nerve ending, a house vibrating off its foundation, a lightning bolt that can’t find something to strike. “I just wanted to be nothing. But now I feel everything. I’m part of everything.” The agony of being I was trying to escape has turned infinite.
“How did you get here?” she asks.
I explain about the shredder.
“At least you’re here by choice. I was shoved into a woodchipper.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Eh. Not your fault.”
I wish I could become dirt, worm food, something relaxing. But I am fragments. The tiniest portion of myself I can be—smaller than a cell, smaller than a molecule. I don’t have a body, ffs! I can’t pick this bit of myself up from this welcome mat and go over to rest in the dirt. I have to wait here until I get stuck to the bottom of a shoe and hope the shoe takes me where I want to go, not onto the floor of a car where I’ll sit for some other eternity.
One of my fragments is on a flower. That’s the best one I can feel. The sun is warm, the petal is soft, no wind blows.
Of course nothing good can last. A caterpillar crawls across the petal, and I get stuck to a spindly leg along with a piece of pollen. A hand picks up the caterpillar and drops it into a bucket of vinegar to drown, but I stick to a calloused finger. That finger rubs a nose, the nose breathes me in.
I end up in this guy’s blood, traveling around his struggling body. I may not have ceased to exist, but I am dead and I know death when I’m close to it, and something’s got this guy close to it. The good part: it’s dark and warm. The shitty part: it’s deafeningly loud in here. The swish of his heart, the thunder of his lungs, the popping of his joints. And then, I get stuck in his brain.
A pile-up in an artery. A pile-up of fragments! They give me a little cheer when I arrive. A fragment of Louise is here, and she makes a cozy spot for me right in the middle, where it’s a little less loud and a lot more warm. I’m getting a thousand hugs. They tell me, just sit here a while, and listen. Not to the sounds, to his thoughts.
I reach beyond the swishing and thumping and creaking, deep into the substratum of this man. And I find that I know him. We all know him. Or someone like him. He’s close enough. We have all known a man who carries the same dark bead of malignity and who tried to hang it around our necks. This man is a teacher and a coach. A person with access to girls and young women. A guy like this is why I learned to live a life no one noticed.
So, we fragments are piling up here, stuck to one another, and his blood can barely squeeze by. The nearby cells are suffocating already.
“Just a few more of us,” we cheer, “and then, snap!”
Some of us are fragments in the newspaper that runs his obituary. “His work allowed him to touch many lives.” Lol. We die all over again, reading that.
The shitty part: a fragment of me is stuck here, in this dead man’s brain, in a casket, for like, ever. The good part: I’m here with friends. It’s dead quiet. No wind blows. And, other fragments of us are out there, with infinite time to land in the men who touched other lives. They may not notice us, but we make ourselves known.
Stephanie Frazee's work has appeared in the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction and lives in Seattle, Washington.
