Hubris

by Katie McHugh

Jackson stirred his tea not on the Last Day, but on the Last Morning. Sunlight burned through the blinds of my bay window and set his face ablaze. It was hot. He was hot. Looking back, it’s moments like this where my brain plays tricks on me. I doubt he looked as good as I remember him, like Apollo riding the dawn of a new age. His skin was as pale as white marble, but his eyes, his lips, and his cheeks were all color. I felt if I held him up to the light, he’d refract rainbows.

I couldn’t tell you why I remember him this way. Jackson was cute but all-in-all mediocre. President of the school’s computer science club. A temporary glitch in the video game of my life. Chances are, I only think so highly of him because he’s dead.

“I like it,” Jackson said, squeezing hazardous glops of honey into his mug. “It’s good.”

Any other hormonal girl my age would have taken the compliment. Smiled politely, humility stuck between her teeth like buds of broccoli. But I was not any other hormonal girl. I was a writer, and words like good were empty calories to me.

“So I should kill myself, is what you’re saying.”

“Christ,” he said. “Where did you get that from? I just said it’s good.”

“I’m pretty sure you said ‘garbage.’”

Jackson’s jaw went slack, then hard, then slack again, chewing through potential responses like a horse gnawing hay. Warily, he asked: “What do you want from me?”

“How about something useful? How about a little honesty?”

“I was being honest. You just didn’t like what I had to say.”

“Fine,” I said. “What’s your problem with it?”

He took a long sip of tea, smacking his lips. “It’s hard for me to explain—”

“—shocker,” I muttered.

“The problem isn’t the story itself, but the way you’re pitching it to me. You’ve clearly put thought into it—don’t get me wrong, that’s great—but it seems like you’re more focused on impressing me, or maybe impressing yourself, than getting at something real.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how else to put it. You’ve got motivation, but you’re missing the heart. And a story without heart feels…well, it doesn’t feel like anything at all.”

In the kitchen, my toast popped up like a gasp. He didn’t! I was pissed. One scream and I could’ve triggered the End myself. But I held my tongue. It wasn’t Jackson’s fault he was a moron. I’d met his father once. I wouldn’t be surprised if ignorance ran in the family.

Suddenly, my omelet looked delicious. I cut into it with the air of Marie Antoinette falling upon her cake. Cheesy ichor bled from the wound, and I twirled it around my fork before shifting my focus to the egg. With a queen-sized bite in my mouth, I pointed my knife in Jackson’s direction, serrated edge on top. “You don’t get it,” I said.

That got him. It used to be, the quickest way to rile a boy was to imply he was stupid. Now, if you want a reaction, you have to go for his rations.

“What?”

“You don’t get it,” I repeated, “how ground-breaking this novel will be. You just don’t have an eye for these things. And that’s fine! I’m not writing it for people like you, anyways.”

“People like me?”

I shrugged. “You know, people who don’t have an eye for these things. For literature. Don’t worry about it.”

Jackson’s eyes widened, exposing every grain of his irises to me. Sitting before that shell-shocked, deer-in-headlights stare, I realized he wasn’t a god at all. He was just a boy with the sun in his eyes. “Now you’re just being mean.”

I slathered my omelet in ketchup and took another bite. Through the slits in the blinds, I could see the outside world start to ripple. The middle-aged joggers with their strollers and golden retrievers all swelled and shimmered. The pine tree on my neighbor’s lawn appeared to catch a wave. I’d assumed we were having a hot spell.

I put my fork down. “I lost my appetite.”

Jackson said nothing as I collected our dishes and carried them to the sink. His mug was still only half-empty. Tea leaves swam in the muddy liquid like a cloud of tiny tadpoles. I turned on the faucet and flushed them down the drain.

“You should probably leave,” I said after a while.

He chuckled softly to himself, and I fought the urge to tell him that he was going about this all wrong. He wasn’t following the script. This was the part where he was supposed to apologize. Nuzzle up behind me like a scolded dog and whisper my three favorite words: I was wrong. Instead, Jackson’s moving chair scraped against the tile floor like a rebellion. His car keys jangled in his hand. On the street, his black Jeep Wrangler chirped beneath the sun.

“Maybe you’re right,” Jackson said. “Maybe I know absolutely nothing about writing and my two cents aren’t worth shit. But on the off chance that my opinion matters, I say you need to lower your expectations. This so-called groundbreaking novel isn’t gonna go anywhere if you’re the only one who understands it.”

It was a strange paradox: Jackson’s opinion was irrelevant—uninformed. Whatever he had to say about the book didn’t matter. And yet, as his footsteps echoed down the hallway and out the front door, and every beautiful, bothersome thing about him evaporated into that insatiable heat, I found myself fighting the urge to cry.

The sudden rush of emotion turned me feral. I hacked a wad of yellow phlegm into the sink, missing Jackson’s tea-stained mug by an inch. I tried again. This time, I hit it. My saliva dripped down porcelain the color of his face.

I spun toward the empty kitchen, half-expecting him to still be there. In my rage, I could almost see his cross-armed silhouette like a dark spot in my vision, drifting aimlessly as smoke. To his ghost, I said: “Get out, you illiterate, uncultured son of bitch! Get the hell out!”

I charged across the house and up the stairs as if I could stomp straight through the floorboards. Photographs trembled on their hooks. A lackluster reproduction of The Water Lily Pond swung back and forth like a pendulum. Across the hallway, I body-slammed my bedroom door open, not yet realizing how the temperature in the room had shifted or how the glass in my windows had slowly begun to gel. As I marched toward it, the typewriter on my desk leaned forward to embrace me.

My novel was all that mattered, even as my neighborhood blistered under the growing heat of the sun. The potential was so tangible I could weave it from shadows. The monster drooling beneath my bed, the love interest napping peacefully atop the frame, the hero—who looked so much like myself—grinning at me from the mirror. This so-called groundbreaking novel isn’t gonna go anywhere if you’re the only one who understands it. I laughed out loud. Jackson’s pea-brain couldn’t comprehend that the novel wasn’t supposed to be understood. The whole point of genius was the impossibility of it—the madness— and where words outranked reason, it was me who was a god.

Call me vain if you want. Arrogance is in the job description, and as I claw my way through post hoc earth, it’s a source of power. A few nights ago, I even considered that I triggered armageddon. I can picture it easily: sitting at my desk, fingers extended like a puppeteer’s over the vintage keyboard, a universe lurking somewhere deep in my mind, if only I could find it. I pressed the first key, pushed hard against all of the Jacksons who banked on my submission, and in that instant, when the sun ruptured and the sea hardened and the blue sky was toppled by black, I penned the world into apocalypse.

BIO: Katie McHugh is a writer from Long Island, NY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Folly Journal, Wilderness House, and Riddle Fence, among others. Find her at katiemchugh.com.