Epiphany Jones by Michael Grothaus

thing. She knows he just makes them up, too.’
    Just kill me.
    ‘How old is this guy? Twelve? What grown man makes up his girlfriends, has this much porn, and attacks his mom with a dildo?’ the voice from above laughs.
    Mortified isn’t close to being the right word.
    And yeah, I lied. I’m busted. But what did you want, the truth? That I don’t have a girlfriend? That I’m not on a break from anyone and that I willingly choose to sit at home alone looking at fake celebrity porn? But what did you expect? I learned everything from watching sitcoms and talk shows and movies-of-the-week. I learned what was beautiful and what was ugly and how you should act in any number of situations.I learned how to feel from these things. Larry Hagman. Ted Danson. Kirstie Alley. Roseanne. These were my fathers, my mothers. And they all took care of me half an hour at a time. Consider fake celebrity porn my own little version of the Oedipus complex.
    I also learned a long time ago just to tell people what they want to hear. It makes it easier on everybody. But the thing about lying is that you need to have a good memory, and I don’t. At work I told my colleagues I was dating Harriett, but at a shrink appointment I slipped up and told the doc I was dating Heather. Two-timing the world in your head is hard work. The next week I forgot which name I had told Mom. But she knew, too. She was just patronising me the whole time when she asked about my girlfriends.
    ‘But come on…’ a voice is fading back into my awareness. ‘Bring my thumb drive up here. I want to grab some of his shit before forensics gets here.’
    ‘You gotta be kidding me?’ someone says. It’s Fred.
    ‘Come on, man. I didn’t bust your balls when you took a favour from that prostitute we didn’t arrest last week.’
    On the other side of the car a cigarette hits the ground. It bobs in the black puddle for a second before it dies a cool death. ‘Will you shut up?’ Fred shouts.
    ‘So just bring it,’ the voice says.
    Chicago’s finest, ladies and gentlemen.
    ‘Hold your horses,’ Fred says, and the weight of the car shifts towards me as he leans across the passenger seat and opens the glove compartment.
    The flood of embarrassment fades from my skin as a cold shiver runs through me. I’m going to be caught. Fred will peek out the passenger-side window and see me lying flat on the ground. He’ll slap on the handcuffs and I’ll be taken to jail. At the trial I’ll tell them about Epiphany, how she was a real person for one day in my life. But the judge will call me a lunatic and a pervert and ask me how I could assault my own mother with a dildo. Then he’ll order shock treatment and he’ll send me to prison and that’s where my hell will really begin. Hard-timers aren’t kind to guys like me.
    And I can’t end up like that. I can’t. So in the space of the time it takes Fred to close the door and his slender feet begin to move towards my apartment building, I make a decision that I’ve never imagined I would ever have to. When Fred enters my building, I slowly get off the ground and check to make sure the other voice isn’t still by the window. And when I know it’s clear, I don’t run, I don’t hurry. Calmly, I put one foot in front of the other, and like that I simply walk away from the Datsun and my apartment and my life.

    H ere’s the thing about walking away from your life: It sounds all dramatic and final when you decide to do it, but it’s a logistical nightmare. There are all kinds of things that you never realised you would need to consider. Things like, Where do I go? Where do I sleep? I’ve got no wallet and no money, how do I eat?
    I wanted to go back to Mom’s house, to apologise, to plead my innocence, to have some dinner, but the cops would’ve been there. The best I could come up with is this little park I’m in. It’s far enough away from where everything that happened earlier went down so I don’t think the cops