Might as Well Be Edward

By Ferris Wheel Fox

A car accident leaves sixteen year old Edward (maybe Martin; he isn't one hundred percent certain) struggling to make sense of reality. Or maybe something better than sense.

Can be read in two different orders. For the alternate version, see Martin for the Moment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ferris Wheel Fox
• Release date: May 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005502652

Ferris Wheel Fox

Ferris Wheel Fox has a particular fondness for ideas with a good risk of failure that could easily be romanticized. Marketing books with elevator pitches instead of blurbs, for example. Or giving those books away for free. Or naming oneself in the manner of a band rather than an author. They write psychological, experimental, and dark comedy novellas with the hope of catering to the strange people they love most in this life.

Book preview

Might as Well Be Edward

Copyright © 2021

All rights reserved.

I am a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of my author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dedicated to Death

You’re not coming for me

I’m coming for you

-E/M

One

My name is Edward Martin, and I have a few things I need to be writing down. Or else my name is Martin Edward and I have a story to tell. Some of the specifics escape me. Most of all I should write down the important facts, so that I don’t forget or get them mixed up again.

1. I was hit by a car.

2. I’ve been having trouble sleeping for some time now.

3. My best friend was hit by a car, but it has nothing to do with my accident.

4.

I can’t remember what four is right now. I know there was something else. I think it was important. It was, it was extremely important, but I can’t remember it all right now. I’ll have to come back to it later. More important I guess is to emphasize that Anna’s accident and mine had nothing to do with each other, because a person can get superstitious in that way when they are under great duress.

I was in a coma, too. But it’s not related to her. Mine only lasted a couple of weeks. Then I woke up, because it’s not the same thing. She was hit by a car four years before me, and the driver stayed on the scene and wanted so badly for it all to be okay that he cried for weeks after. So I can see that the two things are not related.

Mine was a hit and run.

What is related is that I haven’t been sleeping all that much. I don’t remember when that started, but I can fill in the details later, I’m sure, as long as the broad strokes are here. Details such as what exactly is my name. There’s an Edward and there’s a Martin, but I don’t know which comes first, and oh well. I could be either one. It doesn’t bother me. I might as well be Edward; it wouldn’t bother an Edward. We have more important things to worry about.

I think I’ve said this all already. It’s possible. I woke up maybe a month ago- I’d put it at a month if I had to- and since then or maybe for a long time before that I haven’t been able to think straight. I’m just tired. This is what happens. Something that happens to you when you don’t sleep.

Which is why I went for a run at night, by the way. If I write about that, it’ll be in third person because it’s easier for me to do. We’ll work around the whole name thing.

One, two, three, four. His heart beating. He heard it and he counted along.

He had left his warm bedroom in the late evening, had set aside his textbook and notes and attempts at responsibility because he wanted to run.

He’d pulled his shoes out of his closet and slipped into them. He had tiptoed downstairs, written a note to leave on the coffee table, and spent several minutes working the front door open in such a way that it would not wake up his father. Once he’d stretched, he already felt better. A slight breeze picked up and he broke into a sprint.

Two miles. He would run one mile north, then turn around and come back home. He told himself he would then do homework, but no part of him believed it.

He ran through his hometown.

The insects were everywhere. He'd swallowed so many flies in his short life. They couldn’t be confined, nothing here could. The bugs worked their way through cracks, under doors, in between tiles. Plants crept up through the sidewalk. Birds nested on the giant letters of grocery store signs and shot through the rafters inside. Above all else, the heat went where it pleased. Classrooms in the summer especially.

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a cat dart by in the street.

Taco Cat! he cried out, almost going after it- but he wasn't sure if he'd seen anything after all. (Was it a car or a cat I saw?) He continued on his original course. It had been months since he’d seen the thing. He was going to have to accept sooner or later that his cat was probably dead. He'd left his warm bed to swallow flies and suffer cat related delusions.

He ran.

One, two, three, four.

He came eventually to a street named West Rye. It was the halfway mark. Once he reached the end of it, he would turn around again. It was one of several unpaved roads in town, as well as narrow and poorly lit (in some places not lit at all). He veered off the road and ran in the long ditch beside it, two or three feet off, counting as his feet hit the ground. Lights were coming up behind him. He wore reflective clothing, so he did not worry. When the car veered off the road and ran into him, he fell in the long ditch. He watched the car come to a halt, heard the driver rush out, and heard him exclaim:

Oh, shit!

The driver dove back into his car and drove away, knowing full well—having looked into the face of him—that he’d left a boy for dead in a ditch in the dark.

He spent so much time being pissed off. If they were his final moments, they were being squandered.

The next time he woke up, it was to an unimaginable amount and variety of pain. He could not even begin to understand it. It did seem to him that there was a particularly pressing source of pain, though he took a long time figuring out what that was. His leg. His left leg. Something was standing (some animal) over his left leg and gnawing on it. He knew instinctively that this scene would be with him forever and found himself wishing, albeit briefly, that he had died rather than woken to it. Then he shrieked.

It hurt to move (he could still move, some small part of him registered that), it hurt to lie there still, and it hurt most of all to shriek because he could not help writhing when he did so. He could not