Logan woke up the next morning with his eyelids swollen shut. He groaned his way from his bed to the bathroom where he nursed the bad sleep and exhaustion from his body. A scolding cup of disgusting coffee made it so he couldn’t feel the scratchiness of his throat. 

He knocked back an allergy pill and set off.

“What the fuck is wrong with this thing?”

Logan punched his ID number into the clock-in machine. The machine was the bane of everyone’s existence. It was too small for a working man’s hand let alone his finger. The touch-screen keypad worked half the time and when it did work, the software usually came up with an error.

The machine beeped, displaying “user not found”.

He ran a hand through his hair. He was too tired to even show how irritated he was on the inside. The best he could do was sigh. 

Thankfully, Harris’ office was only a step away. He rapped his knuckles on the thin door. Just as he was knocking, Harris came around the corner, startled to see Logan there.

“Oh! Logan, what are you still doing here?”

Logan frowned. “What do you mean? I was trying to clock-in—”

Harris gave him a sad look that instantly made him cut off. 

“Yeah, sorry man. I thought someone would have called you. We had some contracts fall through and we’re overstaffed. I had to make a tough call,  but it’s really out of my hands.”

An awkward silence swallowed the already too small trailer up. Logan would have laughed if he wasn’t dead on his feet. 

“I’m fired?”

Harris gave him an insincere smile. He didn’t give a shit at all.

“Want your check?”

On the upside, Logan was looking forward to sleeping in. 

He dragged his ass back to his apartment, feeling more defeated than he did getting off work last night. The allergy medicine wasn’t doing shit. His eyes were still swollen, his nose was running, and now his throat itched and it was scorched.

“Let’s just go to bed,” he said under his breath as he walked up the last flight of stairs. 

His vision was slightly blurry, but clear enough that he noticed a piece of stark white paper taped to his door. In fact, he noticed that everyone on the floor had gotten the same paper.

“Great. Probably raising the fucking rent.”

Anger came reeling back to him like it had done so in his youth. Instead of acting on it like he’d done when he was a dumbass kid, he swallowed the emotion down where it could rip him apart from the inside later. 

With staggering steps, he walked up to his door, expecting bad news, but not the worst. 

He should have been. Because today couldn’t have gotten worse. Except it had.

Logan ripped the paper off his door and lifted it until it was an inch from his face. He kept reading the words “condemned” and “remove from premises immediately” over and over. He had to be reading it wrong. He might have been an idiot who barely made it out of high school, but he could fucking read. 

No matter how many times he read it the words wouldn’t change. The burning rage inside him was melting his insides. His face didn’t show it though. Eerily, he conveyed a calmness that he wasn’t so unfamiliar with. This feeling, though, meant he would do something horrible. The warning signs were there, an echo of who he used to be in the past. 

He crumbled the paper in his fist. He slammed through his front door the second it was unlocked. 

He was just about to call his landlord, to do what he didn’t quite know. What could be done now that the building had been condemned? He could demand his rent back, but that wouldn’t help him find a place to fucking live. 

His thumb hovered over the call button. As he thought about what he was going to do next, someone started calling him.

The name on the screen had his lungs cinching tight. He stared at it, again, doubting whether he could read or not. Or maybe this was a horrible dream—a nightmare—fueled by working overtime. Some say that the worst happens when there’s a full moon. Crazy shit. This had to be what those people were talking about.

Logan sagged against the closed front door. He looked up and around his small apart. It felt smaller than it had when he left. Clothes and trash was strewn across the floor. His coffee table was a mess of receipts and takeout containers. The fold-up twin bed was pushed against the only window in the apartment. The view was nothing beautiful. The city outside was nothing but industrial factories and strip malls. But it had felt beautiful when Logan was lying down at night.

He could see the stars whenever he wanted to. And that had been a dream come true compared to the basement he grew up in.

The phone buzzed again in his hand. He answered.

The line was quiet. He wasn’t in a hurry. He could wait.

“Logan, you there?”

Kylie’s voice had matured. It was more obvious now than the last time he’d seen her. Ten years. 

“Yeah. I’m here.” 

He didn’t know what to say. Did he need to say anything? Did he want to say anything? It wasn’t like words were going to fix the brokenness between them. There was a reason why they hadn’t stayed in touch all these years. They’d both been trying to escape and the other was just an awful reminder.

“Dad died.”

“Good.”

He covered his face. He wasn’t crying, but his face felt more flushed. These allergies were killing him.

Kylie waited without saying anything more. For what, Logan still didn’t know what. Time stretched and then she finally got the message.

“Bye, Logan.”

She hung up.

Logan stared at his phone some more and then looked out the window again. 

“Full moon, huh.”

Logan didn’t need many boxes. His belongings could fit into a backpack if he forwent the furniture. 

He started with clearing out the trash which ended up being more than he thought. Three trash bags later and he moved on to folding his clean laundry. At one point, he thought about throwing out his dirty clothes, but he changed his mind when he thought about how much of a hassle it would be to thrift them again. 

While he stripped his bed, someone started calling him.

“Again?” He asked, annoyed. While it’d only been a day, he still wasn’t used to being called so much. And a part of him dreaded it. Without fail, each time he was contacted it seemed to get worse. 

But honestly, maybe this was bound to happen. Karma or some shit.

Logan paused, feeling something wrong about that thought. Like somehow he’d hit the nail on the head.

He shook off the feeling. 

The caller just so happened to be Nate. Some relief settled in his limbs, though he didn’t feel completely relaxed. Something pinched at the back of his mind. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it or make sense of it. 

“Hello?” He roughly ripped his fitted sheet off his sadly thin mattress. 

“Hey, I know this is shit of me, but I’ve got to cancel. My kid’s sick so I’ve got to head home early.” Nate did sound like he was sorry. Though, Logan wasn’t sure if he was sorry for rain-checking or if he was just upset that he had to end his trip early. 

“That’s fine. I’ve got stuff I need to do,” he said while surveying his apartment. Only a couple more things to pack before he was homeless. Great.

“You’re not coming home for the funeral? I thought we could meet up there.”

Logan froze. “Funeral?”

It was too early for that, right? Or had Kylie just not mentioned it because she knew he wouldn’t come? And why the hell would Nate bring that shit up? He knew Logan hated his old man. 

“Damn, no one tells you anything!”

“Seems like it. Listen, I know he’s my dad and all, but I’m not having anything to do with him ever again.”

Nate made a choking sound. “Your dad? Fuck, sorry. I didn’t know he—uh—passed. But no, I was talking about…well, you remember that kid you used to terrorize back in high school? Dakota? He killed himself last week. Jumped off the Jones Creek Bridge.”

And there it was, the pin drop, the bad omen, the blaring siren confirming that what Logan had been experiencing wasn’t just some weird fluke. The life he’d tried to run from, all the horrible things he did, hadn’t faded from existence at all. They’d simply been waiting for when he got too comfortable.

Karma. It had never crossed his mind. Maybe that’s why this was happening to him. 

He’d thought he was above it.