I hated this restaurant for a long time but there was something different about that night. I guess when you expect it to be your last meal, you might savor the appetizers a little more.

The waiter dropped off a plate of mozzarella sticks.

“Give them a minute,” he told us. “They’re super fucking hot.”

She saluted him as he disappeared back into the restaurant.

I hiccuped.

“Still with the hiccups?” she asked. I hiccuped when I met her the day before. And then again when I picked her up twenty minutes earlier. And maybe a dozen more times since then.

What I didn’t tell her was that there was this poor bastard named Charles Osbourne that had the hiccups for 68 years. It only takes a solid 48 hours of these goddamn spasms for them to be classified as intractable hiccups, but I felt like there should be another term once it hits the six-month mark. All I knew is that I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Don’t. He said—”

But she had already scooped up a mozzarella stick and taken a bite. Her eyes went wide and she cupped a hand over her mouth as she tried to breath out the steam.

“Holy shit,” she said when she was finally able to swallow the hunk of melted cheese and crispy breading. She laughed and took another bite.

We met in line at the bank the day before. I don’t have any kids or anything—not that my savings was much to fight over—so I figured I’d drain the whole account and have a day of buying whatever the hell I wanted. I wasn’t worried about paying rent at the end of the month, or ever again, really.

We stood at the counter at the same time, me with my withdrawal slip and her just talking to the teller.

“What do you mean it’s frozen?” she asked. The first thing I noticed was her shaved head. No scars, no bumps, just a beautiful scalp.

I signed whatever my teller put in front of me but kept watching her stare at the plump man on the other side of the counter.

“What’s fraudulent about forgetting my password?” she asked.

“Our system flags it if you try to get into your account with the wrong information.”

She slapped the counter and looked away from the teller, which just so happened to put her gaze in my direction as a suspiciously thick envelope slid over the counter.

“Problem?” I asked her.

“These cocks,” she said and shook her head.

“Totally.” I slid the money into my pocket.

She continued staring at me and squinted her eyes a little. “Are you robbing this place?”

I glanced at the teller for a moment and hiccuped.

“Did you just beep?” she asked.

The teller called for the next customer so we moved toward the table with the pens on metallic strings. One thing led to another about 30 hours later here we were eating mozzarella sticks.

“It’s a serious problem,” I told her.

“Hiccups? Come on.”

“No, it’s true,” said our waiter, who had appeared out of nowhere. He set plates with greasy burgers and fries in front of each of us. I remembered why I hated this restaurant. “My aunt gets these really violent hiccups sometimes. She’ll be drinking a glass of milk or something and then it’ll hit her and wham she pukes all over herself.”

I looked down at the plate in front of me and sighed. “Can we get a bottle of ketchup?”

“Here you go.” He reached into his pocket and scattered a handful of ketchup packets across the table like dice.

There was another poor bastard named Christopher Sands that started hiccuping one day and didn’t stop for three years. It’s not like he finally did the right combination of drinking water and holding his breath while doing a backflip—he had a brain tumor pressing against his brainstem. If it weren’t for the brain surgery, he would’ve gone on hiccuping for the rest of his miserable life.

She picked up her burger and took a huge bite. Grease rolled down her chin and dripped onto her plate.

“So what? Are you going to kill yourself?” she asked, but it came out muffled through the mouthful of burger.

I hiccuped again and shrugged.

She glanced off into the restaurant, half-full and way too loud. She took another bite without setting the burger down and looked back at me. “Why haven’t you already?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. I guess I kind of wanted to see how tonight would go.”

She laughed and a chunk of burger shot onto the table between us. “No pressure or anything.”

The waiter stopped by to ask how everything was. I just hiccuped and he walked away.

“You know, you’re kind of in an enviable position,” she said.

“Intractable hiccups and a death wish?”

“In-whatable?”

I took a bite of the burger and wished I hadn’t.

“Listen, all I’m saying is that you have nothing to lose. We should do something that normal people can’t do. Or maybe don’t do”

“But aren’t you—”

“We could go skydiving. Or paintballing. Or white water rafting.”

“First of all, normal people do that stuff all time. Second, you think we can just run out and find a plane to jump out of tonight?”

She sat back and rubbed her chin with her greasy hand. Then her eyebrows shot up and she looked me in the eyes.

“I’ve got it.” She leaned forward and said quietly: “Let’s rob a liquor store.”

In World War II, there was a guy named Charles Franklin Lutz that had the hiccups for a couple years. Messed up his sleep. He had trouble eating. The hiccups ruined his life more than being stationed in the South Pacific during a world war. And then one day, just as they had arrived, they mysteriously disappeared. 

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“No. I’m serious. What do you have to lose? If it goes well, then hey there’s some extra money in your pocket. And if it goes poorly, then you have an easy out anyways. We’re not going to hurt anybody. Do you even have a gun?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, me neither. Think of it like a prank, except we can pay our rents if it goes well.”

“I don’t know.” I glanced around the restaurant hoping our waiter would come back and say something stupid.

“You were going to throw in the towel because of hiccups. Hiccups. But this sounds too extreme to you?”

I thought about taking a bite of my burger but decided against it. Instead, I looked over to her and sighed.

“I get what you’re saying about me. I see that.” Hiccup. “But why would you risk it?”

She smiled, shrugged, and took a big, slimy bite of her burger.

 

A half hour later, we stood in front of L&F Market near the mall that was knocked down a decade earlier. We had the parking lot to ourselves.

“I don’t know about this,” I said.

“Oh, come on.”

“I mean honestly, I just feel like an idiot.” We stood next to my car with sweatshirts over the date clothes we wore to the restaurant and looked like kids being picked up after the homecoming dance on a chilly night. “There’s no way they buy this—” I poked my finger out from the inside of the pocket, “—is a gun.”

“We’ll be fine,” she said through deep breaths. “It’s going to be fine. They’re trained to just hand over the money. They don’t want to die for ten bucks an hour.”

“But what if it’s the owner?”

She looked over at me. I hiccuped. Then she looked back to the store on the other side of the parking lot and said, “Come on. Let’s go.”

My feet didn’t touch the ground as we crossed the small, empty parking lot. That’s the way it felt, at least. I followed her as she pulled an N95 mask over her face that I had stashed in my glove compartment from years before. I did the same.

The bright, white lights of the liquor store hurt my eyes as a digital bell announced our arrival. A man in his twenties barely glanced up from the magazine spread across the counter. Hidden speakers played a ‘90s song about stealing sunshine. How appropriate, I thought.

I could feel my pulse in my temples. 

She stopped and looked back at me for a second. Her eyes squinted a bit above the mask and even though it had been a while, I figured it was smize. I felt a bond grow between us then. It wasn’t exactly sexual and it definitely wasn’t paternal, but there was some sort of connection formed in that moment before she walked up to the guy staring at a magazine and shouted:

“Empty the fucking register or we’ll blow your fucking neck open!”

It scared the shit out of me.

The guy stood up straight as if physically smacked. I ran up behind her and pushed my finger against the inside of my sweatshirt and couldn’t think of anything productive to add so I just yelled, “Yeah!” and hiccuped.

He looked between us for a second before hopping over to the register and popping open the drawer.

I couldn’t believe it was working. It scared me a little how much fun we were having but as she said, we weren’t hurting anybody. Not physically, at least. And I could always donate whatever money I made to a homeless shelter or something. The owner probably had insurance for stuff like this. Altogether, this was going to be a net win for the neighborhood when it’s all over.

And then the door we didn’t notice to our right flew open and an older man with a head full of gray hair and a handful of pistol jumped into view. He didn’t yell anything. He didn’t try to scare us away. He just squeezed the trigger and blotted out the ‘90s song with a deafening bang.

“Holy shit!” yelled the guy behind the counter. He ducked.

“Holy shit!” yelled the woman in front of me.

I hiccuped.

The older man fired off another shot and a stack of tiny, plastic bottles of liquor stacked directly in front of me exploded. Everything suddenly smelled like cinnamon.

“Go! Go!” She shoved me toward the door as another shot rang out. We burst into the parking lot as a massive truck pulled in and blasted us with extremely bright, extremely white headlights. Thinking back later, I figured these lights must have made the older man shield his eyes or something for a moment, giving us time to hop in the car and squeal out of the parking lot.

“Oh. My. God.” She threw her mask out the window and looked at me with a disbelieving smile.

I couldn’t talk. Not yet. I just breathed and breathed and breathed.

“You’re alright, right? No holes or nothing?”

I hadn’t even thought to check. “I don’t feel anything leaking,” I said.

“Me neither.” She sat back in the car seat and was quiet for a moment, then she laughed. She paused and looked at me before laughing some more. I felt the electric anxiety start to dissipate and realized I was smiling.

“That was…intense,” I said.

“Intense? That was catastrophic.”

“I told you they weren’t going to buy the fingers.”

“Actually, I think they did. Why else would that guy come out of the back and immediately start blasting?”

I shook my head and rolled down the window. Cool, night air filled the car. “Did that feel like a dream to you? I swear I was just watching it happen from like, up there a little bit.” I nodded vaguely above us.

Ten minutes later I parked the car in another deserted lot, this time out near the lake. Fishermen would start launching their boats down here in another few hours. I shut off the engine and we sat in silence for a moment.

“Were you really going to do it?” she asked. A slight breeze ruffled the leaves of the trees surrounding the parking lot.

I shrugged. “I think so. I don’t know. Thinking about death always feels a little hypothetical, even if you’re dealing in reality.”

“Do you think about death a lot?”

“I mean I don’t dwell on it, but it crosses my mind.”

She nodded and looked out her window. The lake was calm, but light from whatever town was on the other side still danced across the meager waves.

“Have you noticed?” she asked.

“Noticed what?”

“The hiccups.”

I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, and then realized I hadn’t been interrupted once since the liquor store.

“How does it feel?” she asked.

I wanted to say Good or Great or something along those lines, but I couldn’t describe it. I hadn’t had control of my body for so long. I couldn’t take it. The only option that made sense was to eliminate my body altogether, but now that feeling was gone and all that was left was a void waiting to be filled.

So I reached over, grabbed her hand, and looked out to the calm lake.

“I really hope that place doesn’t have cameras,” I said.

She smiled, gave my hand a squeeze, and sneezed.