Tex mounted the stage and immediately began draping it with all of the miscellaneous bits of dazzling cloth and beads and doo-dads she wore on her body. Soon the whole stage appeared as her public boudoir, complete with the lady of the house lying down on the stage as if under a dutiful admirer, her hand cupped where a hard liquor bottle should be. Tex’s war paint sagged under the pressure of hot lights and her boots scuffed lines in the sweaty stage. She sang about lost children, wolf packs mating and killing for life, and the way blood smashed on the screens of B-movie theaters at dawn. Tex asked if she should remove her skirt — the possibility elicited applause — but the band went right into the next song and she forced a huff and gulped around at the glistening air. She’d turned saying the phrase “It’s okay” into an art form, each time finding new and more serpentine ways of intoning the phrase. It got so elongated and abstract that I couldn’t be sure of what I was actually hearing. She sounded more and more sleepy. Of course it was different now because she was old — all the more exotic to see her out there wrapped up in nothing more than scarves and baubles and of course the clanking boots. The years on her face made her bulging eyes appear hijacked and haunted, and the idea that she had woken up every day for the last 20 years with the same bra on was mind-boggling. Where do these people come from? More importantly, where do these people go?… Her face bore a resemblance to that which had been locked up, the key thrown away. Confined in a lock box, breathing black water, ankles bound at the boot, hair braided to the chain. A small water spout kept her alive all these years, twisting and growling like a wild horse. Inside she sagged and molded into the form of an animal. Released (chain loosened) she crawled up on stage and lapped at the whiskey pooling up where the audience had spit screams at her band. She sang, she prayed they would lock her up and throw away the key.
After scanning the crowd a little bit I ended the evening by making a point of looking at the faces of the few other girls in the club. I wanted to force them to look into my eyes — a selfish game upon which I hung so much. How come more girls don’t do this? I thought: We are so few.
Yes, Kim, I think I like you best this way: tousled, smeared, bright.
I had a place I was going to. I had to walk, even though it was raining. Walking up the street I was startled by a large pregnant squirrel with big boobs perched motionless at eye level on a knobby tree, gnawing on a red bone. As I turned a corner my bangs changed direction in the wind. I arrived and the place was like a tree house, way at the top of a wooded drive, encircled by redwood columns and brown painted walls. I sat on a couch holding a drink, eagerly staring straight ahead at the TV. A man in Dockers sat next to me, slowly stroking my left breast like a little pet. I stared at an anchor lady explaining something to me about a corpse found at the bottom of a ravine. Moss and mud falling in sheets from between the folds of her canvas swath. I couldn’t look away as the words were mouthed on the screen. The harder I stared the more the world fell away and soon I couldn’t escape the sensation of running my fingers along her smooth hair, catching in its tangles, taking in its wild bouquet and with it, the love from a breathless mouth, its secrets etched on this breath entering my skull from the front, hitting receptors in the back of my throat like a shockwave on pink scaly flesh. Just hanging there. There was room for both of us in this canvas backdrop, with secrets cemented by knifepoint. The point was made at the important part of our story. Elsewhere in the tree house plans were muttered between old friends to tackle a girl in baggy overalls, her straps were snipped and they fell to the floor. Palms were passed over her dewy surface, forgiving of passages that shied away. Hot lips were graced with objects at hand, and she was made to kiss the part of a cantaloupe where it smelled the best. Fists of hair were taken up in grips that glowed white, before dissolving completely, and now this girl had been released, collapsing onto the coffee table-
slash
-ottoman, her head at a level lower than her heart. I pried open intoxicated legs and stuck one, two, then three fingers inside, sampling the spring of virgin flesh bloodshot through before turning her over, now having completely yielded to the footstool, to the glances cast in that direction, to spilled drinks, and fists grappling for handfuls of hair. And I crawled on top of her. I forced myself into her, sucking, nipping at her white mouth, draining her lake until her eyes dried up and fused shut forever.
Making out with the dead lady is turning us on
they screamed. Hearing this I reached to stroke her neck, but instead my arms felt of lead, tumbling to the carpet. They fell past the floor, appearing to be nothing but static apparitions of limbs. Ratcheting to a stop, I was starting to not be able to move, my head numbed, my teeth disappeared, pipe smoke replaced thoughts of escape, my eyes tried to focus on a spot which was as much floor as ceiling — I went blind! Lowering myself into sleep, joining the footstool girl, and I’m positive I’ve found her.
It’s Kim; she’s here
, I remember thinking. Lurking in some corner of this pale, cold mouth. Our lips touched. Secrets were passed back and forth during the hours of our intoxication. The long long night was populated with shadowy leaves and grey moss growing on windows that hadn’t ever seen the sun. While asleep those hours, I dreamed I was assisted in achieving climax by three or four men, each of whom attended to different places on my body. I was asked to yield secrets, too, and since I refused, these secrets were retrieved by tying back my arms and legs and interrogating my pussy with whatever was at hand: a remote control, a wine bottle, a cordless phone. My jaw was unhinged, my throat was thrown open and made to replicate exactly the form of a glass bottle with a rubber seal. Love poured inside. My heart got bigger and bigger until it threatened to explode. When I woke up enough to know I was still restrained with a long grey rope I was soothed by an onlooker who mopped my brow with a brown dress sock. He said Let me take your top off, I want to feel your adorable flesh next to mine. I want to cup your breasts and weigh them in my hand like an expensive bag of grain. Let me take your pants off, I want to bend your legs until they reach around my love for you, it is so great. I will run my fingers up and down the spot where the world stops spinning and escapes into a black box. Let me take your ring off, I want to put my mouth around its gold seal, the purity of its design eclipsed by a desire so perfect it must not be spoken of. I put the naked finger in my mouth and sucked away at it, cleaning the nail that traces trails of disaster on my back. Let me take you away from all of this, lovely girl, because I know how sad one can be when un-loved.
When a sleeping cat’s paws twitch it’s dreaming of running away from you. You know, these are weird times, marked by a nonspecific dread that rests in nights of brown fog at the center of my bones. Everything in this life is determined, a machine fueled by the tones emitted by digging a fresh grave. Horrific events are set in motion in this occupied territory, activated by movement, but I can’t stop moving… And he: Angel Father, winged creature, a shadow on a rock. I am a mutant offspring, one that doesn’t recognize faces. It’s like every time is the first time… I surfaced from a dream to someone prodding me with a stick. I was in a bed laden with piles of sheets. Some of the cold fabric had been shoved in my mouth. When I raised my head a crumpled mound fell out of my mouth and stood up, frozen and set with saliva. My body was icy and stiff and seemed to crack when my joints felt the pressure of impending movement. I would characterize myself most accurately as being “congealed.”
Then the obvious occurred to me: autumn had come, and all the things were preparing to go to sleep. Signs were everywhere… I imagined darkened rooms with rows and rows of beds upon which lay hundreds of girls, taking their long winter sleep under a roving cloud of crystalline dust — the substance of dreams itself — that seeped through walls growing in weight and dimension with every exhaled gasp of desire unchained from deep within the sleeping statues.
I thought that I could curl up under some packing material and descend into a long winter’s sleep — even though I should be heading for the coast, the furthest-most point on land, which I knew to be the logical place for Kim’s luck to run out. A good a place as any to run out of luck, time, patience. No more land. No more pretense. The abandoned mortgage office would have to be my solitary winter hibernation place. I made my preparations for the impending descent, balling up several dried rags under my head, wrapping my body with as much flexible material as I could find. This meant plastic, paper, and cloth — whatever was immediately at hand. In the middle of the night forest rats vomit up sticky beads of phlegm on a dark forest trail. I take care to walk around them before settling into a bush at the crest of a cold stream. Wayward girls like me wander all over town looking for answers. They spend hours with their faces refracted in gas station bathroom mirrors. They muffle a sob and beg to be kissed as the band plays behind them. He doesn’t hear it. Frozen alley cats gather at the edges of the parking lot. I kick rough pebbles to the side. Winter nights go on forever. Morning heats the puddles of beer on the sidewalk into noxious clouds that blow up and down the street. I’m still kicking around downtown, shoving what little clean air I find into my mouth as if I have no use for food. Later I encounter the most unearthly 7-Eleven ever known. Addicted jobless vagrants doze in the corners in the mid-afternoon dead hour. Sleeping potion is channeled up through special vents and sugar-medicine smells swirl around inside. I crawl over to a man, his face hidden in his arm; I nudge him and whisper fucked up promises. His gut rises with shallow breaths in sync with intervals dispensing medicine. He mutters the vague chorus of a tune I used to know, and I’m certain he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know anything, not when I tug at his shirt, not when I breathe magical breath into his mouth to make him mine. Another wakes and drunkenly turns to me but I swat him away. Looking deep inside I begin to notice a familiar teen eye unscaling beneath me and I wonder about them, about all the boys who ran away… Wayward girls sip pollen through straws in dead aisles of the Albertsons, just off the freeway. I wander among them and they speak a dead language nobody understands — they are horrible vagrant animal creatures with no death in sight. At dawn I dug up my dream cat, collapsed dead in the snow. I held up the damp hide as snow fell silently around us. I kept digging away and found more and more signs of a past race of modified creatures — a mass grave of psychic cat-rats. I walked by the day labor exchange and the dudes all yelled at me and said tsk tsk. I cried fuk
you
in garbled speech, soda flying out of my mouth, flashing two thumbs down. I’m death in drag. My name means “Lady Annihilator.” My shadow is just dirt. I store myself in the muddy smells in the backs of buildings.
As I lay panting in my alley bed the boys knelt down, their eyes shining in the darkness like diamonds. They breathed hot breath that smelled like wet fur and petted me with licks and nibbles at my side as I lay wincing in the dirt. Thrashing, I grabbed the nearest one and sucked all the hot breath out of his mouth so I wouldn’t die, but the carbon dioxide made my head spin and fall and fall. I had changed, and so they looked different to me. Knowles, Josh, Murph, and yes Seth too, were their own kind, they had each other, unified by their parallel quests, their mundane, detail-rich existences that seemed so boring in their inevitability — in their insistence on perpetuating their lives throughout the years that I would not see them… I thought of the dude from Monmouth and how it was nice to be looked after, gazed upon, even by somebody who was just smoking a cigarette. And yet I’d been curt. Because I’m not one of him… After running out of the Greyhound ladies’ room I saw rats licking pollen from their hands, stooping on long low pieces of rat furniture under an iceplant in the median. I found four of my fellas hanging out at the 7-Eleven with their friend who worked there. Hungry, irritable, and stupidly tired we swept into the place and started thrashing around the store displays. Josh stole cigarettes and beer while Knowles raged at the coffee station, throwing two coffee makers and a bucket through the window. I wrapped my hand in a sash and bow. It became a good weapon for the boys behind the counter. I was open, exhilarated. My blood buzzing in my body as I took enormous breaths. I stared hard through gaps in my bangs, smiling with my teeth gritted together. Rustlings on the periphery began to slow. Standing in my boots, a shirtwaist dress under an apron and over that, a large hooded sweatshirt marbled with grease and mansblood, I counted down the minutes, then seconds, as particles of drywall and snack flakes settled into the mess on the floor. I watched a pair of eyes peek over the edge of the counter. Hours passed, everyone seemed hidden under fallen merchandise. No sound could be heard. I hung in a dark corner of the storeroom in back, snacking on open boxes and crushed fruit scraps. I dug deeper into the back of the shelves and found one of the clerk boys on his side with dirty blood caked all over his chest. I dragged him out; he groaned and pawed for my face, staring at me with shiny pink tears coming out of his eyes, saying things I could barely hear and didn’t understand. I noticed he had a huge hard on but pants that wouldn’t open. Looking around aimlessly I became very sleepy and lay down and went to sleep on top of him. Gradually I became aware that with every breath he was getting smaller and smaller and soon my knees were touching the concrete floor. I knelt before this guy passed out below me — he’s not much older than me, and now he’s almost nothing. I picked off the buttons on his shirt and the whole thing fell off, revealing his grey waterlogged flesh. I took my hands and — with a dusty hiss — wedged open his chest. The cavity opened so slowly,
finally
wrenching wide and I found it to be nothing more than a lint trap with fruit fly nests. Go figure.