by Liz Worth
- 12 -
A BEAUTIFUL CORPSE
Shit Kitten is playing in an old brick factory at the edge of an urban forest. All I want is to get there, but Tara wants to do complicated things and won’t let me leave.
She suggests the choking game. Believes I can handle it because although she’s lost some of her history she knows mine immediately, knows what I’ve done and where it led. But I don’t have enough breath left to apply pressure to a throat. Tara just answers with a kiss thick with deep throat saliva, something that tastes like an old push for survival. In her grip I am dust on a lens. Eyes open but unclear. She knows I only pretend to half-remember my past.
Tara says her memory is like an awkward grind, forever up against the rough fabric of a crotch, riding a sticky lap. Beyond that admission she says nothing.
“Okay,” I say. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
We can see into each other, both having been halfway to the other side. Her eyes sparkle with the moment before a kiss. Mine, shocked with the insecurity they surrender. I knot that nervous energy in a pack of hair, hang it in a window. Hope its light reaches me.
Tara casts a darkening crown upon herself as she pulls the blue wig over her head. Along with it comes the smell of sweat embedded in the nylon hairline. She’s encased in torn silk and black lace. She wears no bra and the nubs that were her breasts peek through the top of her thin camisole like a hot implication.
She keeps her last tube of burnt orange lipstick sitting tight in the pocket of her black leather shorts. When she leans into the corner of the cracked mirror to colour her lips there’s enough of a wink from the tops of her thighs to know she’s not wearing underwear.
Her lipstick is down to a nub. It seeps at her mouth. There’s no more makeup to buy, it being one of the first things that ran out, one of the first things we noticed was missing off the store shelves. Not enough of a necessity over batteries and lighter fluid and dried foods, even though everyone still wanted to paint their faces. We’ve held on to whatever we could: dried up compacts, flaking palettes, lipsticks down to their final strokes.
In our dreams we have everything. In our hands we hold the things we really want and believe them to be ours. It’s not until we start to wake up that we remember dream objects can’t travel back to the waking world. We don’t get to keep them. The only way we can get them again is to stay asleep and we try, but that sleep won’t stay on us.
I sit on the floor beside Tara, squeeze my face into a slit of glass, smoke a stub of eyeliner across my lids, smudge it with cigarette ash to make it stretch. The glass of the mirror is tinged with yellow; it reflects the room back three shades darker, makes us look even more tired than we are. Tara’s face takes over the mirror, shoving me out.
“I used to watch you, you know,” she says. “You and the other Valium girls. Some of my friends wanted to make up a name for all of you. The Valleys or something. Ha! That would’ve been pretty stupid. Well some of the other girls thought you were pretty stupid. I’d hear them in the bathroom, talking. They were waiting for any of you to fuck it up, make the wrong move and kill your relationships. It was all jealousy, though. Everyone knew you were the most beautiful girls. You had the best style. Everyone wanted to be you, but that made it hard to like you, you know? Because you had this thing we all wanted. The scene itself could have felt like a family, but you were part of this inner circle that some people thought was hard to become a part of. It was almost like you were on the outside for a lot of us, even though you were in the center of everything.”
Tara talks at me through the mirror. It slants her face, brings one eye higher than the other.
“I heard Hunter wasn’t always nice to everyone,” she says, “but he was nice to me.”
Tara turns to me now, with her face back on straight. We both nod, an unspoken understanding that we are each other’s reluctant links to the past.
Shit Kitten’s playing tonight, running on generators or finding a bump in the thin power grid. We don’t care how the music happens just so long as it does, so long as their sound can still slam through bodies so our bodies can slam together.
The building’s old and full of stone, properly absorbent, abandoned years before we ever found it. People used to have parties here. I heard, a long time ago, that a girl fell off the catwalk one time and died. That was years back, though. Nobody could come around for months after. The cops kept it guarded, warned people away.
If any of us die tonight, no one will ever know. I like this privacy, fold it into the palm of my hand as we take a shortcut through the trees, down the hill, knives and sticks pointed, ready for anything. Around us the forest is a backdrop of kindling—bare trees rubbing their branches together—eager trembling hands.
Instead of an opening band there’s a ritual chanted out by a thin girl in a long, loose-knit sweater; its collar looped around her shoulders, runs in the fabric zigzagging all the way down her arms. The sleeves bunch at her wrists, cover her hands. She doesn’t wear pants, only black underwear and motorcycle boots. Her lips are stretched, like they don’t fit her face. She keeps her mouth on the microphone as a high, honeyed chant rises up from below her navel.
The girl arcs her neck as a guttural moan shakes through her, forces her head back so we can see there’s a second set of teeth growing from the roof of her mouth, each ending in fine points. Beside her is a guy, hair blonde and long enough to touch his waist. He’s shirtless: on his chest shines a scar, fresh. As people file past, some of them touch the raised tissue, pause to fully flatten their palms over the inverted star carved there.
There is nothing but noise building behind them, a beaten up synthesizer pushing out a tantalizing wave of fuzz tinged with migraine—just enough to keep us cuddled in a cold canopy of sound. The girl’s voice has risen again and the guy joins her, his vocal chords stretching to reach hers until they sound identical, interchangeable.
Someone has made a bar out of milk crates and cinder blocks. Tara comes away with plastic cups in each hand, deep purple liquid streaking the backs of her hands.
“Tooth found a shitload of Kool-Aid, apparently,” she says, handing me a cup of homemade vodka with a splash of grape. It’s been so long since I’ve had a drink with this much sugar, even this small amount. Granules of sweet crunch against my teeth. I know I’ll have a headache tomorrow but right now all I want is the extra few beats the vodka is kicking into my heart.
Aimee’s moved off into the crowd and Tara’s turning to me to talk, touching me with every other word tonight. “Things find you,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s talking about me or about herself or about this place. Whichever it is, she’s right, and as the vodka hits the back of my neck with a rush of warmth I know there is nothing else we need to say.
Cam’s hair is getting long, keeps getting in his eyes. It’s how I recognize him coming up behind Tara. He won’t take his hand off of her to brush the strands away. Tara’s hand glides over his eyebrow, tucks an angled tuft behind his right ear.
“Thanks,” he says, smiling without looking at me.
He and Tara act like they slept together once, like they would do it again the way he’s distracted by the curve of her waist, his fingers pumping to underline a point. My eyes are on his collarbone; a chin could fit there, nose slipping under his jaw, eyelashes tickling the back of his ear. A shiver could pass between him and a girl then, if he’d let anyone be so close.
“You excited?” Tara asks him.
“Of course,” Cam says. “I was made for these times.”
I roll my eyes. Cam doesn’t know what it’s like to live through a lost identity. He hasn’t yet accepted that there will be no news stories about all this, no books in the aftermath, praising us survivors as heroes. There will be no after at all.
Tara’s left hand pecks nervously at her right, pulls at a hangnail on her middle finger. She’s slipped her boots off to wrap and unwrap her toes around her Achilles tendons. She sees someone she
thinks is familiar, opens her mouth as he walks by but it’s a false memory. She tells me she thought it was a guy she might have almost slept with this one time—kind of nice, kind of smart, but boring. “Boring boring boring,” she says, “an automatic write-off.” They got as close as forehead to forehead, staring and smiling at each other in pre-kiss state. Except his head had an extra layer of fat, enough padding that it felt like she was leaning her head against the heel of a hand instead of the smooth bone of a skull. “Still,” she says, “if it was now, I’d sleep with him, considering the circumstances.”
Shit Kitten is three songs into its set. We stay sitting because this is where we feel the music the most, conducted through the floor. Aimee finds us, sits, too, because this how it gets into you, beats the shit out of you. It comes crawling up from the earth and simultaneously dives right into your heart head-on, hits your chest from top and bottom, fists a cardiac hole and then fucks your aorta, ventricles, pummels your blood. By the speaker is where the abuse happens, where you give yourself up for this, give yourself over to the music, to the music’s mind.
There’s a tail coiled in my left side, burning above my pubic bone. It twitches, like an animal dreaming.
Aimee asks, “You feeling okay?”
The tip of the tail tickles my stomach into a slow flip. Tara offers me a drink from her cup. I shake my head, keep my mouth closed. Not that it really matters what goes in, what comes out, where it lands. Rattail used to keep a bucket in front of his mic stand for when he had to puke. His blood was made mostly of a mix of speed and mushrooms, alcohol and a dab of heroin that he said he used “here and there.” In Shit Kitten’s early days he said it was nerves, that he had to get so fucked up just to sing, his stomach knotting up under the crunch of his abdomen, the strain on his vocal chords pushing down so hard that he just couldn’t keep anything down. But we never really believed that. He had too much confidence for it to be nerves, and if you were ever hanging out with the band before or after, you probably saw Rattail’s eyes roll all the way up into his head, so far in fact that whole minutes would pass by before you saw him come back again, a testament to just how wasted he could get.
Another song in and my nausea passes, the belly-deep tail settling enough for another splash of purple and vodka. Someone’s passing around grayline and my dose collects in a chemical drip at the back of my throat; I can feel the slow pull every time I swallow.
Rattail’s crawling through the next song, almost crying through the words. There is no stage, just a circle of dirt where the concrete floor ends.
The back of Rattail’s t-shirt is shredding, mostly hanging off his chest, front-heavy. He flops onto his side, a tired dog, and whimpers out a few lines. People around us are electric, with so much heat running between them that it’s melted the soles of their shoes to the floor. Their bodies collide but never move from their places.
Rattail’s voice might have gone from aluminum thunder to a serrated lullaby but the guitars are still at full roar, still have us in their jaws. Cam’s in front of us, on his knees in the dirt, listening for the quietest words. He’s holding his hair back now, face serious, concentrating on the messages in the music; his knuckles huge and almost black they’re so dirty, an eye drawn on the back of his hand, watching.
I can’t tell if Shit Kitten’s still playing the same song or if they’ve moved on. It’s all a swirl of destroyed sound now, revving distortion, a razorblade grazing a thin black stocking.
Rattail’s not moving anymore, hasn’t sang or even whispered a note in I don’t know how long. Feels like it’s been at least an hour but Cam’s inked eye is still staring, unblinking, from the back of his hand. He’s still crouched there, same position. No one could stay like that for so long, could they?
Cam always says drugs slow your time down because they bring you closer to death, and the closer to death you are the slower everything gets. Time only accelerates when you are at your most alive. By that logic we’ll be dead any minute now.
The guitars do stop, finally, fade out and disappear like a screen gone to black. The tail’s slipped out of my stomach to twist through the crowd, a purple trail chasing loose hems. Outside, someone’s gotten a fire going. The heat is bright enough to bathe us. It crisps the skin of my face, makes me feel the cleanest I’ve been in weeks.
A thick fog hangs low over the trees, three-quarters of the way over their peaks. If we weren’t all in tshirts you could believe it was almost close to something like cold out here. A semicircle of people crowd around the fire. The chanting girl that opened is there, too, sitting on a dented folding chair. I don’t recognize her until the tip of her cigarette lights up her face. Her leather boots are rotted through across the tops where her toes bend, the heels worn into upward curves. The intake of smoke from her cigarette sparks an orange puff of light across the bottom half of her face. At the corner of her eye, crisscrossing up to her temple is a dark sparkle, a charcoal swirl.
“I can paint your face, too,” she says. That’s when I notice she doesn’t blink, that her eyes are only white with black, the eyes of something that once lived in deep water.
“Hold this,” she says without waiting for my answer, stubbing the filter of her cigarette between my fingers, telling me I can smoke some if I want. I do.
The girl goes face down into her bag, digging. Her fingers come out of the dark sack, tips covered in powder, soot. “Ready?” she asks, looks at me, and then she’s at the side of my face. Her fingertips have the stickiness of a spider’s legs. They spin out a spiral across my eyelid, stretch the webbing across my cheekbone.
“There,” she says. “Done.” She’s smiling, proud, wants to show me, pulls a small compact from her pocket, holds it up. Except the mirror’s at the wrong angle and has me out of the frame. I reach for the compact, try to pull it down but she stops my hand, holds it in hers mid-air.
She wants to know: “You like it?”
All I see is sky. “I love it,” I tell her.
It might be somewhere around what used to be 3AM and the show is breaking up. There’s still a small sputter of fire; a few people have stretched out around the fire pit, sleeping on their backs. Tara and I have lost the last of our time here, both blacking out after the singer went back inside and Aimee went off somewhere again. Shit Kitten said they were doing two sets but we can only remember seeing one.
You never know how long it’ll take to walk across the Bloor Street bridge. Should only be a few minutes, five to eight depending how fast you are, but you never know what you might step into here. There are pockets of time, holes that’ll slow you down, ghosts that’ll pull you in.
Tonight the only measurement of time I have to go by is the fatigue I’m starting to feel in my lower thighs, muscles straining to get to the other side, slowed by the cold that always creeps in up here. I want to stay, lie down right where I am on the bridge, but Tara pushes into the small of my back, tells me to just move, move, move. I fall behind anyway.
Finally I crawl up the porch stairs, the last one in. Even Aimee has made it in before me, having come a different route with Trevor. No one waits to make sure I get in okay.
The legs of my jeans are damp from something wet but I don’t know what. It’s absorbed upwards, left a coating of black grime, tiny pebbles across the calves of my pants. I pull the jeans off and leave them in a far corner of the room, don’t want anymore outside transmission on me than there already is. I throw my t-shirt there, too, wipe at my ankles. A few specks of dark sand fall onto the floor.
I find another t-shirt to wipe at my face. It’s not clean but at least it’s dry. The sun is starting to come up, bringing in enough light to get at my makeup. The swirl the singer painted earlier is gone, nothing left even in the crease of my eyelid.
- 13 -
EMPTY HUNGER
Aimee wakes me up and asks “Do you want to get drunk?” and I say, “Of course I do.” She says, “A friend I ran into last night told me about someone who can ho
ok us up.”
I sit up. “Really? Who?”
“Well it’s kind of weird,” she says. “Like, how we have to pay for it.”
“Okay,” I say. “So what do we have to do?”
Downstairs, the kitchen sink is backed up. Blowing chunks. Looks like stewing beef, meat cut at odd angles. Tough strands of white fat exposed. A circle of blood rims the drain.
Five of us stand around trying to figure out how to deal with it, what to do. After this I think I will probably never be hungry again.
From the right, a finger runs the length of darkness beneath my skirt, distracts me from the disgust of the sink. Cam, at the back of my knees.
“What the fuck?” I spit, spinning to catch him.
He laughs. “I’m kidding,” he says. “Besides, you better get used to it if you want to get drunk today.”
Close your eyes and they could all be the same, guys like Cam, grabbing at ankles in the dark, hands reaching higher.
Aimee says guys always like me because I’m one of the thin girls, because they think they can just flick me away. My raccoon eyes give me away, apparently, make it too obvious that I apply insomnia in place of eyeliner.
I kick at Cam, heel to collarbone, prove Aimee wrong.
We ride west, big empty bags over our shoulders. Aimee says no one needs money anymore, that dealers just want to hold you, have someone close.
“Girls and guys?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Why not? It’s not sexual. They just want to not feel so lonely or something.”
A platonic exchange. No sex, just an hour in a man’s arms.
“So is this different from what Trevor does?” I ask.
“Trevor does his own thing,” Aimee says. “There are a lot of people who don’t want to get off, just want to be cradled. Oh, and my friend said they might want to talk or something, so pretend you’re listening and don’t fall asleep.”