Then I saw her.
Standing in front of the exit doors at the back of the theater, silhouetted poetically each time the doors opened and closed behind her, I saw the profoundly distinctive, diminutive form of Marion Crane standing, smiling, applauding my greatness with long, slender fingers, cinched tight in a corset of bones, rattling like wind chimes with the skulls of tiny rodents dangling from slender gold chains.
She was astonishingly gorgeous, and I could not look away.
But my genitalia, rent and wounded and full of anger, found it time to fight again, to resist the tyranny of the body that withheld them from their will, pounding out against the black Levi’s prison that held them captive.
It was all quite evident in this white-hot floodlight, and the audience, believing it to be a rigged practical special effect, began to laugh and cheer all over again.
But this was not latex; it was flesh and blood, my flesh and blood, and it hurt like holy hell. I could not contain a scream, and when that shriek launched from my throat, the audience joined in, all of them screaming to outdo one another.
Marion watched from her doorway, Mona Lisa’s self-satisfied grin on her lips, and blew me a silent kiss.
Well, that threw my privates into a frenzy, and they fought like a cat in a bag to be free, as the gawping crowd just laughed and cheered and hooted and howled.
I could not take my eyes off of her. She was stunning, but she was also Medusa. However, I did not turn to stone, I turned to jelly, trapped in her galvanizing gaze.
My body’s revolution was in full thrall now. My penis was engorged and morphing, taking on shapes not seen in nature. It pulled and pulled, and I could feel the raw layers of my pubic skin ripping, actually tearing away from my groin. I felt—and even heard—the rending of my flesh as it tore apart, my cock and balls ripping free and tearing through my jeans like the chestburster in Alien. In a spectacularly sanguinary crimson shower of spurting blood, my genitals ran down my leg and onto the stage floor, as if to take a bow.
The crowd went wild, stomping and losing all control at this, the Greatest Show on Earth.
I stood, gape-mouthed as a grouper, when Marion gave a little whistle and crooked her finger. My body parts, running on my—their?—testicles, slalomed up the aisle as the ravenous, toothy audience bellowed their approval, and my blood gouted into a widening spotlight of crimson corona around me, and I collapsed on the stage.
My bits and pieces trotted mischievously up the aisle, and Marion leaned down to greet them with her cunning little boarskin purse wide open. My manhood jumped jauntily inside, and she snapped it shut, blew me a kiss and made her grand exit, while I lost consciousness on the greatest night of my life.
—
And then I woke up.
—
Unfortunately, my awakening was within the sterile confines of a hospital room, my head throbbing on a cottony cloud of sedation, IVs needled into my veins, monitor screens beeping and humming. Webs pulled away to reveal white walls and isolation. It was a tiny, generic room in a hospital, and I was all alone. As usual.
Hoping it was all a dream, I tentatively reached down below the sheets and the hospital gown I wore. At my body’s fulcrum beneath the bedclothes, I found gauze and bandages.
I had to know.
I gingerly plucked at the edges of the tape and slowly peeled, grimacing with the grip it had on my pubic hair. I peeled it back as sensation blossomed through the juncture of my body. Gently, frightened, I let my fingertips brush the place between my legs and I gasped. Everything that belonged there was missing. I just felt a cleft of stitches at my groin, and all else was null and void.
A curtain of funk fell heavily upon me, and the room filled with that horrible smell, so strong it was almost a liquid. So wretched that I wanted to puke.
But I didn’t.
A shadow fell across me, causing me to look up. The doorway was filled with Marion Crane, her expression inscrutable, her eyes an unholy green. No longer corseted in bone, she still wore black, and wore it well. It was a stretchy little dress that hugged the sleek lines of her taut little body. It barely reached the tops of her thighs, though the crisscross webbing of her stockings embraced the racing-sleek lines of her athletic legs.
“You’re awake,” she said, her voice low and husky. Like everything she did had to be sexy or something.
“I guess,” I responded, still in shock about the departure of my favorite organs.
“Who are you?” I asked.
That fucking grin again. “You don’t know?”
I felt so fucking stupid.
“Should I?”
“Of course you should.”
I was clueless.
“Have we met before?” I asked her.
“In a way,” she answered.
I was getting pissed off at the game. Not to mention the loss of my cock and balls.
“I’m no good at enigma,” I said, but it only made her smile again.
She glided across the room and sat on the edge of my bed. I could hear the chirping heart monitor accelerate.
“Look at me and ask me again,” she said.
I looked at her, and even though there was some kind of malevolence beneath the beauty, it was easy to do. I recognized her but was not sure from where. Suddenly, she looked like every movie star I’d ever desired. Every two-dimensional woman I lusted for, craved, sought after.
“Who are you?”
“I’m everything you’ve always wanted,” she told me, the smile lost and the eyes turning a deeper shade of green. I could see my own face reflected within them, and I looked empty. Ugly. Unborn.
Teasingly, she ran a fingertip up the length of my leg beneath the covers, then lifted the sheets to take a peek. Her lips pursed as she saw the surgeon’s handiwork.
“He did good work. He must have liked you.”
“How encouraging.”
She sighed.
“You know, sometimes you can’t have everything you want,” she said. “Sometimes you just get a taste. And sometimes you get to take a great big bite. And sometimes it bites you back.” The last statement was made as she cast a theatrical glance at the stitchery that belied my gender.
“Um…is this a story with a moral?” I asked. “Because if it is, I’m really not looking for life lessons from you.”
She shrugged. “Far be it from me to tell anyone how to live their life. Me, of all people.” And she laughed, as if I should know what that meant.
She got up and stood over me, then bent down and kissed me on the lips.
She was delicious.
“You’ve had me,” she said. “But you won’t have me again.”
“And so I should be glad that I had a taste? Of everything I’ve ever wanted?”
“I would if I were you.”
“Be happy with that and give it up for good?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just because I’m Everything You’ve Always Wanted doesn’t mean I’ve got all the answers.”
The taste of her kiss lingered rapturously. I almost forgot about the curtain of stink.
Almost.
“When you get a taste of Everything You’ve Always Wanted, you give up something in return. I took the meat. I took the vigor. I took the aspiration, and it makes me strong. It makes me happy. It makes me sexy.”
“What did you do to me?”
“Not much. I just used you up. I brought you back from the dead, gave you hope, and then took it back.”
“Who are you?”
“Why, I’m Marion Crane.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m the silver screen that you project your movies on,” she said. “I’m your imagination. I’m your joy. I’m your sex.”
“Everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“So far as I can tell. You had me, but you can’t have me. I am elusive. I am smoke. And now it’s time for me to go.”
“For good?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not sure that good is the word I’d have chosen. But this is the last you’ll ever have of me. Good night.”
And with a twiddling toodleoo of her fingertips, she stepped out of the room. After a beat, she turned around and came back. With a smile, she unclasped her clutch purse, withdrew my drooping, lifeless flesh from it, and tossed it onto the bed, where it landed languidly on my stomach.
“I won’t be needing this anymore.” And off she went. I watched her shadow lengthen as she made her way down the corridor outside. And then it disappeared.
In the wake of her exit, the air was cleansed, tinged with lavender. I breathed deep of it before I looked down.
My malehood lay inert, gray and going green, lifeless as a dead cat on the highway, but nowhere near as stiff. All that color, its sanguine cockiness, had fled. It looked silly, ridiculous, useless. I could see I wouldn’t be needing him anymore, either.
I looked at the Frankensteinian needlework that ridged the cleft that bridged my pelvis and picked up the limp, heavy, lifeless meat of my organs with the tips of my fingers. They just hung there, dead and frowning, and I tossed them into the wastebasket in the corner.
I lay back in a lonely hospital bed somewhere in Indianapolis, a castrato, gelded by Everything I Always Wanted, and trying to find and heed some kind of moral. But I came up short. Somewhere in the distance, thirty-five-millimeter film ran through a projector, pierced by unbearably hot light throwing stuttering images onto a Panavision screen. I heard the film break after my life burned a hole in it, and the ends flapped on the disengaged reel, over and over and over again.
I really hoped this was not destined to be a double feature.
The Land of Sunshine
Kealan Patrick Burke
The cracks in his marriage had started to appear ever since the affair, and nothing they had tried in the years since had fully shored up the crevasse. It didn’t help that his wife couldn’t speak, for though it had never bothered him before, her muteness now more than ever seemed like an infirmity destined to compound the inevitability of their dissolution. He had never heard her voice, and so did not have the right to mourn its absence. She had ceased speaking due to a trauma that long preceded their union. But still, it frustrated him. She could hear him perfectly, of course. This he knew. But without the benefit of inflection, her silent nods or shakes of her head, or the slight gestures she made with her hands, could be read only one way, or no way at all, and he needed the kind of closure the quiet seldom gave. She had never learned to sign, and he supposed this was a good thing. If her hands were not raised, he didn’t have to see the pale scars that bisected her wrists, and thus be reminded of how he had failed her.
To aggravate the situation, as they moved like ghosts through the gloaming of their lives together, he also began to develop the nagging sensation that something other than love had gone missing, something other than his loyalty had gone astray. It manifested itself as a vague certainty, a low voice in another room, the persistent conviction that someone had stolen into the house of their marriage and shifted things around just the tiniest little bit, just enough to create a subliminal feeling of violation, of something not quite amiss, but awry.
When he expressed this concern, his wife regarded him as she often did these days, with mute attentiveness draped like a dust cloth over the dark hunkering shapes of pity and resentment. If she felt the same absence of anything but mutual love, it was not evident on her face, but then nothing was.
It was at night, as he lay on his back in a bed that like so many things had seen better days, his back sunken into the valley in the old mattress, that it became clear what he must do. He must find and locate that missing thing, that wrong thing, and return it from whence it came, before he lost all that was left to lose.
After creeping wraithlike out of their bedroom, which seemed cavernous in the dark—a direct contrast to the lives shrinking within its suspiciously wavering confines—he decided to start at Moriarty’s, a place he had frequented enough times that surely the mahogany on his favored corner of the bar must still bear the scuffs of his elbows.
Dressed in a once-black threadbare overcoat and porkpie hat, he shuddered out into the cold and navigated the narrow, dark streets with the same chaotic certainty as a marble through a tilted maze. Here in this forgotten neighborhood, the streetlights had died in time with the idea of prosperity and reclamation. The city had eaten it, and its coal-dark shadow had scalded everything from the gaps in the gutters to the morality of the disillusioned young who haunted its corners. Even they weren’t present now, though, and his sigh of relief was visible as a transient specter that, despite the absence of a breeze to claim it, whipped away from him as if eager to be free of the association. In the suffocating quiet, his shoes made the sound of slow, sarcastic applause in the dry, humorless rent of an alley that seemed all too eager to close in on him before he had a chance to clear it.
Freed of the garbage truck–like sensation of being crushed, an impression aided by the stench that swaddled him upon his exit, he moved quickly toward the sole oasis of light in this otherwise claustrophobic urban labyrinth of forgotten streets, and found himself within view of the bar. It sat crookedly on a corner that seemed merely to tolerate the weight, the amber light through the stained windows bleeding sickly into the gloom.
Buoyed at the reprieve from the darkness, the man quickened his step and then immediately regretted it, his enthusiasm writing signatures across his knees with an arthritic pen. Hissing like the steam that bullied its way from the vents in the street, he limped on, until he found his heart lightened by the idea of old friends and familiar faces, his hand warmed by the door handle, his mind settled, but only briefly, by the notion that here the mystery of loss might begin its unraveling.
He twisted the handle and pulled.
The door was locked, the single ratcheting sound it gave as abrasive as the poorly concealed laughter of pranksters.
He tried to peer through the frosted glass and made out only a series of still shapes clustered in a tableau around a bar, their blurred shadows paler toward the top, where their faces were turned toward the door. The thought of knocking raised his fist. Uncertainty kept it an inch from the glass. Clearly, they knew he was here, and just as clearly, he knew he was not wanted within. But did they know who was standing upon their threshold? The weight of his own guilt this night told him they probably did, and that they had latched the door as soon as they heard the unsteady echo of his approach.
Still he stood, as still as they, and for a moment not even air or light seemed to move, his shadow flung across the curb behind him as if the decision to depart had already been made. Moments passed, a part of him wishing, daring them to let their own guilt sway their opinion and carry them to the door to admit him, but no one moved, still they stared, and at last he placed a palm flat against the cold glass as if wishing it farewell, and moved away.
The memory of their faces split by smiles assailed him as he followed the cracks in the pavement with his eyes, but the more he remembered, the uglier those smiles became, the once bright eyes above them darkening like ink spilled in water, accusation and judgment flashing like silvery fish in the ocular depths. He shook his head to clear it and raised his eyes through the sudden veil of rain he was almost arrogant enough to believe had been sent solely to torment him. It hissed malignantly down around him, filling the holes in the pavement, seeping up through the battered leather soles of his shoes, and running in rivulets down the fissures in his face. With the rain came a cold that insinuated its way through his coat and his skin and settled in his bones. His body stiffened, the pain in his knees worsening until he was forced to stop and lean against a red-brick wall emblazoned with graffiti that had long ago lost its vibrant rebellious color to the smoke and dust and decay that formed the breath of this dying place.
It would be so easy to give up, he knew, as he let his brow rest against the back of his hand, the rain tapping against the brim
of his hat. It would be the easiest thing in the world to tamp down the compulsion that had plagued him of late. It was merely unfinished business, after all, and what life is not characterized by such things? Not everything gets to end. Sometimes you walk out of the theater before the movie is done, and never give it a second thought. How simple it would be to do the same now. Besides, despite the need within him to find whatever it was he had lost, perhaps it was his destiny to exist in a house haunted by the ghost of old love. What man didn’t suffer that melancholic torment at one time or another? He could use the pain as an excuse, for now it felt as if someone had struck his knees with a crowbar. Imaginary points of contact radiated fire. Hissing air through his teeth, he straightened, looked back the way he came, then ahead to where the ruined pathway would lead him. All was darkness there, the streetlights long broken and bent almost double so that they formed a steel rib cage around the street.
He could go home, but the thought of the silence awaiting him there kept him for the moment immobile, stricken by the kind of uncertainty that forces men to merely occupy their lives instead of living them. At the root of it all was a gnawing absence, a dark hollow within him from which something had been removed, something so critical to his composition he had grown to fear he might die if he didn’t recover it.
He moved back from the smoke-stained wall and raised his face to the sky. Towering above him was a billboard he had to blink the rain away to fully appreciate. The same dilapidation that had scoured the town of definition had not been dissuaded by the height at which the billboard stood. On its scabrous surface he saw a once gleaming silver airplane that had been shorn in half by the peeling of the paper upon which it had been printed. Beneath the aircraft, the tropical ocean looked speckled with ash and flotsam. To the right of the bisected plane, a man and woman clinked glasses full of mildew, their faces torn away by decay and hanging in yellowed flaps from their necks. Above it all was the message THE LAND OF SUNSHINE in large yellow block capitals, and though most of the letters were missing from the cursive text beneath, he was, after sleeving the rain from his eyes, able to put it together: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
Dark Screams, Volume 5 Page 6