by David Wood
Alma raised his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Good! Let’s keep it that way.”
Brushing past her, Alma picked up the knife and resumed making his turkey and cheddar sandwich. “Get out of my sight. I can’t stand to be around you when you’re like this.”
Kelly rejoiced at those words. It made her so much more comfortable than the leers and stares he used to direct her way. She knew the implications of those looks and knew one day they could lead to something they both would regret.
Twirling the pink parasol as she walked up the stairs, she smiled at the freedom her Gothic Lolita character had provided. The look of disgust crinkling his ogre face proved she had thwarted his horrid desires once again.
She fell onto the comfort of her bed. Relief washed over her, making peace with the war drumbeats of her heart.
Chapter 3: Video
Two things bothered Kelly the next morning.
First, the stupid video.
She clicked the play button and dragged it back. The YouTube clip had jarred her senses. The bizarre performance caught on video intrigued her, but she still couldn’t believe the woman’s words.
She played it again. Like a lot of amateur videos the audio was poor and she strained to make sure she heard it correctly. There it was. Above the crowd’s commotion the woman repeated the lines that had caught Kelly’s attention.
“She’s pierced through. Oh my god. She’s pierced through!” The woman chanted the words like a mantra.
Kelly rewound the video farther back. She wanted to watch it from the beginning. As far as suspension performances went, this stood at the top of the heap.
It seemed impossible the way the camera captured the woman dangling from the chains eight feet above the stage. Her body displayed hundreds of piercings. Most of the piercings had stainless steel rings attached. The hooks from each length of chain fit into the rings, holding her aloft.
She faced upwards, and if her eyes were open she would have seen the man six feet above her. He faced downwards and sported his own assortment of body piercings with rings. The chains descending from his flesh supported the weight of his female counterpart below. A series of cables and a pulley system allowed him to hang from the shadowed ceiling above.
The man employed a superman horizontal position while the woman imitated a dead man’s float in midair, both positions chosen to evenly distribute their weight. Most extreme performers used meat hooks threaded through the skin of the back. Meat hooks could bear the weight of a human form, whereas the piercing and ring system used by the two performers should not have been able to handle the strain put upon it.
Kelly watched this point of the video closely, trying to determine what had gone wrong. The female performer’s eyes shot wide open. She looked startled, as if catapulted out of an altered state. She howled a blood curdling cry and thrashed against her restraints. The chains wrenched themselves loose one at a time. She fell eight feet to the stage floor, sending up a cloud of dust like a bursting sack of flour.
An emcee rushed on stage, flailing his hands in an attempt to clear the dusty air. He managed her into a sitting position, supporting her with an arm around her shoulder. She remained conscious, but her eyes stared straight ahead, fixed on nothing. No tears, no sobs, no cries of pain; just that unfocused gaze. She paid no heed to her torn, bruised and bleeding flesh.
Kelly sympathized with the fallen performer but focused on the reaction from the woman in the audience. She remembered her social science teacher’s lesson about the origin of miracles, how belief in them was created by a minority insistent enough to give a rumor life. Her teacher had concluded that was how water gets turned to wine, magic carpets take flight and corpses arise from the dead.
In the case of the suspension performer who spilled from the ceiling, Kelly feared the woman would become the subject of another rumor that would eventually birth a miracle. All because one hysterical woman in the crowd had repeated over and over again, “She’s pierced through. Oh my god, she’s pierced through!”
“That’s not it at all,” Kelly said, closing YouTube. It was videos like this that gave people the wrong impression about piercing through. Piercing through was not the equivalent of being catatonic. If so, there were plenty who mastered the feat already and they could be found in any of the city’s psychiatric wards.
Still, something intrigued her about the extreme performance. She downloaded several still frames from the video and printed them out.
The second thing that bothered Kelly that morning; the stupid outfit she had fallen asleep in.
The silly outfit reminded her of the harsh realities of life and of the extremes one had to go to protect oneself. However, if it kept the ogre’s advances away, she would gladly wear it when needed. With him having already left for his logging job, she felt safe in removing the costume.
She looked in the dresser mirror, wiping off the ghoulish white foundation and corpse blue lipstick. Opening the closet, she tucked away her five buckle black Goth boots. The black knee length skirt, lacy pink petticoat and striped stockings sat on the dresser top, folded neatly and waiting to be put away.
She thought back to the YouTube video clip, wondering if something could be learned from that impressive suspension performance. She studied the downloaded still frames and smiled, hoping later that day her friend Trish Kendrick could help her with a little experiment.
Chapter 4: Experimenting
“You had to get yourself a tramp stamp?” Kelly asked, peeling the gauze bandage from Trish’s lower back, just above her pant waistline.
Fresh drops of blood marked the skin and the area of the ink job looked red and swollen.
“Ah!” Trish winced. “Why does it have to feel like a bad sunburn?”
Kelly tossed the bloody bandage into the pail at the foot of her bed and giggled. “Princess? How typically you.”
Both girls laughed as a gust of wind shook the old roof on the 1920’s Victorian house.
Kelly loved Trish to death, but she was such a typical suburban teen, as her new PRINCESS tattoo proved. Everything from her Portland Trailblazer jersey to her pink Nike tennis shoes reeked of the status quo.
Trish lived in Beaverton, an outskirt community to Portland where those who bristled at the hustling inner city life settled down for much desired tranquility. Kelly hated the pretentious nature of the middle class suburbanites and inwardly applauded the influx of Mexicans that had the Beaverton yuppies on edge.
“What’s wrong with a princess tat?” Trish asked, looking over her shoulder, her brown Honduran eyes sparkling.
“Don’t you think it’s-I don’t know, boring?”
“Not everything has to be dark and Goth to be cool.”
“Sure about that?” Kelly raised her steel spiked vegetan leather bracelet with a playful sneer. “Now this is what I call cool.”
“Talk about typical. Every Goth and Emo kid in the city has spiked cuffs.”
“Oh yeah?” Kelly scooted forward on the bed and wrapped her forearm around Trish’s neck in a choke-hold, her body pressed up against Trish’s back.
Trish’s laughter turned to protests. “My tat. God, that hurts.”
“Sorry. Forgot.” Kelly backed off. She glanced at the raw blood stained flesh. “Still, you could have gotten something like ‘uckfa ouya’. That would be original.”
“Since when is Pig Latin back in fashion?”
Both girls fell into another bout of laughter, rolling back and forth on the vibrant red comforter.
The roof rumbled once more. It was early autumn, but the weather had turned quick this year. The first wind and rain storm of the season made its presence felt. It sounded as if the roof would soon take flight and rain pounded a steady tempo on the glass window like invisible percussionists concealed by the night.
“I’m glad you came,” Kelly said, climbing off the bed. She turned her back on Trish, looking at the downloaded web pages on he
r dresser.
“The weather, right?” Trish asked, pushing back her long raven black hair.
“Yeah, he’s particularly ornery when it’s like this. I guess the Oregon weather gets the best of us all, but especially him.”
“Is he working?”
“Could be. Could be out getting sloshed. I don’t really care as long as he just stays away.”
“Is that why you’re dressed like that?”
Kelly bit her lip, trying to hide her frustration. No matter how many times she explained it, Trish always brought it up. She supposed that was the price to be paid for allowing someone into her inner sanctum.
Kelly patiently explained it again. “Yes. For some reason he’s frightened of this look. It keeps him away from me. Just the way I like it.”
Trish’s eyes narrowed. “Do you really think that he’d-you know-touch you improperly, or something worse?”
“Fortunately he hasn’t. I think it’s definitely possible, though. I’m not taking any chances. So you’re stuck with Gothic Lolita tonight.”
“I don’t know. I kind of like it.”
Kelly turned from the dresser and saw Trish smiling from the bed. She snorted a laugh, feeling the 20 gauge captive bead ring running through her septum tickle the skin of her nose.
“Remind me again. Why did we become friends?” Kelly often harassed Trish about being her polar opposite.
“It was your idea, remember?”
“You’re just lucky I came along when I did, or who knows what would have happened.”
Trish had a Caucasian dad, but her mother came from Honduran descent. She favored her mother’s South American side with a fabulous darker complexion and since she lived in Beaverton she often paid the price of mistaken racial identity. Beaverton teemed with Mexicans and thus Trish regularly got accused of being one. Though Portland and its satellite communities prided themselves on being liberals, a thread of racism still directed itself at the Mexican population.
One day Kelly came upon a scene where Trish, having been mistaken for a Mexican once more, had been the target of three over-privileged white kids.
“I’m still grateful to this day for your getting involved,” Trish said. “I mean you didn’t even know me then. You could have minded your business and gone on by.”
Kelly fiddled with one of her spiked cuffs. “I just can’t stand to see people mistreated, no matter what their financial or social status.”
“I still can’t believe those punks. What did that one guy say?”
“He called you brown sugar tits and asked you if you were tired of working in the strawberry fields.”
Trish giggled. “Oh yeah. Then he shoved a twenty down the crotch of his pants and asked me if I wanted an easier way to score some cash. Your reply was classic. ‘You might want to save that twenty to help pay for the ambulance you’re going to need once I finish with you.’”
“I did say that didn’t I? I must have been convincing because they sure took off like bats out of hell.”
“Then we went for coffee and the rest, as they say, is history. You’re stuck with a new friend whether you like it or not.”
“Yeah, I can’t seem to get rid of you no matter how hard I try.” Kelly smiled. “Just kidding. I love you like the sister I never had.”
Both girls elapsed into a moment of silence. Kelly picked up the downloaded sheets and tossed them onto the comforter. “Not to change the subject, but look what I found.”
Trish picked up the photos. Her eyes squinted. “What in Tarnation?”
Kelly knew the photos from the underground piercing performance shocked her suburban friend. Shock value wasn’t her aim. She needed an ally. She watched as a flash of understanding passed through Trish’s eyes.
“This is about that crazy idea of yours isn’t it?”
Kelly nodded.
“Where did you get these?” Trish held up the photos, one side of her top lip curling upward.
“From the Internet. It’s a Chicago based extreme theatrics group.”
“Let me guess. You think if you copy this little performance you can break on through to the other side?”
Kelly laughed. “It’s not a Jim Morrison song, but yeah, you get the gist of it.”
Another blast of wind struck the house, rattling the bedroom window. For a second, she feared the double paned glass might shatter. The first storm of the season was turning into a monster.
“Come on, Trish. On a night such as this it will be fun, like the time we stared into the mirror and said Candyman five times.”
“You said it five times. I chickened out after four. I didn’t want no man with a hooked hand slashing my throat.”
“But you were in this room with me. It was fun, getting all tingly and scared.”
“I guess.” Trish held the photos in front of her face. She gave them a thorough scrutiny. “This thing you have with crossing over; I mean, how far are you willing to go?”
Kelly jumped back on the bed and sat cross legged in front of Trish. She grabbed both her friend’s hands and smiled. “I like living on the edge. This stuff keeps your mind sharp. The adrenaline rush from getting the pants scared off you feels great, right?”
Trish flinched and looked away. “So you don’t really want to break on through to the other side?”
“Well, I mean the ‘what if’ factor does makes it exciting. These things always turn out to be a joke, harmless ghost stories. Let’s just play around with it a little and freak ourselves out.”
Trish’s worried face softened into a hint of a smile. “I suppose it will be fun. But I only have a few piercings, not hundreds like you. How will that work?”
“Like I said, we’re just going to play around with it a little. Nothing like what these pictures show.”
Kelly snatched the photos. She wished she could enact the ritual down to the finest detail. The subjects in the pictures, the male and female suspension performers, were nude, their exposed flesh plastered with hundreds of piercings. They sported everything from barbells to plugs. Most of the accessories were fitted with stainless steel rings. Attached to each ring were equal lengths of chain. The multiple chains linked both bodies together.
A good number of the photos showed the couple in various poses, each position designed to create a tug of war between the opposing bodies. One photo showed the couple sitting on the stage floor, leaning in opposite directions from each other. The stretched skin looked as if hundreds of miniature t-pees had spread across their faces, chests and torsos.
Another frame depicted the male face down, suspended from cables above the stage. The woman hung beneath him, face up and held by nothing but chains.
Unbelievable. Something like this was sure to smash down barriers and break down walls. However, Kelly knew she couldn’t take it that far, not with Trish’s conservative approach.
Another bout of wind pummeled the little Victorian, shaking it down to the foundations. The lamp on the dresser blinked off and on.
“Spooky,” Trish said, bringing her clasped hands under her chin and grinning. “Obviously you’ve thought this through. How do we do it?”
“Great. I knew you’d get on board.” Kelly pulled three eighteen inch steel chain linked necklaces from under the red comforter.
“Wow. For me? What’s the occasion?”
“For both of us.” She leaned towards Trish. “These hook clasps will work perfectly.”
Trish snatched the necklaces out of her hand. She looked them over and said, “Afraid these won’t do the trick.”
“What?”
“I don’t see a hook clasp on both ends. How are we going to hook both ourselves together?”
“Come on, Trish. You’re not getting out of it that easy. I can remove a few of my captive bead rings. Easy sleazy.” She hopped off the bed and bounced to the dresser. She fished a pair of ring pliers from the top drawer. “You work on getting yourself hooked up while I get these loose. Unless you’re chickening out.”
Using the pliers, Kelly pried the nose ring open, catching the ball as it fell into her other hand. She peeked at Trish in the mirror. Trish knelt on the bed, struggling to get the hook clasps through her hoop earrings.
“How you doing?” Kelly asked, lifting her sepia Still Dead band T-shirt to loosen her captive bead belly ring.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Kelly turned to face her friend. She cupped her hand over her mouth.
“What?”
“It looks a little silly.”
“I suppose it does. Remember, this is your stupid idea.”
Kelly couldn’t contain a chuckle. Trish looked ridiculous, sitting on her knees, two steel chain necklaces dangling from her ears and another one extending from the bottom of her red and black Trailblazer jersey.
“Come down here,” Kelly said, taking a seat on an area rug boasting dark twirling patterns and a bright gold pentacle in the center.
Trish paused then scooted off the bed to join Kelly below. “You sure this is just some sort of game? I don’t know about you sometimes.”
Kelly brushed her hand across the brown skin of Trish’s cheek. “I love you to pieces. I’m not going to put you in any danger. What kind of friend do you take me to be?”
“A freaky devil friend,” Trish said with a soft laugh, pointing at the pentacle symbol woven into the rug between them.
“I won’t even light candles if it makes you feel better. We’ll leave the main lights on. How’s that?”
“Whatever.”
Kelly could read the relief on her friend’s face. She inched close enough to grab the necklaces dangling from Trish’s ear lobes. She hooked the nose ring in her palm through the last chain link of each necklace, brought it up to her face and worked it through her septum, snapping the end of the ring into the ball to hold it in place. She did the same with the necklace hooked to Trish’s belly ring.
“Feels a little weird,” Trish said with a nervous giggle. “What now?”
“We both should lean away from the other, until we feel the pull of the chains. Close your eyes and concentrate.”