Tail

by Julian Duenker

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The passage of time was riddled with romance through the following weeks. Over nights, Mathew and Susan shared bread together, it was very good bread covered by the lube of Mr Black and the oven cooked stank followed by the rubbing of sweaty thighs. Now that’s good fucking bread.

  Over the two weeks she shuffled across her days, tiptoeing her societal significance, afraid to shatter the ground she walked on. To be fair she didn’t know how thick the ground she walked on was, she never really felt like taking a huge risk. Across her walk she was accompanied by sprinkled and popped dates with Mathew, resulting in the exchange of numbers and various liquids. He provided the bottled fun as well as his own shafted gear. In other words they were very busy exploring their new found interest in one another.

  The pacing of their discoveries were well placed among Susan’s weeks. But as she further trekked across her ground, he became less and less of a solid figure in her life. Yes he dragged joy with him, but as far as anything else went, well nothing else really went. She couldn’t see the end of them though, still tied up to the present of their relationship, too preoccupied with other matters.

  Every so often she would carry her thirteen ringed tattoo to Kevin and check up on him. Every repetitive check was followed by a dismissive wave for him to be alone. She respected him but every time she visited him he appeared to drift further and further into the walled confines of his own back garden, which unsettled her boots relentlessly. She knew it wasn’t her place to control him, but she still felt the need to care for him. The vicious circle built with every visit.

  Alongside everything was the illusive image of money. She had nothing coming in apart from Kevin’s double green thumbed hand giving her little doses. She didn’t care about money on its own, but it was the food that came with it that truly impacted her.

  As the days and nightly fights of Mr Black and Grey went on so did the gradual depletion of her funds. One morning straight after another night of drinking, Susan awoke to the same comforting scent that lingered around her flat. She was still reeling in from the night previous trying to catch her eyesight that seemed to roll its way a few feet in front of her.

  Food created a full stop between her ears. The larger it grew the fatter it got tearing more and more into the lining of her throat and stomach. The worst look of disappointment stabbed itself onto Susan’s face as she opened the fridge. It was empty apart from a half brick of butter laughing its ripped wrapping open. The shock of her foody dreams shattering sent her staggering backwards with exhaustion. With what was left of her strength she held herself up by the counter.

  It was some very dramatic shit, as if the butter had carnivorously ate every piece of helpless food in the fridge. Taking a moment to ponder her next hungry move she started to fill her empty bucket with further unnecessary problems, all in an attempt to stimulate her self-pitied underbelly. First her appearance, then the state of the flat, followed by the repetitive pounding of dwindling cash.

  The filthy stain on the couch pulsated whenever she looked at it. She didn’t know if it was teasing exhaustion or if it was actually happening, she didn’t care much to bother figuring it out. Either way she felt like a hungry stain dragging itself from one corner of the carpet to the next.

  Walking into her bedroom she hushed into the corner beside her nightstand and took out a shoe box, laced by the drawings of boredom. Dragons and bloody superheroes littered the edges of the box overlapping with the lid. Opening it her expression deepened, pushing her eyebrows further and further into her forehead. It was the expression of hopelessness with the shoe box being virtually empty apart from a few coins. There was no point in checking her bank account because that thing had been depleted of resources for the past couple of weeks. Her situation wasn’t that bad, which she would figure out weeks later, but at that hung over point of time she only saw the gap in opportunity and felt nothing but her broken oesophagus. Something not even a hug could fix, and they can fix almost everything. Susan was in such a depraved hole that not even human touch could have rectified it.

  The day aged alongside Susan’s tortured waist. After the whole fridge incident she hovered around the flat for a while munching on the bare bones of what her next move was. The immediate knocking from money beat against her skull shaking her hair to the track of exhausted paranoia.

  Calming herself down she decided to move forward and bang on that same repetitive drum that provided green papery nutrition for the past year. Kevin was targeted as the plot point, as the destination as the relief fund for her disastrous hunger pangs. She slept in until the afternoon which left a considerable crater in her stomach. Strange how hunger can make anything seem as erect as a mountain. Gathering her hopeful expectations she went to her fathers.

  Parking outside the house she already smelt the taunting huff and puff pangs from his fridge, or at least she thought so. The trees and flowers shifted their hips to Susan’s pinpointed vision. Emerging from the dip in the front she reached the front door of the house and entered. Once more the house was empty and void of any sign of Kevin apart from dirt covered boot prints labelled across the tiled floor. Not much thought was given to his hidden location. The nearer she got to the door of the fridge the less she acted like a manic carnivore.

  Pulling out some simple bread and butter she created a masterpiece of a slice of buttered toast. She started with the edges first leaving nothing but the crunched golden middle. It stretched a smile into her jaw as she slid it down. Somehow the toast had solved every single one of her problems then and there in one glorious swallow, covering the inside of her with melted riches. It was such an overwhelmingly positive feeling she had to sit down on a nearby chair.

  Once the sandwich had lost its grasp on her emotions she stood up to recalibrate herself. Looking around the kitchen she noticed a brushed trail of Kevin’s possible whereabouts. With her new motive, the rubbing of money, she followed his crumbs. Half drank cup of tea crying itself cold on the counter. A plastic white bag of empty spray cans flittered against the lower cupboard. Calling his name aloud a few times confirmed he wasn’t there. She already had a good idea of where he might be due to the orgy of empty cans in the corner. But before she left, her eye caught the back garden where she saw him previously. With the memory of him digging the ground playing in the back of her head, she walked her way over to the patch of mixed dirt.

  The grass surrounding the spot was baron, suffering from a horrendous case of skin cancer. She saw all the blades of grass trying to run away as fast as possible, bending in the direction of the house. She stood over the spot looking at his attempt to plant a tree. A few seeds popped over the soil exposing their skin to her.

  Dashing her eyes between them, she thought about how much effort he put into his garden. She remembered him pulling bags of sanded rock to and from, and his bent back over the sea of dirt. It was always a hobby for him and she always enjoyed helping out as much as possible.

  She wondered if he wanted the garden to make his home beautiful, or if he wanted to wall himself off from the world. The tall strongly dressed walls around the back garden framed the feared thought. Her boots angled away from each other not being able to look at Susan in her eyes. All of the joys brought by the crusted nature of the toast had entirely been washed away by that one thought.

  To fill the void she marched roughly through memories as a child. From as far as she could remember, it was just her and her father.

  Susan refused to succumb to a reflective flashback, but no matter how much she tried it seeped into her legs and crawled its way back up to her head from her boots. All that she ever heard as a child were loud metal crunches coming from his garage.

  In the memory she walked from the house to the garage. She saw the silhouette of her father burying his hands into the gut of some stroke suffering car. Nothing happened of much importance, but she stood there on the spot looking at him ingesting all of the torn sounds that limped its way over to the y
oung girl. She remembered a hollow feeling in her hand as if she wanted to grab onto something, and everything she held felt empty, void of all born warmth. There should be more to a family than this? That one thought, one line, one coloured drawing brought her back to the bed of seeds in front of her.

  Thinking about the family she wished she knew, she moved back into the house tossing her family members between all her fingers. With her thumb pulled in she had nine fingers left over demanding some sort of a memory of family, but they were ring-less and bony.

  She had asked him about her mother before, but was left with a quick telling of her tragic death. The look on Kevin’s face when she asked him made her dig the question into the recess of her boots, afraid that he would say it was her fault that she died giving birth. She always thought that he was hesitant because he was afraid to hurt Susan. The image that her mother was an orphan also frightened her. She knew how she died and that’s all she felt like she needed to know. The same touchy button was next to Kevin’s family. She knew the story, she heard the story and left it at that. One conversation is all that that topic needed, leaving Susan to fill the gaps herself. But questions didn’t vanish as they usual did, that day they lingered on with polystyrene grip.

  Opening the kitchen door she threw her thoughts onto the backburner unsatisfied with her conclusion. She had to go to Kevin and get some money from him. This maintained its position as the priority. As she collected her whereabouts, the corner of her eye noticed Kevin’s box of meds next to the kettle and the half drank cup of tea. It was open, pulling her gaze towards today’s designated pills. She didn’t know his routine and which popped pill he needed on whatever day, but she did know that he didn’t just leave his meds hanging about open on the counter. If she had bells stabbed to her earlobes they would’ve been ringing like a lunatic.