Let Me Die a Woman

by Alan Kelly

Sales for Blood Rag had increased so much since her arrival he saw no reason not to agree to it. Blood Rag was selling over 60,000 units globally thanks to Alice Fiend’s connections worldwide. It gave him the perfect excuse to get rid of Bunny Flask, the irritating little half-assed journalist with all her leftist bollocks about women in the horror genre. She’d nearly run the magazine into the ground during her editrix-in-chief approach; championing guerrilla underground film-makers, soliciting obscure directors to write copy and giving his ex-wife Kiffany Boston-Gifford a monthly column and making her the ‘Blood Rag Beauty Queen’.

  Kiffany ran her own PR company and had shares in an American production and marketing company called GUTS. She wasn’t a writer and she sure as shit knew sweet F all about the horror genre. Neither did that skinny little no tits, Bunny Flask for that matter.

  When Mick discovered Alice’s motives for joining Blood Rag and the real reason she wanted to begin a radio programme, he thought he’d strolled onto the set of an Ed Wood invasion movie, by which time, it was too late. But, thought Mick, he’d never turned down a friend, hell for that matter he’d never turned down a stranger….even if she wasn’t completely human.

  It was the other thing in the room that troubled him. The eight-foot corn dolly with the skin of a smiley child’s balloon stretched across its face (or whatever was underneath). It kept to the shadows and paid him scant attention and, for that, he was grateful. Alice Fiend described it as ‘The Midwife’ and to Mick it seemed like a bit of a slow moving klutz, but he knew better.

  Corn Dolly was made up of a thousand smaller beasts; revolting little parasites, each a foot long, blue with razor spikes protruding from their backs and hideously baby faced. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around it all but Ms Fiend was adamant he’d always have a place by her side if he assisted her in her plans now. He would have wealth and immortality. Mick Jones would have it all. He noticed that Ms Fiend was still at the window; her volcanic hair a trail blaze down her back, that stare still burning out over the dirty, dusty little city.

  Alice Fiend folded her arms and looked down at the little creatures from the third floor office of Blood Rag’s headquarters. She’d scour this planet, rape it of every natural and synthetic resource and enslave those flesh wasters who referred to themselves as humanity. She’d obliterate those disgusting apes, it was self-defence, and to them she represented the oldest question in philosophy: Evil. It made her laugh, the acts she’d seen, the aspects of human activity she had been a witness to over the years. Humanity was a malignant force in itself, existing in its own right. She would take this world by force. She stood and stared and thought about the day The Sisters would fall from the sky. It made her smile.

  4

  Shivers

  Bunny Flask had fallen through her apartment door well into the early hours of the morning, completely rubbered and screaming obscenities at her boyfriend Josh, who was sitting in the dark waiting for an explanation. Her head nattered away at her now like Courtney Love and her mouth tasted like a dog had taken a shit in it. She reached about and discovered she was alone in the bed. The heavy curtains were shut tightly, which she was grateful for. Tiny little scars of morning light moved across the wall. She rubbed the grit from her eyes and listened to the pitter-patter of rain on the window. Eventually she threw the blankets off and went in the living room. She was still wearing yesterday’s clothes and a dry sheet of sick had run across her top.

  ‘Hello,’ she called out, walking into the room.

  Josh had gone, leaving her greeting for Sissy Spacek, who glowered back at her from the poster on the wall above the television. She noticed that there was an envelope on the coffee table. Bunny picked it up and started reading.

  Dearest Bunny,

  I fear you have forsaken me for Blood Rag, I never did have the balls you did. I’ll collect my 42 inch plasma.

  When you’re out…

  Toodlepips Bunny

  Josh

  ‘What a fucking idiot!’ she shrieked, tearing the letter up and tossing it out over her balcony.

  Fuck him, fuck that fat boil Mick Jones and fuck Alice fucking Fiend. She made herself some coffee and turned on the news. More doomed tales; a blonde woman was talking in a robotic octave. Today a young man had been found cut up in Portobello, a young couple from the other side of the tracks had murdered and tortured their baby in a sort of ritualistic killing and Gardai were still searching for several missing women. Bunny switched to The Alan K in the Morning Show. He was interviewing Noir goddess Megan Abbott.

  Fuck Josh, thought Bunny, feeling better knowing there were other people out there far worse off than her but guilty because she felt this way. She shivered; the skin crawled on her arms like a draught under loose carpeting. She rubbed them and decided that it could be worse, not knowing that, for her, it was only just beginning.

  5

  They Nest

  Worms and parasites, dust and decay; Alice and Corn Dolly stood in the humid enclave of the Doll House. The walls swarmed electric blue with eager razor backs slugs. The seven women Jones had delivered to Alice were bound at the wrists and strung up with cast-iron chains. Some were in the later stages of the ‘Caging’. Two of the seven were about to begin their wakes. Alice looked at the wretched creatures and noted that they’d all cocooned. Dolly had already flayed or was in the process of flaying the others. The skin of the victims stitched a macabre coat over Dolly’s lumpy bulk.

  ‘It’s almost about that time Dolly Dearest’ Alice smiled.

  The eight foot creature towered over Alice and moved its head slowly up and down in acquiescence. Alice touched the cage, which was almost ready, and the protective film bit at her fingertips. The Doll House was a converted sauna in Jones’s basement; the nest needed desert heat to sustain itself. For the time being she needed Jones more than he needed her. He was a seller, a buyer, traits she almost admired in the creature. She knew that time was at a premium and she needed to forage this city for as many soldiers as possible. The male of this species were obsolete when it came to breeding, it was the females she wanted.

  ‘Alice,’ came the limping, lisping wetness of Jones voice from behind them, sounding like a satchel full of furious snakes.

  She hadn’t heard Jones creep up on her and she was furious he’d even dare to come in here. The flesh on his face danced like a bad skin graft on a shop dummy.

  ‘Don’t,’ she pointed a finger at him, ‘you dare come in here.’

  He backed away when Dolly moved towards him, grabbing the scythe she used for skinning off the wall.

  ‘Dolly enough!’ Alice clicked her fingers and Dolly stopped stock-still.

  ‘I apologise for Dolly. She gets over excited, as you well know,’ said Alice, throwing her eyes in the direction of the women.

  Jones took out a handkerchief and wiped sweat off his brow. Alice shuddered. He really did disgust her and she looked forward to the time when she could make a recording of Dolly disembowelling him when she no longer required his services. She’d add it to her personal collection and call it ‘Death and Ecstasy’.

  ‘Thought I’d come in, see how everythin’ is, ya know?’ he was sweating profusely now and breathing heavily, his hand adjusting his balls.

  Alice glanced at Dolly, who was cradling the scythe like a mother would a child.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘You’re not needed and, more importantly, not wanted here.’

  ‘Now you listen here Missy, I’m the one…’

  Alice shot one look in the fucktard’s direction and his words were dead before they hit the floor. The more recent of the skinned was writhing about, trying to free herself; the viscera had already begun to harden and pitiful whimpers came out of her mouth. The matured cages began thrashing on their hooks. They looked like a human would if you filled their bodies with fat, the skin stretched obscenely into viciously distorted balloons, giving the parasite time to absorb the victim and duplicate an identical copy. One cage split and Alice tur
ned to Jones.

  ‘Out,’ she screamed, showing the man the palm of her hand.

  Jones needed no further instructions. He turned on his heel and fled. The creature clawed its way through twisted bone and rotting viscera and finally broke the protective film. Alice once heard that they never quite recovered from the trauma of being born. She knew this as surely as she knew her own skin.

  6

  Female Trouble

  ‘How did you ever let that fat motherfucker bastard put his dick up you, whore?’ Bunny asked Kiffany Boston-Gifford, taking a mouthful of her Long Island ice tea.

  ‘I hadn’t a shackle when I met him sweet. It was better than the beat’ she clicked her fingers together in front of her face and sipped her sauvignon Blanc.

  They were sitting in a popular gay bar on Capal Street called Pantibar. The owner was a notoriously fabulous drag queen, or so Kiffany informed Bunny. Bunny couldn’t help but notice that she was just a little bit distant but Kiffany wasn’t the kind of woman who did distant; she was always clawing her way into the very centre of attention.

  ‘He sacked me for some cunt he just met. Mind you he is a sadistic fat fucker.’

  An embittered husk of a man was eyeballing them from the bar; a crustacean eroded by the four D’s – disease, disfigurement, destruction and decay.

  ‘Hmm...’ replied Kiffany, from a hundred miles away.

  Thinking it wise to change the subject and seeing that Kiffany was seven shades darker than the last time she spoke to her, Bunny asked, ‘Have you been on the sun beds a lot?’

  Kiffany’s eyes widened and her mouth hung open so Bunny continued, ‘Its just that those things can give you melanoma.’

  Kiffany slowly let out a breath she’d been holding before saying, ‘So what? At least when I do die of cancer my skin pigmentation will match the coffin my mother has selected for me.’

  She snapped her fingers and nearly drained half her glass. Honestly, Bunny didn’t know why she tolerated walking on eggshells for people sometimes.

  The bar was nice, thought Bunny. Little lace knickers hung from soft lighting. It was a mix of antiquey velvet drapes and Warhol postmodernisty design with pictures of Dolly Parton on the wall, Brazilian bartenders mixing cocktails and a little black and white Jack Russell called Penny Dreadful running up and down the bar area.

  ‘What happened with Josh?’ asked Kiffany.

  ‘Shit stick lied,’ Bunny began, and added ‘well Jones sort of rang Josh and told him I had a problem.’

  Kiffany raised an eyebrow. Bunny knocked back the dregs of her Long Island.

  ‘What sort of problem sweet?’ Kiffany poked Bunny.

  ‘With drugs Kiffany!’ Bunny shouted.

  Kiffany nearly took Bunny’s eye out of her socket when she whipped her head from side to side to make sure nobody was listening in to their conversation.

  ‘Keep schtum. I don’t wanna be barred,’ Kiffany slapped Bunny’s bare arm, which stung like the bite of a silver fanged cocksucker.

  Bunny rubbed it. She looked over at Kiffany, all T and A, but smart and funny too. She was intelligent and loved what she did. Bunny slyly watched the curvaceous strawberry blonde dream and wondered how she could ever have let that creeping dread Jones share her bed, let alone suck his knobbly micky? It must’ve been for the cash. If it was one thing Jones had it was money and power, and plenty of it, so how was an unemployed cult journalist like Bunny Flask ever gonna get comeuppance? What was she even thinking of vengeance for anyway? Nobody would be actually cutting her cheques from now on. Dublin was becoming like Paraguay. She was just waiting to see the breadlines start up and she’d be first in the queue.

  ‘I’m gonna get that sonovabitch Kiffany,’ Bunny said, after a few more mouthfuls, meaning every word.

  Bunny glanced out onto the street, the evening held the promise of a bitter night.

  ‘That sneaking conniving little abortion,’ she hissed.

  Kiffany was quiet for a while before she said anything.

  ‘Yes, you are and I know exactly how we’re gonna do it sweet.’

  ‘We?’ asked Bunny.

  Kiffany looked straight into Bunny’s green eyes and said, ‘You know I love to explore death and pain; it makes my life so much more valuable!’

  7

  Razor Blade Smile

  By closing time the evening’s promise of a bitter night had made good – Dublin was miserable with rain. Bunny Flask watched her fellow drinkers ducking into abandoned doorways and nightclubs for shelter against the onslaught of wind and rain. Knowing there wasn’t time to linger there Bunny practically threw herself in front of a taxi. Getting in she told the driver to take her to her father’s place in Dun Laoighaire. The driver took a circuitous route and the road leading to her father’s was paved with squat forlorn cottages, decaying industrial estates and miles of high-rise and council estates. As the cab navigated through the jumble of arterial roads, flyovers and property developments that ringed the city, the architecture morphed into decaying hotels overlooking the sea with small overgrown graveyards and pitch-black parks. The cab driver smiled at her with dirty eyes, spaniel jowls flapping and she returned his look with her finest razor blade smile. The taxi driver continued on, oblivious to the hate, which she could feel – and hear – throb inside her.

  8

  Bad Dreams

  Bunny began that Saturday with a strange kind of quiet pain. There had been no dreams, just a never-ending nothingness which locked her down in a small room inside her own head amongst feverish shadows and the violent desperation of gagged memories like the spectres of still borns, screaming over and over and over. Grainy morning crept in and snatches of a song she remembered as a teenager came from somewhere, either above or beneath her.

  Getting out of bed she stumbled, slamming her leg into a locker, and she bit down on her cheeks to stop herself screaming. She looked herself over in a tiny cracked mirror under the jaundiced hue of a bare bulb deciding, finally, that all things considered, she didn’t look half bad. She routed beneath the kitchen sink and found a bottle of Diazepam. She dry swallowed four. She looked at herself in the mirror and whispered ‘you’re all by yourself’ and wondered if this was what other people called living?

  Bunny sat on the toilet and felt all the shadows in the small box crouch about her, mocking, like the gawky old cunts from the estate outside. She could hear Jones laugh, mock and taunt her incessantly. The voices of every person who had ever shit on her, ripped her off or violated her in one way or another came crushing down on her – Jones, Josh, Alice Fiend, her parents. She turned on the shower and taps until steam filled the small room, blinding her to her own bruising. She removed her clothes and forced herself under scalding water and screamed hard, expelling the rage that was burning up through her. The rusty water was the colour of spoilt fruit. She slapped and punched at the tiles, the water searing her skin, and carried on until she passed out.

  9

  Near Dark

  Jones sat and watched and waited for a woman to approach his table outside the Fisherman’s Bar on Bolton Street. This was where he normally picked up women so strung out, or desperate, or plain lonely enough they’d do just about anything for money. The sky hung low, the reluctant purple of a fading bruise, and he sighed. A group of boys with bum fluff on their faces, wearing trackie bottoms and passing around a bottle of Buckfast, surreptitiously shot glances in his direction. He drank his whiskey in one gulp, went into the bar and ordered another.

  When he sat back outside a wretched creature with manky bleached yellow hair, viciously pulled back in a ponytail off her blotchy face smiled at him with crooked teeth. He gave her the once over; she wasn’t ideal but she’d do. He had no sooner smiled back than she made her way across to his table. He noticed she wore no bra under her vest top and he could see the outline of her saggy tits.

  ‘Ah roight mate, don’ min if I join ya?’ she pointed to the seat opposite him.

  ‘By all means, be my
guest,’ he replied.

  She slumped down in the seat, putting a bottle of Bulmer’s on the table in front of her. Without a glass, he noticed. She bit at her fingernails, suddenly coy before taking a mouthful from her bottle and belching quietly.

  ‘Scuse me,’ she laughed, covering her teeth with her fingers.

  He forced himself to smile back. She really was a sorry little thing and, by the time he was done with her if all went to plan, she’d be even sorrier.

  ‘Sos why’d ya come up here?’ she asked.

  ‘Gets me out of the house. Never know who I might meet.’ he made his gaze level with hers.

  She blushed and began playing with her ponytail.

  ‘Ya married so,’ she stated, in a matter-of-fact way.

  ‘I was, but that is done with now’ he replied.

  She went a shade redder and took another drink of her cider.

  ‘Whas your name so?’ she asked, lighting up a John Player and taking puffs in speedy succession.

  ‘Phillip Cotton, and you?’

  She ran her tobacco stained fingers over her greasy yellow scalp and tightened her ponytail.

  ‘Michelle’s my name.’

  ‘Well Michelle, how would you like to make some extra money?’

  When he looked at the sky he noticed it was near dark.

  10

  Reanimate(her)

  When Bunny woke up she was in a room that was huge, cavernous. The walls were stained from the sodium glare of the street lamps, shadows fell across the terraces outside, slivers of light fading from bitter orange to petrol blue. She could hear dogs bark, their legs moving quickly, chasing their own pathetic shadows away, away across the estate. When she tried to breath it sounded like she was gurgling sand, she moved her arm from under her belly and almost screamed when she felt the reanimation of a million pins and needles. She vaguely remembered waking up in her father’s, taking some sedatives, and getting into the shower.