by Sims, Karina
She rolls her eyes, quickly looking at Carl, at me, back at her peeled bottle. I point at it. “It’s a sign of frustration, you know.”
Alison’s head doesn’t move when she looks at me. “What?”
It’s hard to hear with all this music so I lean in. “What?”
“What?”
“What are you talking about?”
She tears a big strip off the glass, rolls it between her fingers. “What’s what?”
I lean in closer. “What?”
She rolls her eyes again. The song playing, a bad remix of some top forty sensation cuts out as she shouts, “What’s a sign of frustration?”
Her whole face goes red as about twenty people turn and look at her. Another rotten club mix comes pounding out of the speakers as I lean back into the padding of our tiny semi circle booth, flicking little balls of torn paper off the table. “Peeling the labels off your drink.”
Carl laughs and pokes her in the ribs, “Yeah I heard this somewhere. They say it’s a sign of sexual tension. You aren’t sexually frustrated, are you babe?”
She glares at him. “Says who? Who says it’s a sign?” He shrugs and drinks his beer, his glassy eyes wandering over to the dance floor where two skinny girls with pixie cuts are kissing each other.
I tap the table with two fingers. “Well to be fair, it’s a sign of anxiety, really. And anxiety is believed to be released through sexual intercourse. So put two and two together and bingo, you’ve got a common misconception.”
“What?” She smirks, biting her nails.
“Ah, never mind.”
She shakes her head, spits a few nail fragments onto her jeans, the table. A fleck of white lands on my wrist, when she brushes it away her fingers are wet and when she sees she’s got spit on my hand she looks like she’s about to cry. I smile and rub the back of my hand clean on her jeans, her thighs clench when I touch her and looking at her face I notice that she’s only wearing one earring. “You OK?”
Carl looks back from the dance floor, at her, at me. “She’s OK. We did a bunch of blow earlier. I think the shit was cut with something bad because she’s been acting like this since we got here.”
Her mouth twitches as she says, “No I haven’t.”
He flicks a rolled wad of Alison’s label at me. “Well, since you got here anyway.” He takes a slow drink of beer.
I look at Alison, she looks down at her lap and then back at Carl. She looks nervous. Real nervous. “No I haven’t. It’s since we got here. Not since Amanda got here.”
I lean in, “What?”
She waves it off, “Never mind.”
I nod and look for the waitress but I can’t see her anywhere. There’s too many scrawny gay guys and fat lesbians in the way, so I can’t see a damn thing. After a couple minutes of this, I get up and slip through a sea of exposed midriffs, facial piercings and pungent odors, a stinking cocktail of dozens upon dozens of different perfumes, hair products and body sprays, the stench of sweat and body odor permeating everything.
I’m not sure how anybody can breathe while standing this close to one another. Every person in your elbow space, every person vacuuming up the oxygen around you, and if stealing it away from the vicinity isn’t enough, they’ll shove their tongue down your throat and suck it right out of your lungs.
I wave at the bartender, shout out for three more beers. He gives them to me but when I hand him a twenty the waitress, the blonde-leggy-model- thing, she snatches the money from him and pushes it back into my palm. There’s so many people around I can’t hear what she’s saying and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or the bartender, so I just pocket the twenty, raise the beers to her and nod appreciatively before slipping back into the crowd of colliding queers.
Back at the booth I put the booze on the table and sit down. Carl and Alison are gone, but I can see them mashing into each other on the dance floor, not noticing the dirty looks being shot at them by the surrounding dykes bopping up and down on the floor. I chug my beer and sip the one I brought for Alison.
In this light people look like faded versions of themselves. Pale skin flashing in and out of focus under a disco ball of revolving burden, everybody looking like a color photocopy of their actual self. Everyone swinging their bodies to the same beat, the same chorus, yet each vessel of mirrored flesh swaying out of synch with the others. In my opinion, the only kind of dancing that makes any sense is choreographed dancing. Choreographed dancing is the clear sound of human rhythm. It is the course essay of human body language. The careful comb of final edits. Martha Graham said that dance is the hidden language of the soul. Ruth St. Denis described dance as being used as communication between body and soul, to express what is too deep for words. Looking at the small mob of men and women flailing this way and that, knocking into and another, I see nothing inspired. I just see what is probably a thousand dollars worth of booze swishing about inside the bellies of these serial one night standers. Angela Monet once said that those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music, I guess this is true in my case, because the more I watch these strangers straddling one another on a foggy floor, one that hides their feet entirely, I feel colder and colder inside my skin, I feel frozen at the bones, chilled in the guts. I feel alone, empty and apathetic.
“...ends in about ten minutes.”
I look up; the waitress-model-blonde thing is standing in front of me waving her cell phone in front of her. “Mind if I join you after?”
The beer I’m holding is empty. I look from my hand to the vacant seats around me. Carl and Alison still bumping and grinding each other in the fog, under the disco ball.
The waitress touches my arm, winks and walks away, her body swallowed up by the crowd. I go to the restroom, stand around and watch she-males stroke layers and layers of mascara onto fake eyelashes until a stall opens up and I can take a piss. On the wall someone’s written ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me. So throw me down, and tie me up and show me that you like me.’ Underneath is a heart painted in orange nail polish. I push my thumb in the middle of it and when I take it away, my print fades away instantly from the cold scarred steel.
Outside the stall a girl is pounding on the door next to mine, talking to her friend who’s bent over the sink and leaning right into the mirror. I can see them through the little space between my door and the wall. The girl pounding on the next door, she’s saying, “Hurry up! I gotta go so bad I have to take a number four!” The chick inside on the toilet says, “What the hell is a number four?”
Pounder girl just keeps hammering on the stall, “I gotta go! Hurry up asshole!”
The girl on the toilet clicks her heels on the floor, I hear her farting a little. “Fuck off, bitch!”
Pounder slaps the door one more time, walks over to her friend at the mirror who says, “Where did you get that shirt?”
“I know! Nice, huh? I like it. It looks great right?”
“Yeah, but it would look better in the garbage.”
I flush the toilet and don’t bother washing my hands on the way out.
Alison and Carl are still dancing. I wave at them as I walk by, but they don’t see me. I think about going to the bar and getting more beer, but I don’t want to have to fight the crowd for one more lousy bottle, so I just walk back to the booth. Some drunk guy is falling down close to some tables and reaching out for anybody to help brace him, he sees me, goes for a grab, I step out of the way and he topples over, his head slamming into the leg of a high stool. I think about maybe going for that beer again, but I see the waitress sitting at my table, her legs crossed. I’m too close to just walk away so I walk real slow up to her and slip into the booth, she reaches under the table and squeezes my knee.
“Amanda, right?”
“Hi.”
“You remember me?”
I smile. “You remember me?”
She purrs like a kitten and slides over towards me putting an arm around my
shoulder. “How could I forget these eyes?” A polished fingernail glides over my eyebrows. “And this hair. Goddamn, is it this dark naturally or do you dye?”
“I never dye. I’m naturally black.”
“I see. How do you get it so straight?”
“I straighten it.”
“With a hair straightener?”
Up close her tits look a lot bigger. She’s got them pressed against me so close I can feel the rise and fall of her breath. She doesn’t seem to care that I’m staring at them. She smiles when I smile because she thinks I’m thinking about sucking her milk makers. And she’s half right. I may be looking at her jugs, but I’m also looking for an entry point. It’s said that the human heart creates enough pressure while pumping to squirt blood thirty feet into the air. Looking at her heaving chest, I’m wondering if this is true.
“Uh huh.”
She cocks an eyebrow, grinning as she leans in to kiss me.
She tastes like vodka and watermelons. Her hair smells like jasmine drowned in ammonia. She slips a finger between our lips giggling and nibbles at my earlobe. I think of Alison tearing at her nails, wiping her spit on my hand. I kiss her fingertip anyway. A lot of people think that after you die your hair and fingernails continue to grow. Although entertaining, this isn’t true. What happens is the skin dehydrates and pulls away from the nails and hair. It looks like they’re getting longer, but it’s really the opposite. The body is shrinking.
She leans away, smiling, her eyes falling down to her lap, her teeth biting her lip. “You’re so cute...in that way.”
I kiss her. “Oh?”
“Huh?”
“In what way?”
She grins again, her eyes moving across my face, she’s talking to my neck when she says, “That creepy way. Like, all dark and pale and...” She giggles. “...I’ve always had a thing for Wednesday Addams.”
“Oh?” I’m sort of creeped out that she is comparing me to a fictional character and what’s worse is that character is a child.
She kisses me hard. “I’m going to fuck the shit out of you tonight.”
I brush the hair away from her face, slipping my hands loosely around her neck. If you kneel on somebody’s chest, cover their nose and mouth, and push their jaw upwards you can induce fatal asphyxiation without any visible injuries.
“Is that so?”
She rubs a hand across my chest, cups one of my breasts and licks the side of my face. “Come. My place tonight. You can stay, but I need you gone by morning.”
“Don’t worry.” I touch her chest, feel her heart beating. “You won’t even hear me leave.”
VI
My mother told me that when I was born, we laid in bed for those first three days. She said I spent the entire time with my eyes closed, my hands not leaving her hair. She took her baths sitting on the edge of the mattress, her feet in a washtub as Marcy ran a sponge down her back. We lay there on that dusty sunken pad of broken springs, my mother spooning the meals brought to her while I fed from her breasts, staring wide eyed into nothing. On the morning of the fourth day we rose because somewhere between the break of night and all its darkness and the blue beginnings of dawn, her warm breast slipped from my mouth and I cried for the first time. Ancient blankets bundled around me, I sneezed from all the dust buried in the wool. My mother said she picked me up, carried me to the window and pointed to the still fields surrounding that dead house. She told me she was looking at the stars as they faded out of the sky, saying my name to herself over and over as each one went back into the black of space and all its emptiness. She said she didn’t care, because I was the only light needed, the rising sun come to chase away the darkness. She said she told me this, but when she took me off her shoulder and cradled me in her arms, I was asleep. And soon, so was she.
I was crawling when the wrecking ball came. It shattered the living room with one swoop. Marcy was on the toilet, my mom chucking corn in the kitchen while I explored the shadows of empty cupboards. Depending on how drunk she was, the story always changed when she told it to me years later. Sometimes the ball was far from me, sometimes close, but how we left the place was always the same. We always ran out the back door, my mother and I squeezed together, chest to chest, Marcy behind, stiff strips of wheat whipping us raw as we tore through the fields. None of us had dry eyes when the construction workers chased us down. None of us had any shoes on when the sheriff put us in his car.
When the former owners of the house came into the police station and saw mom and Marcy, heard me screaming in the social work room, they decided not to press charges. They gave mom two hundred dollars and the phone number of their church’s minister. Mom took the money but she threw the seven digits in the trash after they left.
VII
“How’s your boss, how’s he doing these days?”
“Harry? He’s fine.” I drop a dish in the soapy water, pull the plug and let it drain a little before turning the tap to hot and filling the sink back up.
Marcy pushes her wheelchair towards the miniature Christmas village, each tiny glass house lined up neatly beside the other on top of an old coffee table. “How’s about the other fellas in your department? You got any boys you’d like to bring back to introduce me to?”
I turn off the tap. “In customer service? Naw Marcy, you wouldn’t be interested in meeting any of the people I work with.”
She pinches the cotton sticking out the chimney of a miniature church. “Oh come on now. I wouldn’t mind. I haven’t seen you bring home a fellow in years. Just those friends of yours.” She turns her wheelchair around. “Those girls...”
I drop a pot in the water, steam rising, burning into my eyes. “Isn’t As The World Turns on?”
She looks at the cuckoo clock above her TV. “About ten minutes still.” She sits there, breath in her chest, frowning and drumming her fingers on the gray rubber of the chair’s wheels. I say, “You wouldn’t want to meet any of the guys I work with.”
“Huh?” She looks at the linoleum. “Why? They a horny bunch or something?”
I sigh, drop a handful of forks and knives in the sink, water splashing the stomach of my t-shirt, “All boys are, aren’t they?”
She sounds nervous when she laughs, her voice fading to mumbles mid sentence. “That’s what your mother always used to say about that...”
“Well,” I drop another handful of silverware in the sink, that sound of steel scraping hard against partially submerged dishes. “She was right, I guess.”
Marcy wheels over to the couch, picks up the remote control, looks at the clock and wheels back to where I’m standing. “I’d like to see you with someone. I’d like to be around for a wedding.”
She frowns, looks down at her slippered feet. “You know that.”
Chunks of old spaghetti sauce float to the top of the water. They look like flakes of dried blood. I run more hot water, squeezing the bottle of dish soap into the stream. “Marcy, it’s just not... I’m not ready, you know? Some people aren’t maybe meant for lov—meant for marriage. I’m one of those people, I’m...”
“Amanda Troy! You look at me right now!”
I bow my head and turn off the tap.
“Amanda Francis, look at me right now!”
I look at her. Her little fists knotted like lumpy balls of yarn, her blonde hair gray at the roots. She has the same eyes as my mom; the same eyes as me. We have almost the exact same mouth, except I have three scars on my chin, and one long one beside my mouth. These are claw marks from the first girl that I raped and murdered. She kept screaming through the whole thing, but the real problem was: I don’t have a penis. Chicks will lay there while a dude drives hard, banging away balls deep in her. Half the time girls don’t say anything because they don’t want to get popped in the head by a guy who’s three times stronger than they are. They don’t want to risk a shattered nose, broken jaw, even then, laying spread eagle in the bushes, spirits shattering with every thrust, their vanity is still telling t
hem not to piss him off because they could wind up with a bald patch, or a bruise, or a broken jaw. But in reality, there is nothing more violent and torturous than lesbian rape. Because most women don’t get off as simply as men and you’re working with a different set of genitals than guys, so there’s a lot of other things you have to use to compensate. Anyway, afterwards I choked her to death and then broke her neck. I was so scared I’d get caught, but blood was coming out of my face like a faucet so I had no choice but to go to the emergency room. When they glued the cuts together, when the nurses all gathered around me stroking my hair and telling me it was going to be alright, that I was beautiful and they were so sorry, I had the same look in my eyes as Marcy does right now.
“Don’t you ever say that! Your mother would say that! I’d hear her say that over and over again. Every day the same thing, the same ‘I don’t deserve love’ garbage!”
In the emergency room, I told them I was raped. When I showed up in triage with five deep slashes on the back of my shoulder, fingernail gashes splitting my face open, they got Victims Assistance to pay for a new outfit. A week later the cops called me up and I got twenty five hundred dollars from Crime Stoppers for pointing out the right guy in a police line up. Turns out the guy really was a rapist, and after I randomly fingered him, he admitted to the cops everything he’d done to some woman in the park. The women of this city really should be thanking me.
“You’re beautiful! Amanda, you are a beautiful person, inside and out. Don’t you go second guessing that, second guessing yourself around me!”
I scratch my neck, hot water dripping down the collar of my t-shirt absorbing into my bra. “Thank you, Marcy.”
She holds her glare at me for a moment, then wheels back over to the couch and turns on the TV. The volume is nearly deafening and I have to strain to hear her say, “Give me strength, Francis.”
I lean back over the sink and slap a dish towel over my shoulder. “Shouldn’t you be asking God?”
She looks at me like I’ve said ‘fuck’ in church. “Now why would I do a crazy thing like that?”