The Key to Everything

by Alex Kimmell

  …Dedra’s howling was like that of a wild animal caught in a trap. The fabric of her nightgown pushed upward in the shape of a small foot. She pulled at the thin, yellow material, tearing it away from her body. The skin beneath was blue and black, with bruises outlined in a bright pink. Another white-hot bolt shot through her when the shape of an open mouth pushed outward from around her already extruded bellybutton. The teeth were crooked and malformed. Her skin flopped loosely…

  …in the vast empty hole left between the upper and lower jaws. A muffled scream bounced off the tile and porcelain of the bathroom. The skin between the teeth flapped up and down as the waves of sound caused the impossibly malformed flesh to vibrate. Her lower back arched as a familiar urge to push rushed through the base of her instinctive animal brain. Fists or feet pounded at the outside of the bathroom door, shaking the hinges loose. This couldn’t be happening. She wasn’t even…

  …pregnant for only a few months. Dedra knew it was too early for the baby to come. There was no way it would survive this early. Splinters of wood and plaster flew into the room as the pounding at the door increased its ferocity. The eyes of the woman in the mirror flared, panicked. A pool of blood formed beneath her thighs, and chills washed over her as her body…

  …rode the oncoming contraction. The face withdrew, leaving her stomach skin stretched and tingling with millions of tiny biting pinpricks. In the mirror, fingers reached out from inside the mirror-woman’s body and grabbed onto her thighs. Emily slapped at the bloody hands squeezing and pulling at her legs. She felt a ripping…

  …at the walls of her insides and fell backward, hitting her head on the edge of the tub. Dedra forced her eyes open through the pain. The beard appeared to be brown. There may have been flecks of red and grey too. It was hard to tell underneath all the blood and amniotic fluid. Another surge of uncompromising agony…

  …and Emily let out a faint whimper. Her feet slipped forward as the grey-haired man’s arms pushed up from the floor. She wanted to reach for something to hit him with, anything to stop the horror from continuing. The man’s face turned and locked eyes with Emily, opened its mouth, and pleaded, “Help…

  …me.” His arms lost all their strength, and he fell face-first to the hard tile. Dedra looked at the blood-spattered mirror. The man on the floor of her bathroom was not the man lying in the pool of blood in the mirror. She watched as the woman took a towel and cleaned Abram’s body…

  …gently drying off his head and cradling him in her arms. In the mirror, Auden did not open his eyes, but he breathed in time with the older man in her lap. Emily fought the darkness creeping in for as long as she could. Helplessly, she relented, and her eyes closed with one final glance into the mirror at the strange woman and her husband tangled up together on the floor…

  -32-

  Auden: Boot Man

  The floor is cold when you open your eyes. Fingers brushing through your hair are soothing and relaxing. A quiet hum of a woman’s voice speaks into your ear. You try to lift yourself up and get a better sense of your surroundings, but a hand pushes down on your shoulder gently, and the unfamiliar voice whispers, “Not yet.”

  Your eyes trace through white patterns on the tile floor as your vision comes into focus. Your bare skin is splashed with blood. Your hand’s reflection moves in the mirror, a thick black-and-red substance oozing down from your fingertips to the floor. A woman’s hand with dirty and chipped red fingernails wipes your forearm dry with a towel.

  The humming stops and is replaced by the sound of sobbing. Your head moves in time with the shallow inhales and exhales of breath, your head resting on the woman’s lap. You are about to ask why your wife is crying when you see the reflection in the mirror. This bathroom tile you are laying down on is not yours. This woman holding you is not your wife.

  Knife-like daggers of wood and shattered glass fly across the room, piercing into the wall behind the tub, as the bathroom door explodes. The woman’s arms squeeze you tight, but it feels more like trying to use you as a shield than holding you prisoner. You hear the harsh click of the military boots on the floor before you see them. There is no time to react before the polished boot lifts up and slams directly into your solar plexus.

  A friend once told you that your lungs never completely blow out all the air that they contain. There is always a little bit of oxygen left, stuck in the bottom somewhere. You used to try blowing out as hard and as far as you could, imagining the powerful lung walls closing tightly together, pushing every last bit of oxygen out of your body. It made you feel as thin as paper. The tiny, sharp pang of emptiness hurt a little bit, but the next huge inhale immediately brought relief so keen that it felt like a rebirth.

  This kick was not like that. Yes, all of the air rushed out of your body. The fact that it was preceded by a steel-toed boot crushing your ribs removed all the pleasantness involved in your youthful memories. It also made it rather hard to take that refreshing inhalation after the lungs were emptied out.

  You roll over on the floor, gasping. You can almost feel the imprinted boot-bruise rising on your skin. On your back now, you try to focus your eyes on the boot-wearer. The woman is screaming as Boot Man leans over her. You can’t see anything clearly at first. He moves closer, and you finally see his face.

  Long white hair trails down from his head and his chin. Hollow eyes look out from deep sockets embedded in nearly transparent skin. Cracked lips peel back, revealing yellowed enamel on what teeth, with blackened roots, remain.

  Boot Man grabs you by the ears. “You… Where the fuck is he?” He slams your head back down on the floor. A lightning flash of pain, and then nothing.

  -33-

  Auden: Unlock the Pages of Forever

  Pages flipping in wind… words too blurry to comprehend… neat rows of text melt into black lines… waves foam and curl down from high above… fingers pinch and squeeze and hurt you… can’t move… waves breaking down closer now… pages slap louder… lines turn to words turn to letters turn to teeth biting tearing shredding pages flesh blood water falling down down down over head no breath no air no breath no light no no no…

  You cough over the sound of a metal bucket clattering across a concrete floor. Water drips down your face, and you swallow air for the first time in forever. There is enough light in the darkened room to see Boot Man pacing back and forth frantically, in front of what looks like an old fireplace or furnace. Boot Man looks younger now. His hair is trimmed neatly, and his beard is short. He is slim, but muscles bunch and uncoil underneath his sweat-stained white t-shirt.

  “Not him… not him. How could it not be him?” The words curl out fiercely through clenched nubs of teeth. For some reason, they don’t echo from the concrete walls, as the sound of his hard-soled military boots do.

  Your wrists are free, so you reached down to feel what’s holding you locked in place. There is a chain of some kind around your waist. Another chain attached to the front stretches tightly out beyond reach, and another chain stretches behind you. The ground is moist beneath your bare feet, surprisingly warm despite the biting cold in the air.

  You hear no sound other than that of your own breathing, and the occasional clatter of the metal links rubbing together when you try to move. You dare not close your eyes again for fear of losing focus. You count seconds. You time your breath. You stretch your toes out in the mud and tried to picture the thickness of the earth. Anything to stay in the present and ready for whatever comes next.

  Not knowing how long you were unconscious terrifies you. Boot Man’s odor is strong. He must have been in the room with you for some time if the scent is still this powerful. He brought you here without waking you. Your eyes burn at the brightness of a match igniting and providing fire for his cigarette. In its glow, you can make out more of the basement. Hand-built rock-and-mortar walls with varying sizes of stone set at odd angles. Wooden shelves holding barrels with a smudged and unreadable brand, alongside bulging bundles wrapped in old potato sac
ks.

  Eventually, he speaks. A quick grin passes over his dry, cracked lips and his eyes glance down at your naked, shivering body. You don’t feel truly exposed until he slowly starts to move closer to you. He takes another a drag from his cigarette, the embers glowing brighter, reflecting off the finely polished steel of the sword he uses as a cane.

  Lifting the sword, he presses its sharp blade into the flesh on the back of your right knee. A gentle pressure causes you to raise the leg, shifting body weight and digging the cold iron chain into your left hip just above the waist. Smiling, he pushes the blade a little bit harder against the soft flesh. You feel the cold metal digging into the skin and strain the muscles in your thigh even harder. All he needs to do now is pull, and the sword will slice through all of the tendons holding your knee together. Sweat beads into a small pool on the back of your neck.

  “Fear is what I want from you. I collect it.” Boot Man slowly moves his tongue across the remains of his top teeth. “The fear of someone who has already suffered a great deal tastes much sweeter than an innocent, you know.”

  He turns his back to you and raises the tip of the sword high toward the ceiling. “Maybe it’s because you’re a Jew.” His eyes look down below the chains, and he nods his head. “Could be the different diet.” He laughed at that. “No. No. No. It’s the centuries of suffering. That makes the experiences of life, no matter how bitter they seemed at the time, so much more gratifying. Right?” He spins back and the tip of the sword lands on your shoulder, the blade pressing into the side of your neck. “A bit of salt brings out the richness in chocolate’s flavor, don’t you think?”

  “Pain will come eventually.” You can smell the sour of his sweat under the damp moldiness as he moves in, touching his cheek to yours, and whispers, “Live in anticipation for now. Swim in the depths of this darkness and wonder when. It will come not unlike an orgasm. Mounting… rolling…building in waves. Wash the fear down over me. Be scared. Be frightened. Be terrified. Feed me your worst nightmares, soldier.”

  “Oh… I almost forgot. Your children are dead.”

  Every muscle in your body turns to stone.

  You can’t move. You can’t even flinch as he rises up on his toes, sticks out his cracked grey tongue, and licks the tear from your cheek. He isn’t lying. You have been lost for so long, and now your boys are taken away from you forever. You will never get the chance to hold them again. They will never go to ball games with you. You won’t help them learn how to play the Goldberg Variations on the piano.

  Boot Man touches your cheek, and you pull away. You feel more than hear him chuckle and watch him put out the cigarette on the ground. In the darkness now, you listen to his footsteps moving away from you. A loud clicking noise, followed by the crackle and hiss of what sounds like a record needle finding its place. The longing sighs of “Sehr Langsam” from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony work their way through your ears and penetrate your stomach muscles. They tighten and churn with grief. You lurch forward against the chains and howl like a wounded beast.

  Dancing around the cellar and smiling, he lights candles with a long wooden matchstick. He twirls in circles, moving faster with each howl from his prisoner. Your throat raw and torn, the only sound you can utter is a pitiful rasp, buried beneath Gustav’s prayers for love and redemption. Eventually your body tires and collapses, held up only by the chains keeping you on your feet.

  Taken in all he needs for the evening, Boot Man holds your sweat-drenched head in his hands and whispers softly into your ear. “You are the key to this release. Tomorrow we begin anew and will begin to unlock the pages of forever.”

  -34-

  Auden: Picasso Taste

  Every time you open your eyes, you hope that it’s still a dream. But Boot Man makes sure you know you’re awake. He never actually hits you or cuts you with the blade of the sword. He gives you water, bread, and occasionally a few small bites of some heavily salted meat. There is no natural light in this space, so you can’t distinguish between day and night. Your vision blurs, and you ramble incoherently. He mimics your sounds while skipping around on the toes of his boots in a grotesque and cruel ballet.

  Your skin beneath the chains turns raw and infected, seeping pus and blood. This the Boot Man collects in a rusted tin cup that he places on one of the wooden storage shelves, next to a large burlap sack marked in a language that you can’t read. There is the sound of a distant trumpet through the walls. You look up and see the old man pressing his ear against dirty stone, with his white-within-white eyes stretched wide.

  You imagine yourself at home with Emily. It makes you happy to still have her name. Everything else seems to be fading away. You pour yourself into the memory of her. Send every part that you can imagine back to her. Your only solace is that she is not here in this room with you. You can be with her out in the sun and swimming in the sea. You can go away. She takes all of you with her and helps you stay free.

  You dream of making love to her. You’ve fucked other women before, but Emily is the only woman that you ever made love to. No one else ever touched you entirely. You let each other explore and feel every bit of your bodies. She would take you in her hand and feel the weight of you in her palm. You in turn traced the outlines of her strange mysteries slowly, softly.

  You remember the wonderment of going inside of her for the first time. That strange feeling of becoming one body together, occupying the same space. You were both patient and gentle, not needing or wanting to rush. Building infinitely upon a growing energy between you that started the night you first met. Heavy breaths led to moans built into groans escalated to howls of pleasure and laughter.

  You feel your back being pushed forward. Your arms are held immobile. A weight crushes your feet into the cold, hard concrete. Eyelids peeled open. Something grabs the top of your head and forces you to look down. Not wanting to see. Realizing where you really are. The sharp tip of the sword pushes slowly into the skin above your bellybutton. Boot Man takes his time carving an oval shape: longer from top to bottom than from side to side.

  “Well,” Boot Man grins, “you weren’t an ‘innie’ before, but you sure will be now.”

  The brain recognizes signals from your stomach. The brain feels every cell of the flap of skin assaulting your mind as Boot Man slowly peels the oval of flesh from your body. The brain tells the jaw to clench teeth tightly together, suppressing any outward vocal sounds. The brain chooses to not give Boot Man any more satisfaction in his torture. The brain tries to picture Emily, Jason and Jeremy.

  Boot Man lifts up the flap of skin. He rubs the bloody inside of it against your cheek, leaving a trail of your own gore on your face. Your eyes burn from not being allowed to close for so long. The edges of your vision blur around Boot Man leaning his head back, opening his mouth wide. He holds the oval up over his broken and missing teeth, giving one final wiggle before dropping it in.

  He chews slowly, staring at you with a dark satisfaction.

  “Mmm mmm mmm.” Boot Man closes his eyes and swallows, rubbing his stomach. “Tasty.”

  The hands holding you turn your head to the left. You see the woman from the bathroom sitting on the floor next to the old Victrola. Her arm rests on top of the short brick wall, embracing the speaker still singing its warped serenade of crackles and pops. Boot Man smiles, twirling his fingers in the air in time to the screeching metallic violins and out-of-tune piano. Nodding his head, he blows you a long, slow kiss.

  His hand extends its pinky and moves down to the woman. The small finger touches her head just above the ear and gives it a slight push. Her head slides over an inch or so across her freshly sliced neck. It teeters on the edge of bone and tissue but comes to rest right before it falls. In the shallow light of your prison, you think yourself lucky for not being able to see any fine detail of veins and muscle.

  “Not unlike a Picasso, eh?” Taking his finger into his mouth, he glances down at the shape of the broken woman below and shrugs his shoulders. H
e lifts the head by the hair with one hand and holds it out. With the other hand he grabs her chin, moving her mouth like a ventriloquist’s dummy. His voice becomes a high-pitched, vibrating, failed attempt at the sound of a woman. “I’m feelin’ kinda frisky.”

  He moves next to you, holding the head in front of your face, one hand holding it in place, the other working the jaw and lips. The freakish attempts at smiles and pouting grins are made worse by the woman’s lifeless green eyes staring vacantly in your direction.

  “Hey sexy. How’s about you gives us a kiss?” The head moves closer. You fight to turn away, but the hands hold you in place. He opens the woman’s mouth while you feel fingers grasping at your jaw, pulling it down. Your lips reluctantly move apart.

  Your brain has lost control. You can no longer stifle the screams as her lifeless tongue falls downward into your mouth. Boot Man twists the head from side to side while he mimics moans of pleasure.

  “I’m curious…what does death taste like?”

  Boot Man throws the head backward over his shoulder. The squishy thud when it hits the floor is muffled beneath the volume of your screaming. He stands in the center of the room with eyes closed, his arms spread wide. Cackling hysterically, he begins to twirl. It starts slow, almost graceful. He speeds up faster and faster until his arms become a blur. Wind builds around him, picking up dust from the shelves and small rocks from the floor.