****
You’re horny...the note passed between us in the book store.
I slouched over the counter where the employee had left a Tupperware bowl of noodles, cold and oily, when he had gone into the back room. Della stood behind the counter, smiling, as if her trespass was a blatant desecration and warranted some fantastic punishment. Feed you my girth, the paper note continued. My legs hurt, just put them on the table. Bend over. Give it to me, big boy. Over and over. Deep. Yes. Yes. Yes. Where are the commas? What do you mean? ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Oh god, give me a break. Just sayin’ babes. Mkay, miss. Tomato. Okay monsieur donut. Madame Cucumber. Mr. Cock. What a scandal. Be a man.
The fat woman walked around, ambled, she did not seem to walk, but bounce, en stride, gracefully. She did not care for books. She was here because we had asked her to be, to show us this book store, a niche. The fat woman acquiesced as she always seemed to do; this was her way. But if there was irritation, disinterest, I saw it when she perused the cooking books, snorted, and continued to amble beside the different shelves, not caring to give her attention away like a secret, held and distributed at her willingness. She didn’t care for books, the way Della seemed to. She was a fat, happy woman and didn’t need.
“This is a nice book store.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, like, really nice. How’d you find it?”
“Hamilton’s small, but, anyway, a friend showed it to me.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t.”
“All right.”
I turned and saw Osoyoos, the fat-cocked, and imagined stabbing him to death and watching the pool of blood, sputtering, splattering, splashing as I stalked him down, rolled him over to face me and jammed the knife into his throat. Then, I thought of the prison sentence, the collective disgust of those who loved me, and returned to watch the fat woman, Cardina, who was reassuringly sane despite being abused, placated and ignored. These thoughts weren’t regular, but they happened and I wasn’t better than the disdain, loathing of what made me insecure.
“It was Jomina,” Della said.
“Did I meet her?”
“Yes, she’s the one who goes to Mac.”
“Right. She was nice.”
“Boring, though.”
“Why?”
“She has no personality.”
Cardina moved and sat on a green leather chair that was hidden behind a bookshelf. I lost sight of her. Della now stood, peering down at a collection of Mavis Gallant’s short story collections and an old copy of 17 Magazine...one where there was a poem by Sylvia Plath. I was delighted. There were crusty tomes and leaflets and an early edition of Leaves of Grass. It was all I wanted, these words, forgotten and indifferent to my eagerness, participation. I was impatient to understand the dire vanities of writers and poets...not so much their stories - who thought they had known somewhat of the moralist, beleaguered world. But they knew as much as the rest of us, just human and weak and love-fucking-addled. And I stood there, asking: what is the point? All has been said. All has been done.
“What do you perceive me to be?” Della asked.
“Huh?”
“I’ve asked you twice now.”
“Asked me what?”
“Oh for god’s sake.”
“What?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Why are you being rude? Have I been rude? No, I haven’t.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to be so aggressive. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“All right, then. What was the question?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
“Then tell me.”
“Later.”
“Come on.”
“Later.”
“Okay.”
Della moved to the other side of the book store. I returned to the front, looked outside of the window and decided to locate where she had gone. There was humidity in the book store, physically glazing onto the wood and books. My neck stung, my elbows ached. Then I found Della.
A wing-shaped shadow covered the right portion of her face, where she was hunched over, crouching to grab at something on the lowest shelf. Poised, she seemed engrossed, indemonstrable. Each time her hand blindly fumbled through the bookshelf. She wanted with her hand. She wanted with her strained body. She wanted, intensely, whatever it was that she was looking for. And I watched. And as I watched, there it was: loneliness.
Inescapable loneliness. I had to accept the penetrating feeling. Like my sexual tendencies that were emotional and unconsummated, I was always brewing and submerged, like some torrent that would break in and ruin and she would say: “what?” and I would say: “my but?” Like a tease that I never forgot. It was unalloyed sadness. Her proximity was so near but I was so far. It wasn’t her fault, it couldn’t be anybody’s fault. It was my disposition, I decided, after having observed my father’s loneliness, often, and my mother’s insouciant caginess. My parents were passionate people and complemented each other’s indomitable resolves like decent enemies, forever malcontent. But they had gotten along, survived. That was something, everything, beautiful. This was a recurring feeling, one that, whenever it happened, I had to wait to pass so that I could return back to normalcy.
I reached into my pocket and extracted my cell phone. I filmed Della in the book store. The quality was pink and grainy, the image that I took of her on my mutilated cell phone...broken and disabused on wash room floors, playing pitch and toss with my hands, late at night. She read a children’s book. She whispered that I was her soul mate. She danced, lithely. I danced, rambunctiously. I filmed the whole spectacle. We were not attuned. But I filmed then deleted it, seconds later, and told her: “You are swell. God damn.” And she looked at me with sparse perfection, slavered in a way that made me wish I hadn’t deleted the video. But I was glad I did it. Because I was lonely when she was near and I was lonely when she walked over and kissed my cheek, took my hand, and said: “Come on, let’s go.”
****
I saw them hanging down, strung up like chickens. Stuffing dripping out of the fat woman’s ass. Benito’s penis: a larva covered protuberance. There is brown pock-smeared filth all over their bodies. The entire room is an insect’s menagerie. Bloated, squirming and fetid, invective masses gather over the floors, walls and furniture. Unless I strain my eye, it is as if it were one snake-like mass, hyper and moving and horrifyingly stinky.
Della lay prostrate, hands covering her face. Her anus gaped open, dried and chaffed. Red pieces of flesh coated the ground. It was clean except the red flesh. A hole in her throat from the metal hook was sculpted, immaculately, and there was no blood. A black vortex in her throat pulsed with her breath, fluttering out of her throat and into the room.
I took my hands and tried to mend the hole. I picked up the red flesh and placed it on the hole, trying to patch it together. I used a needle from my pocket to stitch. But they flapped in her breathing as I tried to mount them back onto her ripped neck. I navigated through the beetles, clamping them down with my fist. I kicked at worms, but they were indefatigable, insatiable and I turned back to Della. Picking up the pieces, I placed them outside her throat, trying to fix and heal and repair. She was looking, looking at me and I couldn't save her. I couldn't mend her rip.
“God damn, you are ugly,” I said.
“Thanks. I do have a hole in my throat,” she responded, the hole opening and closing, protracting like a noose.
“You should, you know, plug the hole?”
Della laughed and the hanging pieces of flesh rippled from her open throat, one piece sealing the hole and approaching out and in. Her body crumpled onto the floor, her head placed on my thigh. I saw the flesh on her cheek scrape off onto my jeans, coarsely, soldierly.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,
” she said.
“It looks pretty bad.”
“Well, shit.”
I held her as she flummoxed, wheezed and laughed, crippled and pitiable, lame. She looked at me with fat, microbe eyes. Slowly, she died. Feebly, I held her head and felt the strain mount my forearms. More than anything, I strained. I was strained and there was strain in my forearms.
****
Dum. Dum. Dadada. Dum. Lilly Allen. Honey dear, isn’t this one Kate Nash? No, mom! This one’s Regina Spektor. Honey, you’re putting me to sleep. Fine, here. What is this? So loud. Stop trying to be young and hip, mom. It’s The Drums. Why don’t you put on the radio, honey dear? Because I don’t feel like listening to the radio? How is he? Is he sleeping? Yep. How long? I don’t know, fifteen minutes? Okay, shall we go home? Yeah, I’m tired. Me too, honey dear.
I lay, my head against the car window, half-asleep.
****
The truth was, I had to cajole Della into thinking I disliked the fat woman. Abhor, was the word I used. With Della, you had an image of her: constitution, temperament, interests. But she was very much a puzzle, arbitrary and inopportune. She liked the notion of spontaneity, of trekking north to the little, hidden streets at night and purchasing a bottle of whiskey and sitting in a park bench, admiring the pink and neon graffiti. She liked, randomly, entering a house party and stealing beers though they were free. Once, I saw her use a pool ball to smash in an old black and white photograph that hung off a wall in one of the campus Fraternities. I still remember the young men’s stances, heads lolled to the side, eyes sincere, eyebrows befuddled, chins raised. There was the appearance of triumph, zest: hope. I knew it must have been naivety. But I saw what I desired to see, and I let their lives evolve, shape into what I conspired. They would have been privileged, then, in the 1920s and reared in affluent surroundings. Caucasian, British, Anglican and sons of exorbitantly wealthy fathers; oil tycoons, bankers, politicians, writers. I made them sanguine, unburied; commiserate to a world before nuclear fission, cell phones, Internet, Facebook, before the millennial. But there were dark eyelids, still held captive by the camera’s lens. Sad eyes, masking what lay beneath; a brokenness, as there was in the frat house with Della’s indifference, her disgust when she smashed in the photograph. These men were flawed. And I watched them fall to the ground, the glass pieces fragmented and the faces, incised, spoiled, forgotten.
“But I don’t get why you have to be so friendly with her.”
“She’s your mother.”
“Obviously, I know that.”
“She’s a sweet woman.”
“She’s a bitch.”
“Come on, Della.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“You’re right.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to call you a bitch.”
“You didn’t.”
“What?”
“You called your mother a bitch.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
Whatever grievances Della had with the fat woman, she never did say anything about her father, Benito. I wanted to model action, thought and voice with her father’s. I decided that if she couldn’t discuss him, she must love him. And if I were him, she must love me.
“Fuck me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sex.”
“Do you need to be so vulgar?”
“What?”
“Christ, I want to make love to you. Not fuck you.”
“You’re so sensitive. What’s wrong?”
“Don’t call me sensitive if I feel like treating you decently. I’m not scum.”
“No one said you were.”
“Enough, I’m going to sleep.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
“You know, Osoyoos wouldn’t act this childish.”
“Are you kidding me? Did you actually say that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck off.”
“Wow.”
“Okay, I’m sorry that I said ‘fuck off.’ I’m pissed and god damn it, I’m not sorry. You’re out of line.”
“God, relax. Besides-”
“Muckrakes.”
“Don’t you swear at me.”
“Enough!”
For a long time after the silence began, I remained in bed, thinking. What had surfaced? In the display of noxious anger, were we more bound? Was our love more authentic? If there were layers to Della, had I not seen them? In the minor happiness and the sullen brutishness, had I not known her fully? There were questions I had of Della: why recall the others? Why let there be a past? Why not only now? Fuck? How could I forget? In the absences or disorders or calm, whatever the inhumane world spewed at us, I would kiss Della. I would kiss her in the morning. Make it right. Even when I studied her, sleeping, I wanted to leave. But I couldn’t. The fat woman was too nice. And I felt guilty, because...I would kiss her in the morning.
****
I had a nightmare. I woke up three times. Every time I thought I was still in the dream. I didn’t trust myself. I was manic, going mad. In the dream there was this slashed face, grinning, laughing at me. I was in a basement and there was the same face, carved into stone pillars, brick pillars...red and splotchy and the face was inside the brick, like the grout. Etched as if someone had taken a knife and carved it into the stone, but it was animate, you know? Like fucking alive. Then I went into a room and my brother was there. I said I loved him, he woke up and it was that face. It flew into the air and was bearing down as if to eat me, wispy, blue flames and silver teeth, teeth and teeth and fucking teeth. My entire family was dead. I didn’t know if it was real. You know that feeling that you’re insane? I didn’t know if I had just gone mad and I was, like, aware of my decrepitude. I studied the closet door. The purse, hanging off the rack. It looked like a man hanged. The bed sheets deformed into the shape of a child with a pink hand, curled and frost bitten. There was a scrap of carnality in my pants; my erection was bent and pressed into the side of my jeans. I slept with my jeans on. I wanted to be psychoanalyzed, completely, uncharacteristically. I wanted the face to rip into my mind, tear, obliterate and take me into a world of blue. I wanted it to give cause behind the brokenness, this roughness and wrenching. I wanted them defined. I wanted to be fucking elegant. I wanted to be beautifully empathetic. I wanted the wraith-face-ghost-whatever the fuck to just end it. I wanted the horror to subside. Jesus, what was happening to me? I felt like an invention, you know? Do you? Do you know? Like I was unreal, but there, like the fucking madhouse, what’s the English slang? Bedlam. Horror. Maniacal. I had a video, I had a video, I had a video.
Hitched
by Mike Casto
It had just started raining when Arthur noticed the fuel light come on. He grimaced. He was a long way from anything and didn't relish the idea of being stranded out here. He could neither afford nor trust cell phones so didn't own one. If he got stuck out here it would be a solid sticking. He hoped to reach some sort of civilization before running out of gas and kept driving.
****
Hannah drove through the rain, steady but not heavy. It was nearly one a.m. and she hadn't seen another soul for quite a while. She passed a car on the shoulder, its emergency flashers blinking; it was a dark colour and looked like a late model Honda Accord. She pulled off the road in front of it and got out. She walked back to the car and looked through the window. There was a purse on the passenger seat. She smiled, tried the door. It opened. She took the purse, carried it back to her car and resumed her drive.
She was on TX-7 driving from Nacogdoches to Waco. The speed limit was 75 and she was rolling along at nearly 80. She could just make out the black arrows on their yellow backgrounds indicating a relatively sharp curve ahead when the sky opened and the steady rain became a deluge. Gotta love East Texas weather. Her visibility dropped to virtually nothing and the car started hydroplaning. Just as she got the car back under control she hit a shallow dip where water had collected and her car was yanked
hard to the right. First, she thought, "Damn, the curve. And there's a wall." Then there was a man framed squarely in her headlights, clothes soaked dark in the rain.
Hannah screamed as her hands and feet started working the steering wheel and pedals. When she hit her brakes a sheet of water rolled down her wind shield making the man's face, lit in her headlights, look like some demonic apparition seen in a fun house mirror. Then the wipers flicked through the sheet of water and she saw a man, face pale and eyes wide with terror. He jumped and fell to the side, landing with a splash and rolling as quickly as he could. The bumper missed him by inches, splashing even more water over him.
Hannah managed to get the car under control before it blasted into the barrier wall. She immediately put the car in park, hit her emergency flashers, and jumped out to check on the man. She found him laying face up in a puddle of water. Eyes closed, he was laughing hysterically as raindrops slammed into his face.
She knelt beside him. "Oh, hell! Are you OK?"
The laughter died to a chuckle and he turned his head, opening his eyes, looking at her. His brilliant emerald eyes met her ocean blues and a spark passed between them. He thought at first it was the usual jolt he felt when seeing a pretty woman, maybe enhanced by the near brush with death.
Her eyes flickered and she thought, hm. Interesting. She asked again, "Are you OK?"
He sat up slowly, feeling his body. "I'm alive. Nothing seems to be broken or sprained. I suspect I have some bruises and abrasions, but nothing major."
She sighed and extended a hand. He took it and she helped him up. "Was that your car back there?"
"Yeah. Don't know what's wrong with it. I don't have a cell phone so couldn't call anyone."
Bloody Sexy Anthology Page 14