Doa Ii

by David C. Hayes

  He could, but it didn’t matter to these puppets of the rich.

  Instead, still speaking in that broken Scottish accent, Alvin said, “I bloody hate the game of golf.”

  SLICE OF LIFE

  Thomas Pluck

  Walking down the street of brick row houses, Will squeezed the narrow, gray handle of the knife in his pocket. Sheathed in the leather cover of the Bitch’s Holy Bible. Carbon steel. Sharper than God. Will’s shaved forearms a testament to its purity.

  Will stared ahead, mumbled to himself. Shove my knife up that cop’s asshole. Rip that skirted bitch from crotch to tits.

  Will inherited the knife when the Bitch had a stroke in the parlor, sprawled in her flower print armchair dotted with cigarette burns. Will knew she was still alive because her eye twitched when he cut her tits off. Knew she was dead when he sliced her eye and she didn’t blink.

  The Bitch had been Will’s mother. She called him the bonus on her SSI check, which kept coming long after the flesh was scraped from her bones and burnt to ashes in the furnace. The bones were stripped clean with lye. He’d wired them together and made a gleaming cage for her eyeless head down in the cellar.

  The Bitch’s wizened rictus stood tall among his other souvenirs: a shriveled big toe. A nipple dried into a Hershey’s kiss. A nose. Whatever the knife told him to take.

  The knife was God.

  When the Bitch owned it, it had been the Devil.

  ~

  Rachel eyed the little brown bottle from her bed. Half empty, round white moons scored down the center. Three weeks since her last.

  The dull film of unreality had washed away when she stopped taking the pills. The flowerpots on her fire escape no longer flat as a painting; bagels stopped tasting like modeling clay. The muted buzz of city life focused into taxi horns, sirens, people berating each other over their cell phones, echoing up to her window.

  But as weeks ran into one another like watercolors, the flowers withered from neglect. Words became twitching ants and books fell from her limp fingers. The scent of decay settled in, and the beige ceiling above the bed became a black hole she could not escape. An invisible stone crushed her chest to the mattress.

  She named the weight Amber, after her older sister.

  Amber preferred to sit on Rachel’s stomach as punishment. For using her lip gloss. For eavesdropping. For sharing her room. For being alive.

  She hadn’t used the gloss, but Amber didn’t believe her. Even after she pinned Rachel down and pissed on her belly.

  “Sleep in it. Tell Mom you peed the bed, you little liar.”

  Rachel did as she was told. She’d seen the things Amber had done to their brother, Justin. He ran away the first chance he got.

  ~

  Will’s father ran off with one of his whores every summer. Told Will he couldn’t stand the Bitch all year. Sorry, boy. Hold the fort for me. Will turned seven the year he never came back. The Bitch sucked her cigarette and told Will his old man washed up down the river, and the crabs had eaten his eyes and lips.

  That night, Will had woke screaming, sheets soaked with urine.

  The second night it happened, the Bitch yanked his piss-soaked undies off, and held the knife to his tiny clammy erection.

  “Want me to cut it off? Do you? We’re out of sheets!”

  The third night, he soaked the bare mattress. And she cut him.

  “Now you’re circumcised, like the whoremaster who made you.”

  He woke screaming to the sting of hot piss on his wound. Fell asleep crying into the ammonia smell of his underwear, held in his mouth with loops of the Bitch’s cellophane tape.

  ~

  An origami crane fused of Remington razor blades perched on Rachel’s night stand.

  Justin had fled to an art commune, where he made razor blades into sculpture. Beautiful, in their inhuman, industrial way. Untouchable without consequence.

  “In Japan, if you make a thousand origami cranes, you get your wish,” Justin had told her. “This is only my seventh, but I hope it grants you peace.”

  Rachel wished her crane could shift the tombstone off her chest. That she could summon the effort to crawl from bed, draw a hot bath in her claw foot tub, and fly Justin’s crane from elbow to wrist.

  To let the slow poison seep from her veins.

  ~

  Will first saw the girl in the park as he watered the bushes. He fingered his scarred member with one hand, the knife with the other. She sat sketching the bridge. She didn’t smoke, like the Bitch. Her hair was the right shade, the right length. She was tall enough. No ring, and when he followed her home, Will found a rusty fire escape bolted to her brick apartment building, in a trash-strewn alley invisible from the street.

  Black paint flaked off the rungs as he scaled the shaky ladder.

  ~

  To Rachel, it resembled a drive-in movie screen miles away, playing the silent and muddy print of an old slasher flick. A rawboned man with coyote eyes stepped in through her window, his long gray knife held low. Distant rumbles rocked the bed as he leaped on her and straddled her chest.

  The man was shouting, his rage muffled by miles of vacuum. The knife quivered above her eyes.

  Drive it in, Rachel thought. End this suffocation. This yawning empty plain of zero.

  Kill me.

  ~

  “Scream, you cunt!”

  Will yanked her sweatshirt and her head lolled. The knife split the fabric and he clenched her breast in his thin pale hand. The knife-edge dimpled her mottled pink skin. Fine blond hairs shone against the blade.

  “I’m gonna cut your tits off,” he growled. “Scream!”

  Will knew she was alive. She blinked.

  He slid the blade an inch, spilling blood thick and shiny as rose nail polish.

  Nothing else. No reaction.

  Will unbuckled and stroked his flaccid, white-scarred member, but it was no good. She was too much like the Bitch. He climbed off the bed, whimpering under his breath. He screwed up his face and plunged the knife into her pillow.

  She’d seen his face. He’d have to cut her throat. No souvenir, though. He hadn’t earned it.

  Will turned to see her hunkered on the sheets, holding a small metal bird. A thin slice marked her right tit where his knife had kissed it.

  The bird was beautiful.

  ~

  Rachel smashed the crane across his face, shrieked and clutched her fingers. The crane shattered into a splash of razors on the hardwood floor.

  The man howled through the bloody strips of flesh that were once a mouth. His kitchen knife sank into the wood. He thrashed and clutched his face. Rachel flinched under the flecks of blood.

  Rachel stuck the knife to the hilt under his ribs. The knife-point stretched the back of his shirt.

  He collapsed to the floor, and she felt the colors rush in. The insane babble of traffic, the stink of unwashed dishes, the rancid funk of his bowels letting go. She felt more alive than she ever had back when she swallowed those round, white moons.

  The knife was harder to remove than going in, but at least this was medication she could live with.

  STUD SERVICE

  J.S. Reinhardt

  Two miles in and the day’s heat had built up a slick sheet of sweat between Steve’s body and his t-shirt. Only a fool ran in South Florida in August.

  He was a lot of things, but foolish?

  Enough was enough, time to cut today’s run short; with the sun coming up the heat would be unbearable in no time.

  Checking over his shoulder for oncoming traffic—like there would be any on this road—Steve leaned over and crossed the aged tarmac in three strides. His thoughts shifted back to Miami, back to work. The soft crunch of his shoes against the sandy shoulder pulled his mind back to his breathing. As he crested a small rise, Steve took note of the vehicle pulled off to the side a quarter mile up; a rusty Ford pickup with long, surf-casting fishing poles jutting up out of the bed. It was a hike to the closest beach f
rom this road—some local must have a special spot.

  He didn’t recognize the truck, but, then again, he had only been in town for a week, most of which he spent holed up in the rented cottage reading and trying to relax. This was his first vacation since becoming director of Emergency Medicine at Mercy Hospital. He didn’t have to be back in Miami for another week, but the dread of returning to the hustle of the city was already boiling up. Gazing down at his feet, he tried to clear his head again.

  Movement.

  Something fast rushed at him from the brush to his right. For a split second he thought it was a gator, but as the large form slammed into him, Steve registered the acrid smell of dirty human. Human or not, he was still gripped with fear as his body crumpled to the ground, his head bouncing off of the jagged concrete.

  Dazed but conscious, Steve heard grunting, and felt the hot roadway under him.

  He was being dragged toward the truck.

  “Stop—”

  His mind warbled and nausea crept into his gut. The last thing he saw was a large black fist slamming into his face.

  ~

  Head lolling on his shoulders, arms bound behind his back, he was being dragged through water, deep grunts accentuated the pain of his body being lifted and then his knees were scraping on a rough wood floor. His head was covered, the rough fabric sticking to the side of his face. His whole head pounded in time with his pulse.

  Consciousness slipped away from him again.

  ~

  Grunting, like a boar.

  Water dripping.

  A torrent of tepid, salty water poured down over him.

  Someone grabbed the sack and yanked it off, taking some of his hair with it and opening the wound on the side of his face. Warm blood pulsed out as the coarse fabric ripped free from the road rash.

  Steve blinked, trying to focus in the low light. The smell of a zoo in summer overwhelmed him, thick and musky with stink and urine.

  Then he saw her.

  He figured her weight to be somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred pounds—an abomination in any sense of what a human could be.

  She had no form, just roll upon jiggling roll of glistening obesity. Pale, almost translucent flesh curdled like old milk over her gelatinous fat. Festering open sores clumped together in wide swaths across her naked skin, seeping dark black and yellow fluid that crusted in the folds of her rotund, slug-like body. Other bumps, red volcanic rises of agitated flesh, threatened to erupt with white puss on her face and neck.

  Her smell filled the humid chamber, overpowering the fetid swamp decay; a pungent stink of old sweat, stagnant shit, rotted meat, and yeasty ripeness.

  She moaned, shifted her bulk slightly to the side, and let loose a stream of piss that sprayed over her massive legs and ran down the rough-hewn wood steps in thick rivulets. Acrid ammonia pierced through the foggy haze of Steve’s overloaded senses.

  Settling back down into a semi-upright position, as much as her bulk would allow, she licked her cracked and seeping lips with a thick, slimy tongue. Her smile revealed rotted black teeth.

  “You’re very tasty looking, young man.”

  Filthy, over-stuffed sausage fingers tweaked the erect nipple of her left breast, a thin yellowish fluid seeping out, matting down the black hairs that surrounded her areola. She brought her fingers to her mouth and flitted her tongue out to taste the fluid.

  Two filthy, naked men pushed sharpened sticks into his side, their muscled bodies towering over him as Steve dropped to his knees.

  “Good job, boys.”

  She flung the last clinging tendrils of her tit’s excretion to the floor like moist snot. A naked, dark-skinned dwarf scampered from the shadows, his flopping erection testament to the enjoyment he felt at his mistress’s gift, and began licking at the dollop of fluid.

  In his periphery vision, Steve could see one of the large men that had dragged him in begin to manipulate his cock, deriving some sort of pleasure from this horrific scene.

  Steve shook his head from side to side, unwilling to open his mouth and speak for fear of adding his own vomit to the muck and stench of this beastly woman’s chamber. The dwarf sat, legs splayed, furiously beating his cock.

  “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

  The dwarf giggled, then let out a high pitched wail as his red-tinged ejaculate pumped out over his hands and dribbled to the floor. Steve watched as the diminutive freak laid down in the mess and began rolling around, his laughter filling the small room.

  Steve convulsed, gagging.

  The woman waved her hand, the movement causing her whole body to undulate.

  “My boys sure know how to pick them.”

  They were all laughing now, cackles swirling around his head, and Steve couldn’t hold back any longer. Lurching forward, his morning’s breakfast rushed out of him in a chunky torrent. The woman’s behemoth “boys,” dwarf, and woman herself laughed louder, wheezing and coughing. The stab of a sharp stick in his back pushed Steve off balance and he slammed down into his own vomit.

  The dwarf scampered over to him, splashing his little feet in the puddle of puke, and proceeded to rain piss down onto Steve’s head and face from his chafed and bloody cock. Steve writhed around, gagging on another rise of vomit, fighting to keep his mouth and eyes shut.

  “Get him up and into the pen. I should be ready tomorrow, boys.”

  With that he was yanked up by the binds on his wrists. The dwarf waggled his flaccid penis at him, squeezing out short bursts of foul urine on Steve as he was dragged across the floor.

  The fist crashed into his face again, and Steve welcomed unconsciousness, hoping it was all just a dream, he would wake up in the cabin, back in a world he could understand.

  ~

  He came to in an even more nightmarish room.

  Naked, in a rusted cage of flat steel, his sweat turning the dirt floor slick beneath him. Pale light filtered through painted over windows, casting the small room in an amber hue. The room was dank, and as his vision cleared, the horrors of his surroundings came into focus.

  A second cage held a prone figure. The long dirty hair made him think that it had been a woman, but there was no way to tell for sure. The body’s flesh looked soft, moist, and gangrenous. Bloated, the outer layer of skin was flaking and brown. Whoever that person had been, their corpse was now in an advanced state of decay, exasperated by the heat and humidity. The smell was foul. The churning sound of liquid meat drew Steve’s eyes to the corner, where a second body, this one missing its head, arms, and legs, roiled with maggots. The appendages, roughly hacked from the torso, hung from the ceiling bound and sweating fat like sausages in a deli. There was no sign of the head. Flies filled the room with a buzzing, and palmetto bugs skittered on every surface.

  In his fifteen years of emergency room practice, Steve had thought he’d seen the most disgusting things a human body could become, but the terror that he would soon be festering and rotting away in the room like these two poor souls, made anything he had seen in the ER pale in comparison.

  He had to escape.

  The sound of large latches being thrown cracked into the room.

  One of his captors struggled to pull a large man into the cage area with one hand. The thug had a hatchet in his other hand. Steve turned away, not wanting to see.

  A wet thud, some grunting from the disfigured man, then the unmistakable sound of the hatchet burying into flesh. Steve rocked back and forth, wishing his hands weren’t bound so he could cover his ears. The floor shook as the hatchet came down again, striking wood instead of meat and bone.

  “Eat!”

  Turning, the man threw a severed forearm at the cage, smiling.

  Behind the hatchet-wielding captor, on the floor, the large prisoner lay naked, his right arm severed and now laying just outside of the bars.

  Steve dry heaved, his stomach empty, his body’s reaction impossible to control.

  Stepping over, the hatchet-man picked up th
e arm and started poking at Steve through the bars with the severed limb, laughing and shuffling his feet.

  “Eat, dummy, eat!”

  Recoiling, wishing he could melt into the floor, there was no escaping the taunts. The dead man’s hand slapped him, sliding across his sweaty skin. The hatchet-man lifted the arm to his own mouth and ripped off a piece of flesh from the mangled limb, chewing it with broken teeth.

  Blood and gristle dripping from his gaping maw, the man reached through the bars and tossed the severed arm onto Steve’s lap. The flesh was warm and slick, the feeling of it landing on his exposed genitals pushed him into a panic. Steve screamed and thrashed about. His captor’s laughs stopped and a scowl overtook the thug’s face. The man’s hands reached in, grabbed Steve by the hair, and slammed his head into the bars.

  “Quiet! Eat!” Steve’s head bounced off the bars once more and he crumpled to the floor as the hatchet-man released him and walked out of the room, closing the door and throwing the locks again from the hallway.

  The chill of shock settled in Steve and his body shuddered uncontrollably. The arm slid off him and down to the floor, but he could still feel it there against his leg, cooling and moist. Roaches converged on the cage, crawling on him, biting at his fingers, swarming the severed arm. He felt them wiggling between his sweaty ass cheeks, spiny legs scratching at his tender scrotum, their gnawing mouths pulling at his body hair. Steve squirmed, feeling the roaches pop under him and scurry away. A nauseous, soupy feeling crept up into his gut. The light was fading and shadows enveloped the room. The bugs, seeming to multiply, scurried everywhere. His head was swimming in delirium, and slowly, the room drifted away down a black tunnel.