In my gravelly voice, borrowed from a dead man, I declare, “Mommy! Daddy!” Dragging my mostly nude, bony, sweat-lubricated new self toward them, I cry out, “I love you!” I pucker my cracked, well-lesioned lips to bestow an adoring kiss, and I beg, “Don’t you know me? I’m Madison!” I cry, “I’m your little sugarplum!”
My new breath tastes the way a pet store smells.
My father’s handsome face is a grimace of teeth-baring disgust, revolted by this creature he finds himself forced to punch. To smite mightily. My father, oh, my beloved father, to defend himself and my mother, he’s dealt the bothersome task of pummeling me with his closed fists. My hot infectious blood sallies forth. Sickened by my hair and bodily fluids on his knuckles, he’s still grimly determined to stop my advance.
With broken fingers I beseech. “I tore off Papadaddy’s turgid dinger,” I confess, “and I abandoned him to die in a puddle of blood.” I tell my parents that I’ve never actually performed analingus on the lofty bottoms of exotic giraffes. I tell them how I only invented my love affair with Jesus Christ. I tell them everything. My strength fading, I paw the air, and my entreaties are met by the hard soles of my father’s Prada wingtips. This atrocity of blood and pus I find myself trapped within, I’m taunting them. Challenging them. Daring them to love me. I’m testing to see whether they recognize, in this tormented grotesque, any sign of their own troubled little girl.
Those two shining paragons, I grovel before them. Showing them what a monster I’ve become, I beg them to accept me.
“Forgive me for assaulting you in the bathroom at the Beverly Wilshire,” I beseech my father. To my mother I say, “I promise to lose weight.”
Looking on is Babette, chuckling secretly. The wench, the buxom succubus. Looking on are the blue ghost of Mr. K and the hummingbird-fluttering, golden sprite of Festus. I slither around the feet of my horror-struck family. In nightmarish slow motion I’m reaching my thin strange fingertips to stroke my mom’s terrified ankle. “Mommy, I’m here to rescue you.”
In response to my professed love, my father continues to hammer me with his fists and feet. Pain blooms within my wasted rib cage. My borrowed heart seizes. And the suffering is indescribable as my blood ceases to flow.
The truth is, Gentle Tweeter, I am always testing their love.
A voice calls out, “The candle! Madison, get the candle!” The source of the voice is Mr. K’s ghost. His ghost hand directs my gaze to a spot on the plastic paving stones. There, the lit candle he’d held at the moment of his death has landed. Its wick has ignited the styrene-foam faux cobblestones, and a bubbling fire rises and makes ready to spread to the rest of the temple, the mountain, the continent. Even subjected to my cardiac arrest I’m forced to choose between kissing my panicked mom and dad with wormy, diseased lips… or advancing in a new direction to extinguish a rapidly spreading conflagration of potentially epic proportions.
Even as I vacillate in indecision, a lissome hand emerges from a slit in the velvet draperies of the sedan chair. A melodious voice says, “Fear not!” The hand, this perfect ideal of a hand, elegant and otherworldly, its fingers sweep aside the red velvet to reveal the chair’s occupant: a winsome maiden. A youthful goddess.
Even as the bubbling fire grows to feed on more plastic steps… a Styrofoam pedestal… the base of a polystyrene obelisk, the perfect maid enthroned at the center of this populous crowd, this slender girl swings her willowy legs and steps forth from the chair. Her hair is lustrous, supporting a gilded wreath of olive leaves. Her limbs smooth. Her face unmarred by eyeglasses. Her sylphlike frame is adorned in a simple yeoman’s tunic of familiar blue chambray.
This ideal maiden points a perfect finger at me and demands, “Be gone, noxious abomination! Retreat, you overweight pretender!” She squares her shoulders and proudly announces, “Behold, for I am Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—returned from the grave to bring mankind eternal life.”
DECEMBER 21, 2:31 P.M. HAST
Denounced!
Gentle Tweeter,
In a leap, the beautiful stranger pounces. Even as I sprawl, dying on the plastic ground, she launches her winsome form from the sedan chair and lands squarely upon my bared, quivering spine.
Beneath her, I scramble. I crawl to escape. For a struggling moment the perfect child is astride me. Her toned buttocks planted in the small of my back, she beats me about the head with her fists. Clutching my ragged hair, she pushes my face toward the growing candle-kindled fire until my skin blisters. The heat swells my lips like an overdose of collagen, stretching the skin so tight that it splits.
So close are the flames that the tasseled end of my oily pigtail smolders. The braided strands begin to burn like a stinking, slow-motion fuse.
My bones, broken… my heart, ailing… I’m helpless, unable to raise myself. No one comes to my aid. The ghost Mr. K stands off to one side, sobbing. The succubus, Babette, is off to the other side, howling with demonic joviality, while the assembled Boorites weep and gnash their teeth.
It’s clear: My parents don’t love me. My parents don’t even recognize me. They love this, this skinny, Barbie-dolled version of me.
Be warned, my predead followers: When you take occupancy of any physical form you must remain in residence until its ultimate demise. You must suffer until life’s accumulated insults render the vessel inoperative. That said, my spirit cannot flee. I’m forced to undergo this painful battering.
I writhe beneath her surprising weight. Twisting to face her. As her uniform, the Barbie-Madison wears the infamous, gunk-despoiled chambray shirt, the tails rippling above her bare legs. As her cudgel she bears The Voyage of the Beagle, that book so much annotated with dried blood. Wielding the not-lightweight missive, she pounds my borrowed face. My head lolls, coughing spit and mewling incoherent protest. Scalding tears geyser from my borrowed eyes.
Despite these exertions, the impostor Madison seated atop me, she doesn’t perspire. Nor is her breathing taxed by her sustained strenuous efforts. In my own meager defense I pummel her torso with my knobby elbows and knees, but I might as well be slugging the great black-rubber tires of an upstate eighteen-wheeler.
The book’s leather binding collapses my nose, flattening it sideways, leaving me gasping. My ears boxed and ringing. My vision filled with bright stars.
Desperate, my fingers grasp a handful of her garment. To this I doggedly hold fast, wrestling the blue shirt from her svelte frame, leaving her not clothed, but to no avail. Modesty does not stem her efforts. To all Boorist eyes we must appear as a depraved naked pervert, a poorly complexioned, libidinous skeleton, grappling to molest a nude lass.
Gradually, I offer less resistance. After the first half hundred thuds, one slug in my kisser is pretty much like another. A trauma-induced lethargy sets in. Not even the pain can hold my attention, and my thoughts wander. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross never mentions it, but there’s another stage of dying. Besides anger, denial, and bargaining, there’s boredom. Yes, boredom. You abandon yourself.
A strange sense of peace settles. Even as the hardcover tome batters me senseless, my struggling is replaced by a resignation more deadening than Rohypnol. If I’m to die… so be it. If she’s more to their liking, let my mother and father adopt this pristine Maddy doll. From farther and farther away, I can smell hair smoking. Faintly, I can hear fists smacking jellied meat, my body already splashing-wet with blood.