If I squinted I could see the future of these woods quite clearly. It looked to me like more rain.
Her chipper, sing-songy way of speaking sounds straight from a children’s instructional television program, I’m baking a cake. I’m making a Taste Food Cake just for taste, one with white crust with flecks of butter, a smallish one, the dimensions of a roller rink, single level with chewy sponge and jelly gleaming in its own red carpet inside… We like sucking at the sides of cakes, siphoning off the reserves of cream and spitting it out on the pavement. We lap at the trimmings. Suck on the sugar-slicked decorations and swallow the jelly from between layers of chewy cream…
House Mom fashioned homemade weapons out of firewood and clay. She had razors hidden all over the house. Many surfaces could be utilized as a weapon at the crucial moment. There were buckets of rocks by each bedroom door and giant fly-swatters as well as a spice rack of poisons in the hall closet. She filed her canine teeth into points and whipped the surrounding hills with her war cry. All over the neighborhood the sound of knives sharpening could be heard. She cooked bullets into most of the food and kept baskets of Ukrainian fireworks in the trunk of her car.
House Mom stapled loose hanging pieces of her clothing together and sealed it to her body with duct tape. She bound her hair into an indestructible rope hiding several rounds of ammunition. Her mouth was covered in scars where she had tried to wake sleeping pets and her skirts were dusted with strychnine and cobwebs. Rat traps held her stockings in place. She painted the undersides of her fingernails with Wite-Out and decorated the big purple hogweed scars up and down her arms with permanent marker. The soles of her shoes were crusted with bone and pygmy goat hairs and she licked at the drifts of dried cream in the palms of her hands. Her teeth dried into clear tiles clanking together around the house…
I thought of forgotten rooms, of walls collapsing in old apartment buildings, accordion-like, disappearing into a crevice in the dark. One day my house mom went into one of these collapsed rooms and found grey grass sinews itching their way through cracks in the floor, filling the room with tufts of itchy vegetation. They grew and spread into the elaborate lace-like fans and dusty cobweb blooms before wilting into flakes at first sign of morning. All of these memories made up some survey of the make-believe life I led as only a kind of version of living. I made myself remember: crime scenes are a kind of ruin too.
My dream cat visited me again. Now its black eyes were huge ports just waiting to open wider. No sign of when I’d be back to normal, or what that kind of tension would feel like. I felt “other than,” secretive. An alien from space sent to get some real truth. But truth only lived on other planets. That’s how you bought your freedom, traded for your electricity. I felt myself being followed, by how many and for what purpose I couldn’t tell, only that they were on my trail, and may even have surpassed me at some point to lie in wait, up ahead.
Mister Mr Mr I couldn’t remember his name so I called him that, like an old TV show. “You know what?” he said, “I’m really starting to like you, sharing space with you, passing the time here when normally I’d be doing my laundry or sitting in my chair, not really doing much of anything for several minutes, just looking around, you know?” He was lying on his bed, his head propped up by his arm in a casual gesture. I feel guilt for the sudden rush of pity — not guilt exactly, but a pang that embarrassed me because a tenuous human existence was revealed to me in its entirety. Something about seeing his body from a distance, a whole self — opened up to the real possibility of being no more.
When will there be no more of me? I fretted. Can others see it — in the gaps between gestures, words, in the blink of an eye?
It was possible that the accumulation of past expired caresses clinging to my skin meant that all the men really wanted was just a giant fuckgrab with each other. I was simply the conduit for their wild desire. I was the gift from God that made their wishes come true. But for me being dead or deadest matters little; I could still bear witness to the annihilation of remote beings. Kim’s was the body as murder evidence; her tour of the countryside was necessary to implicate the right people involved in her demise. She said, Look at my body and what you’ve done to it. It’s fucked up it’s not working properly. You stabbed me so many times that now I leak out of everywhere. Fine. My blood stains your town. My red eyes can see the way you’re looking at me. My skin is mottled brown in patches where gore dried up. I wear rags ’cause in your rush to undress me you destroyed me. Somebody on the edge of town came across my sleeping body wrapped in a taupe backdrop, good for them. Mauve is the color of faded blood, taupe is the color of fresh bone — together the mushroomy aroma of murder baked and seasoned in the sunlight. My right leg is fucked up from a fall off of a train. My other leg has a scar from when I tripped down the stairs when I was ten. One of my arms is mangled, caught in a wild cat’s mouth, rammed repeatedly against the rough bark of a dead tree. I poisoned my liver from drinking too much blood. My stomach turned to stone from the pills I took every day when I woke up ’cause your dick gave me a headache. Everything someday will be gone except silence. The earth will be quiet again. I drank so much cough syrup that I went into a coma and I lost part of my hearing and my vision in my right eye, which is now obscured by a big brown spot. Some of my hair got pulled out by an over-zealous fan while he was fucking me in the ass. My pussy cracked in half. There was no one around to help me up. I had to soak my raw flesh in the creek when I got home but I still came out parched and white. Every time I breathe out my skin flakes off in a puff of crepe dust, this means my body gets smaller and smaller every time I breathe. Someday I’ll blow away. I will be everywhere, in the air they breathe, a voice in the sky… The more I stare the more I can see through things. Your image becomes a jellied screen that clings to my gaze but it obscures my ability to hear people telling me to stop. Trying to keep me from finding you, your body. Over the screech of a nearby freeway I will pray for you, I’ll call your name out loud. The evil that men do lives on and on. The feeling deep inside me grows.