MicroHorror

Mother looked down lovingly with bloodshot eyes, her calloused hands only slightly larger than mine as she led me past the third dark bar. The air seemed different outside each door, somehow thicker. It felt exciting, that air, and I tried looking inside but each time Mother pulled me along before I could see much more than little movements in the dark.

We were on our way to Our Maiden of the Perpetual Sorrow on South Bleeker Street, walking with determination; well, Mother was anyway. I’d been gently but firmly pulled along. I knew that she was crying again. She kept her head up and she probably thought I couldn’t see but I could. Mother is sad a lot about a lot of things but I know she loves me. She always tells me when she gets home at night, when she fixes my blanket and kisses my forehead with lips almost as dry as her hands. But I don’t mind. I love her too.

The sign outside of the church says “Where the Lost Get Found” which was really confusing since we were not lost at all. At the door Mother fell to her knees so I did too. We did the praying; we had done that before but never where someone could see. A man in a black dress came to meet us. He was bald and his smile was funny, like he knew a bad word. Mother let go of me and he took both of her hands and led her into the church. The air felt a lot like it did in front of those bars. I know what a bar is and I know what a church is and it was odd, really odd, that the air outside of them both felt the same. I went inside.

It smelled like bushes and hot perfume and there were candles everywhere making shadows like faces. Mother was so far ahead, past the rows of benches, and the man in the dress had his arm around her. I tried to walk faster and catch up but I was scared and I drug my feet like I knew I should not. I saw them go past dead Jesus on the wall and go into a door. I was alone with the smells and the shadows and dead Jesus and the benches and angry colorful people in the windows. I started to cry and then I heard Mother crying too.

Mother never cried out loud. She always just raised her head and tears would slide down her cheeks and past her nose. They would shine like her nose ring and I thought the tears made her pretty but it was still sad. When I heard her start to cry so loud I just put my head down and ran. I tripped then looked up into the eyes of dead Jesus. He looked like he wanted to cry. I guess he knew what was happening to Mother but I didn’t so I went through the door.

There was a glass box and it was so big and it was full of water and Mother was swimming in there with the man in the dress. He pushed her underwater and whispered then he pulled her up. She looked over at me with golden eyes and a funny smile. She spread out her arms like dead Jesus and called me. I drug my feet like I shouldn’t and I cried and I went to it like a good boy but whatever it was that came out of that water, it wasn’t Mother.

Sweat drips like water from my nose and down my chin, crouched as I am and always this way, soaked with regret and sin. Like a thing of the sewer, like a thorn in the heart and always an ache of remorse. This is dread and loath is the passage of time. Simply wetter I become and more saturated the blood-soaked rag of sorrow. There is no path from this. There is no dry tomorrow, no arid smile. This is damp and fog; mildew climbs my skin like a chill and the smell is dank and musty and feral. I am feral. What I have done is feral.

I kick at a husk, a heap, the remains of what was, who was, who is no longer; no longer beautiful, no longer vibrant, no longer hopeful or alive. She is no longer dry. I have saturated her in disdain and rejection. I have baptized her with the cup of fury, poured out as she has been. Soaking and dripping she seeps like rain through a tent wall, like deionized and purified and mineralized and pasteurized spring water through a coffee filter. But more bitter this and more bitter I and the water is drowning my humanity.

It has been raining for hours. Her blood is a pale steak flowing away from me, away with my compassion and away with my desire. My sin flows away like everything goes away, stark in how vibrant it remains, diluted as it is. Everything goes away and she has gone away. I have sent her there, to the land of away. My too white teeth bite my lower lip and I spill as well. My hands, hands that tear, hands that rip, they twist in tension-laced perspiration. This is the marsh and I am the moss. Slim fingers of decay blossom between my bare and scarlet toes. I can hardly stand the smell of her anymore but worse, I can barely stand to be basted in her as I am. The rain is not hard enough, the rain is not strong enough, the rain is not acid enough. My skin is marinated in She and She is embedded within me as her fingers had been when her hands reached and pleaded. “Anything you want, please, just don’t kill me.” As if there was anything else I did want or want less. Her tears were lost in the flood that was all else.

What drove me is as unknowable as what truly starts the storm. Clouds, weighing tons in reality, float like ghosts and threats. They will pass one man and hand back his sun but when they come to me they open, they fall with their full weight and I drown, bobbing and gasping for air even as my grey flannel shirt and my now-faded jeans grasp each drop of rain and cling to me, grab at me, strangle me and I will do anything, anything at all, as long as it doesn’t kill me.

When I’m drowning in sin and regret is straining at my eyes I need to wash although I am wet. A single mother late at the store bears the burden for my constant fall, always falling and failing and wailing in torment. I am sorry. Washed in the blood of another I am swimming and there is not enough water to remove the stain.

Doreen’s feet are thrashing about wildly. They keep catching him in the midsection and chest, but luckily he is bent at enough of an angle to protect his groin. John is naked, Doreen is not. In their few short months together he cannot recall her feeling so very strong. It only makes his affection for her grow even more and that brings new tears to his eyes. Despite what his father had taught him, men do indeed cry. Real men feel, they hurt, they cry, Dad, damn it!

John can so easily remember the first night he met Doreen. He was fresh from a breakup–real heartbreak, that one. He’d been drowning his sorrows and had actually just decided to call it an evening. In an attempt to get himself together he went to the local corner store to overpay for a coffee and a two-day-old sandwich.

She’d had the unenviable position of working the counter that evening. Even in her blue-green work smock she was beautiful. She’d had a sweet, pixie-pale face underneath stick-straight hair cut in a Bettie Page style, and had a body to match as well, but that was not what had drawn him to her; John was proud to not be so superficial. At first it was just a simple, intelligent glint in her eye that had made him even consider engaging her in conversation beyond normal check-out chatter. There was life in her, real beauty. And as they spoke, he began to see just how beautiful of a person she was inside.

Doreen got off two hours later and, by mutual agreement, John had been waiting for her. They’d walked to the local playground and just sat side by side on the swings, talking. She loved dogs and she “practically lived” at the library. She wanted to be a singer; this convenience store job was just temporary, of course. She’d let him read some of her poetry and he’d cried, real and honest tears. They’d finished the night in John’s bed and he could hardly ever recall feeling so happy. Every day together was another day of discovering each other, looking ahead at dreams together as opposed to fighting through life alone. Every night was a blessing in embrace.

John was earnestly excited for Doreen when she was offered the recording contract. They would have to move out of state but they’d make it work–except that Doreen did not see a “they” in this move. This was her big chance and she had to be “free and open to things,” she’d “always love him” and “never forget him” and John felt his heart break. Again.

Naked, knees sore against the cold tile, toes bent and back arched, he leans in further towards the tub to push her head down more firmly into the just warm water, not too hot and not too cold, trying to keep a good hold on her. She is so strong. This hurts so badly. John cries, bawls his eyes out actually, here on the bathroom floor, drowning his sorrows.

Both wrists slit, face unrecognizable due to “blunt force trauma”, left hand nearly severed, four ribs broken… not even a complete list and this is just the defilement done to her on the outside. I stare at the diamond ring I held onto for a bit too long and wonder at it all. I wonder at a world of violence and disgust that would lead to a result like this. I’m searching for an answer. I’m brainstorming. I can’t accept facts as facts are. Facts. Here’s a fact: we had life all planned out. House, children. We had names picked out for our future pets! Two cats and a dog.

There were two men. That’s what the DNA suggests. I can’t fathom this.

Imagine that there is a God and he is Love and he is Everywhere. Would that put Him at the scene of the crime? Did He watch; did He weep? I was told to “trust in God’s plan” and we had planned in God. My face turns red as I look at the Bible on the end table. I don’t know if it is rage or shame. I scream, but then it could have been a wail. Rage or shame? They told me Sheila is in Heaven right now. Can she see me? Does it make the pain okay? Mine will not go away.

I’m thinking and thinking and it hurts and, damn it, this is really just not working! How do you brainstorm a reason for this? Brainstorming is a process undertaken by a person to solve a problem by rapidly generating a variety of possible solutions. Solutions? Solutions: find the men myself, kill myself and find Sheila, drink and drink and drink, kick a cat, punch a wall, fuck it all! Cry. There is no solution. My mind hurts, my head hurts. Something snaps.

I don’t think I’ve gone mad but things look so damn red in my eyes. I feel like a flood is going on inside my mind. I feel it, I really feel it! Water coming out of my ears, running down my neck. My nose, pouring water. My eyes, crying water. I feel like it is oozing from my skin. This storm has erupted and it won’t slacken. Pour and drip and pour. I think aneurysm and I hear rain. I’m drowning in thoughts which I cannot dam and the flood takes away the sinners again. And I think to myself, “There it is.”

God had a solution. Water. And all my sins, past and now, flood down my chest and leave me clean. I damn the world one last time with one last word and I hear it: rain. Never stop.

“It’s not draining, honey! I see rain pouring over the sides of the gutter! There’s something up the downspout, I’m telling you.”

Knowing better than to give voice to the question “Well, why don’t you go do something about it?” which was screaming in his sarcastic mind for release, Jim dutifully pulled on his shoes and went outside to check it out.

Damn, that rain was cold! He noticed it first on his back and within a minute was soaked enough to notice it everywhere. He grabbed the ladder from the shed and threw it against the side of the house, hard enough to show that he was not happy but gentle enough to not damage the gutter. No need to give himself more work.

“It’s all clear up here, Jeanne! The gutters are empty!”

“I know! I told you, there’s something up the downspout!” Jeanne replied, her head half stuck out of the kitchen window. Jim almost laughed as he saw a big, fat raindrop catch her in the eye right before she jerked her head back in–served her right.

Slogging through the sopping grass to the bottom of the downspout, Jim could see that Jeanne was correct: nothing was coming out of the pipe. Being completely soaked as he was anyway, he dropped belly-flat to the ground and tried to snake his hand up the spout to unclog whatever the hell was in there. He was so numb from the cold rain that he didn’t feel the bite at first. It was the warmth of his own blood that made him realize anything unusual was going on, and by then it was too late. Something up the downspout had him. Now it was pulling him hard, and at this angle his arm could not bend any more. The bottom of the spout was cutting into his arm. He tried to pull back but whatever was in there was stronger than hell and mean as a tick.

With a crack like a shot, his arm snapped and in an instant he was pulled up to his elbow, forcing him face down and almost smothering in the puddle below him. He tried to scream but the water was still gushing over the sides of the gutter, filling his mouth and nose and making him cough and gasp. He was going to drown here in a grassy puddle with his arm shoved up the downspout. And he couldn’t help but laugh at that. Jim laughed until he could not breathe, then he just shook.

“Jim, you’re getting water everywhere! Be careful! Did you fix it?” Jeanne was trying to be calm about the way he was dripping on the floor. She’d have to mop that up just like she had to do everything. Then she noticed the blood. “What did you do to yourself now, you dummy? I guess you’ll expect me to bandage that up for you, huh?”

Jim smiled. “Not right now, honey. First, I’m sorry. You were right. There is something up the downspout. And really, you need to come and see it.”

Her hands should not have been so white. It was October, chilly but not cold. The way she shivered and the way her too-pale hand grabbed at her pulled-up knees suggested freezing. Job walked closer. He could still taste the beautiful bitter of the dark beer on his lips, beer he should still be in the bar drinking but, well, he had to piss and the line for the bathroom was ungodly, so here he was. And here he found her, sitting at the mouth of the alley, wrapped in her own arms and shaking, rocking. As Job neared he heard the sobs. Poor girl, obviously not having a good night.

He knew better than to get involved in something like this. He’d seen it before. She’d either have a face full of bruises from her boyfriend or an arm full of track marks demanding more smack or eyes full of crazy and, for all he knew, something sharp and unseen in the ice-white hand. He knew better. Knowing is, however, rarely doing and so, unable to take her sobbing, heart breaking for the stranger, he moved in and kneeled down. “Hey, are you all right? Is there something I can do for you?”

Her head did not move but stayed down. She did stop rocking; her sobs became a quick sigh. She did not appear at all startled to be interrupted by Job. Whispering, she said, “My name is Beth. I am so empty.” Not knowing how to reply, Job reached out to touch her hand, the hand gripping her knees, the hand whiter than white, the hand with the beautiful slim fingers and perfect black manicure. She was, indeed, freezing.

“Hey, look, do you have somewhere to go? You are ice cold. Do you have somewhere to sleep tonight?” He could not believe he was saying it. He was not that guy, you know? But it was innocent. He would take her home; he would sleep on the couch and let her get a shower and a meal.

“Thank you, Job. But I am so empty.” She said it in a steady voice, a beautiful voice. He loved women with those slightly deep voices, raspy and soft at the same time. Had he told her his name? Was this foolish?

“Beth, I don’t know what’s wrong but let’s get out of the cold and we can talk. I’ll sleep on the couch and you can take a shower and…”

“I am empty, Job. I am so empty. You are kind and for this you are cursed. An empty space needs to be filled and with you I will be.” Hands too white grabbed each side of Job’s head, pulling his face to hers, to eyes too black. Her tears were crystals on her cheeks, beside her lips. Her lips were ink and water, shining.

“Beautiful. You are beautiful.” He had to say it. She was so very…

“Empty, Job, I am empty. But no more.” And she was not.

Lust lives in-between. Between legs, between the sheets; lust grows like mold in the damp and the dark and empty eyes reach to fill themselves with this nothing, these empty spaces. They will sit for hours at the bars longing to fill a hole: with alcohol and smoke and the shadows that crawl around the young bodies in front of them. Crawling the way they would, knowing these dark places and these empty areas. They itch at the thought of filling the cavities, the gaps, going where the shadows dare. Yet they will remain empty and sad and will continue to fill their stomachs with drinks that only further empty them.

Jim walked home that evening as he did most. Doing pretty well tonight, he hardly stumbled at all and had only dropped the cigarette from his mouth once, a fateful accident as it was not his hand that retrieved the burning smoke. She put it between her over-red lips and inhaled deeply, pulling smoke over her moist tongue and into her empty lungs. Her chest swelled against her small red shirt as she did this, the cotton stretching enough to let Jim know that she wore the shirt and nothing under. She exhaled slowly into his face, smoke crawling between his eyelashes and across his scalp, around the roots of his hair. It made his eyes water. He heard her small laugh as she leaned in and licked the tears from his eyes. Her saliva smelled of the cigarette but also of bars and salt and mist. She smelled like three in the morning.

Blinking, Jim looked into blank, black eyes now looking directly at him, seemingly into him. “My name is Lacunae. Say it.” Her left eyebrow cocked and her mouth formed small daggers at the corners as she commanded Jim with word and stare. Still a bit watery-eyed, Jim saw her pale skin as a white halo around her.

“Lacunae,” he breathed out, his own voice sounding alien to him. Was his voice always so thick and slight? Something seemed odd, as if the name finished having a sound before he was done speaking it. But the result was having those two lips thrust against his so hard that he felt a tooth cut his upper lip. Her tongue mapped his mouth. He felt it where his left upper molar had been pulled just last year, where his gums met his cheeks; everywhere there was a space her tongue made known to itself, to her. Pulling back, she gazed at him again and he saw that her eyes were blue. How could they have seemed so black just moments ago?

“Touch me now. Here.” Lacunae pointed to a spot just between her breasts. Her nails were lacquered red and her fingers were slim, long. Jim reached a shaking had out and placed it palm flat where he had been directed. It only hurt for a moment. And then, nothing.

“It’s just one twist… Never enough!”

He had notebooks and pens and half a laptop. He had dreams and hopes and ideas and a hush! “Michael, come to bed, honey.” Honey? When had he ceased to be something more than this, something more animal? He had been tamed. He knew it. And now, these stories he wrote, these ideas he had, they were neutered. It was ten till twelve, midnight; the space between now and then was a hallway of frustration.

“I’ll be up in a bit. Just need to finish here.” He said it without a thought. How many times past had he said this same thing in their three years together? Heather was sweet and just what he thought he’d wanted but now, when his mind was barren and his books were full of these… these… gaps! That’s what they were. Un-joined stories, de-linked ideas. The rejections came back to him and he no longer felt angry at them. They were honest reflections of just what his “art” had become.

“I’m gonna have to pass on this one,” or “The scene just didn’t gel for me.” Of course not! There were gaps! Story gaps! He had not seen it because he could not see it. Before, when he was bourbon and cigs, when he was late night and dull morning, before Heather, he had no gaps then. The spaces were full, were glorious. The pages now before him blurred; the words made no fucking sense! He was pathetic, she was pathetic; this life was a drink away from right. But now he could see, he could correct this.

It was after three in the morning. Michael’s notebooks were scattered around him, like friends at a party and flies at shit: the same, really. Half a bottle of bourbon and that stale old pack of cigarettes pulled from his leather jacket. These from before he had quit. From when he wore a leather jacket and not a cotton/nylon windbreaker. When he wore boots and not loafers, jeans and not khakis. The gaps, the spaces, the empty areas all filled. A hundred failed stories given their balls back! They were genius and full. They were red-bloated ticks full to the bursting.

The air smelled acrid, like fireworks and barbeque. There seemed to still be the hint of smoke like fog in the air. Silence seemed pressing, denying the sound that had awoken Heather in the first place. Arms slack at his side. She smiled slightly at her husband. He had finally finished up. Heather picked up the shotgun that lay at Michael’s feet and looked over his shoulder. Pieces of him covered all of the blank spaces. And his stories were glorious.

What is grown is a result of a burial. What is harvested is the beginning to an end. The seed is planted deep and the blooms stretch like prayers to the sky where they are duly snipped, declawed and vased until dead.

Dawn knelt in her garden, small green pad under her knees, and breathed deep of the bloom in front of her. Was it all truly so morbid as this? Little funerals and small, swift deaths and for what? So that she might have a reason to shoo the beetles and trim the reaching vines and put a glass vial of suffocating flowers on her table, the table where she will sit for hours, staring unblinking.

Dawn’s soft, flawless hands picked at the brown beetle before her and squashed it between thumb and index finger. She absentmindedly wiped the broken bug down the front of her khaki shorts, just above the knee, shorts revealing legs as tan and flawless as her hands, as the rest of her. Dawn was as beautiful and as soft as her morning name might imply. Just flawless.

Roses are poor company compared to what might be but, still, company compared to none is a blessing. And these were blessings taken with gratitude as Dawn daily doted on her blossoms. But this nagging thought, this feeling that their beauty was somehow nothing but a morbid cycle, had started eating at the edges of her mind a week ago. It was a Friday afternoon; the sky was that deep purple indigo it sometimes can be and there was just a single cloud in the sky. The sun fell warm and soft to Dawn’s shoulders and, as she pruned, one of the rose thorns caught the pad of her left middle finger. She sucked at the wound briefly when it hit her: this fiery red, this vibrant crimson compared to the blue-purple backdrop of today; the rose wore the color of abrasion. Of laceration. Of welts and cuts and scrapes.

Dawn, too, once wore these constantly. Dennis. He had been a dream at first, gentle and kind and so intelligent. When he spoke the air was music and his thought was law. Dawn was hopeless before him and positively electric when he offered marriage. She had no garden back then. Her world was Dennis. She doted on him then much as she does her roses today. She cooked, she cleaned, she did other things in the bedroom. She was a perfect wife. But Dennis, dream that he was, changed just as dreams often do. He did not drink or use drugs, so they could not be given as an excuse. And, of course, who could want for more than Dawn was as a wife and partner? Dennis simply changed. To be sure, at one time his wife must have been the very air in his lungs, but now she was a chain, a cage, a burden he was sickened to look at. At first, he would just push her out of his way when she would try to talk to him or reach to touch him. Then slapping, pinching, punching; beating Dawn was freedom. The more she cried, the more she hurt, the more Dennis could breathe again.

Dawn moved in a bruise world. Nothing was real nor did anything matter. What would come would come. Then they did. Hips. In the mail, on a Friday, rose hips in one of those yellow, padded mailers. She had not ordered these yet felt that resolution of anticipation as if she had been waiting months for them to arrive. A scab on her knee itched. She scraped it off and went inside. To show Dennis.

Her roses began with a burial. She planted Dennis deep and the rose hips on top. She felt her body sigh and she took a deep breath. Life is much sweeter with roses.

When I first made it, it was just three words. “I feel incomplete.” A statement, simple; a sentiment to describe an emptiness, a longing. I never could have known that it would… develop, as it has, taking small bites of life when I didn’t notice. Accumulating, assimilating it grew, adding to itself. Maybe I should be proud. Proud of its cunning and wit and skill. It grew in word, in feeling, in scope and grandeur. It fulfilled itself. Incomplete. It became Shelly next door when she let me feel them, “…only outside of my shirt. Okay?” It became her mother, breath thick with alcohol and cigarettes, hands soft, “Does that feel good? Does it? You want to see how I can feel good?”

It was shame and confusion and excitement too. What sin ever made left no room for pleasure? That asshole Kevin at school; he grew it taking my pencil just to hear me beg for it back. Or Mr. Grane, watching and letting him do it, hating the “little pale puss-fag.” Maybe he saw himself in me then. These things, all of these things adding to nothing and the incompleteness growing. The idea is there, the picture formed. My life went on, I grew, like my statement, my sentiment, my other. It whispered to me while I slept. It replayed its building block scenes of scar and tear and empty holes, holes ever deepening and ever filling.

I crack my neck a lot, twisting my head hard to the side and back. It’s compulsive. Sometimes the smallest of shocks shoots up my neck and into my face and I see out of other eyes. My wrists are slim, knots of bone on either side, like bolts I sometimes reflect. Hot water on my wrists, the heat travels. It climbs my arms, my shoulders and my chest. I breathe fire in these times. The wind stirs my hair and my scalp rises, imperceptibly, above my brow firing cold air against my brain, nitrous-shock ride to the system. I swallow saliva, rust sweet with blood, grinding my teeth again. I cry and never outwardly and never notice. I do not notice and you do not. I sit beside you on the bus. I smell like honeysuckle and cloves. Or I grin at you at the bookstore, over the cover of some garishly colorful and oversized book, an equally oversized coffee and sugar concoction at the will of my left hand. You grin back. You are interested or ill and run to the bathroom. Sometimes I follow you back and sometimes we write a stain on the wall. I leave alone and maybe you see me at work, each day with a grin and a “Morning.” We complain about work. We leave. Where do we go? What are we made of outside of the role? What is driving, who is at the wheel, what the hell have you just done!

I’ve strangled you in khakis and slit your throat in an embroidered polo shirt. My loafers have been stained with your piss and your blood and your tears and your saliva, begging and pleading on your knees. You’ll really do anything? And nothing that a good scrub and polish could not erase. My nails are trim but enough to raise the blood. My hair is short, neat. I sit by you at church. I buy my ground beast of burden at the fast food joint. You showed me the ketchup when I seemed confused. I sleep on cotton and scent my sheets with mint. I bathe in rose oil and patchouli. I sing along to the commercials and vote for the next Best American Singing Star. I wear a razor belt around my stomach and get butterflies as I push through a crowd.

What beast has ever left a grave, howled at the moon or craved your sweet candy-cane neck so and been the danger that is my thought now? I feel incomplete.