MicroHorror

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.

Back in the black room they stared at the walls. There was disease crawling faster than the cool draft from outside. From the corner of his eye he spotted Eva. She dropped to all fours and howled but he couldn’t really hear it. The blood was rushing so fast he felt tired; he broke glass to relieve it. In the hot, pumping fountain painting him he saw himself reflected, panting. And the blood was still rushing. And Eva was still howling. And the whole damn wall was covered in crawling disease. Why was this room so goddamned black? Out of the corner of her eye, Eva watched Job fall to all fours and howl. And her blood began to boil.