ramatheson

Brice sipped his coffee again like the last time he fucked that woman; slow and shallow. The taste was the same as her labia; hot and bitter. Wonder filled his head again at her position now in life, where was she and where could she be? Were her daughters finding pieces of themselves strewn about the floors of some amateur porn site’s couch, being filmed the way Brice had filmed their mother so many times before? Could everything Irma given him be enough? He knew the answer, he knew better and he hated himself for it and so like a curb check he had dumped her on the side street of his depression to fend for herself. Thirteen long years of fooling themselves fooling him into believing she was the one. There was no one. There was only one and he knew it and that was himself. He would have it no other way now, and so he stared at the woman across the diner’s table wondering what she felt like inside.

Did she slip over his body like a wetsuit or would his touch make her so cold she would dry up like the discarded husk remnants of smashed pumpkins a month after Halloween had passed; candy long defecated out in bursts of energy in eight year olds? Their time together would be like a band aid pulled off too fast that leaves a faint red mark where the skin once had hair, now pink with the excitement of a pain burst. Half-heartedly he smirked at her as he set his cup down on the table and reached for his wallet. Karma was smiling back at him with the glow of a firefly ready to extinguish itself by swallowing his member so far down she would gag. The thought of that only made him want to fuck her more.

The waitress sauntered off with his ten, five, three ones and change and saddled up to the register to complete the transaction. Karma said some words but Brice didn’t hear. He was too preoccupied with the way the enameled nails, pink, of the waitress, danced along the lip of the register drawer. She was chewing bubble gum and thinking things only he could imagine – syringes and daffodils spread out upon a floor of glass. The words of Karma finally broke through his dream that day. She spoke of unpaid debts and too many drugs that they weren’t doing, things she hoped for and things he hoped she would just shut up about. In his mind her face broke like a jigsaw bashed with the tire iron of his phallus, in his heart she sucked him dry like the inside of his mouth after the inhalation of the cigarette he had just lit. His dualism was his strength, it was why women wanted him. He spread like a Cancer on a cusp, hiding twins within his belly.

The nurse waitress returned to clear off the table and collect her unspent devious tip left as Brice and Karma eased off the Naugahyde booth seats and out onto the street. The cold hit like the blast of a furnace; there were icicles everywhere. She shivered and Brice ignored it. Somehow it felt good to ignore what she needed. He would hold onto that feeling for at least six seconds until she started speaking again, turning his thoughts back to stuffing her mouth just so she would shut up. The conversation of her sentences and his one word replies continued all the way to the car. Twenty feet never felt more like a thousand miles when you are walking through two inches of snow strewn about the parking lot by the loss of your one true love. Her yellow deviation lines, separating the parking spots, had long been covered. The two soon to be horizontal mamboers left footprints in that frozen water, smashing down the memory of Irma from Brice’s mind.

The car was cold, but the heat warmed it quickly. There was just always something about a nineteen eighty-six Toyota that could blast the hell out of you with its heater. Confusion set in as he wondered if he was really warm, or if that hot air was just the memory of when he was small, when he was safe in his mothers arms in the backseat of the car resting in the womb as she listened to Bob Dylan with the man she married for only one reason. That reason was not enough it turned out, and the man was gone. The man had fled like Brice had fled. He was instructed well and had done what all good students do; he put that knowledge to use in the destruction of all he worked his whole life to build. Like his father spending those two hours building a spaceship model for the four year old Brice, only to have the child throw it into the wall crashing down in the lost hopes of a father just realizing his son would never be what he wanted – a girl.

Snow crunching under a ton of steel and rubber, the poorly accentuated car rolled down the street, wipers smearing the slush doing more harm than good. He turned the radio up, and felt Karma’s discomfort. She always felt he was silencing her. The truth was closer than she thought, but not aimed correctly like an arrow fired at an apple on a head, too low and piercing the trust of the recipient. That music was loud to silence his own internal soliloquy, the one that never stopped. Music was what kept him sane, his notebook was not around, he had burned it long ago to step into his father’s skin once again by discarding all the thoughts he ever had during night time smoke breaks. Daddy got away seven minutes at a time, and the price of cancer was gladly paid. When the Grim Reaper came to collect the debt, Brice’s father paid it in full with the ball and chain of a colostomy bag. Brice wished the old man had given up much more than that, although the thought of his dad emptying his shit and piss out of a plastic bag for the rest of his life offered quite a bit of comfort. Maybe someday that pile of bodily waste would build up and his progenitor would finally know what his son had been swimming in his entire life.

The hotel parking lot was arrived upon, and they rolled into the spot in front of their room’s door; green and peeling. They now carved their way through three inches of snow, the extra inch picking up in the ten minute drive from the diner. They collapsed into the room as Brice upped the thermostat to seventy-five; there would be many more degrees piled on by the meeting of their skin in due time. She spoke of gathering herself, powdering her nose, and getting into something more comfortable and disappeared into the bathroom. Brice did the same thing as he sat on queen-sized bed and looked at the dresser the television sat on. There was a soccer game firing from the cathode tube surrounded by piles of cigarette butts and mostly empty thumb-nail sized Ziploc baggies. Despite the clouds, a stream of sunlight still managed to find its way into the room through a small crack in the blinds. The dust of angels floated in it, hypnotizing Brice for a moment.

His distraction ended as Karma emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing but Brice’s lust for his mother. She poured out upon him, finding her way to him through his zipper. He felt good Karma while fully clothed save that hole he peaked out of, prodding and finding her sweet spot that he massaged so well. He wondered how much of an actress she was, and then stuffed it down inside. The man knew she was good, and left it at that. She came what she would have him believe was three times before he finally exploded like a cruise missile across the face of Iraqi children, covered in dirt. Every time he blew his wad, the images of his mother giving him fellatio while he stabbed his father filled his mind. His Karma was good like a kitten, lapping him up with the tongue so rough like sandpaper. At least it wasn’t the razor-tongue of the last female he had come across. Her name was Deceit, and he had made her his namesake. He drowned her in a sea of semen until he just could not take her anymore. He changed her name to Degradation before dumping her like he had Irma.

The act complete, Brice fell asleep as quickly as possible so as to avoid the eighteen wheeler of conversation about to run him down from the mouth of Karma. He fell asleep to the sight of her blue mane spread across his chest like a smurf’s skin wrapped around dreadlocks.

His dreams came almost as hard as he had into Karma; shrouded in secrets that even he could not decipher clearly. Apparitions of loneliness that steal to him from the dark like a whale emerging from the murky water that surrounds us as we sleep. Untimed minutes passed like butterflies and the first cut into a new piece of construction paper, and he awoke to an exploding train within his veins. It was always like this, when he awoke from catnaps. His widow’s peak hairline beaded with droplets of salty sweat like the dew on a moth’s stomach, the raven-haired twenty-nine year old sat up. Today was his birthday, he suddenly remembered. Most voices in his head told him he was not yet even half through his life, and yet his heart couldn’t help sewing itself into the corner of only having months to live. Brice had felt middle-aged since he was fifteen - a rose that is about to bloom, yet becomes frozen by a mid-April Winter’s arrival. His disease was the weight of air around him, the oxygen weighing down upon his shoulders with each step he took begrudgingly; from the first post rolling out of bed to the last as he fell onto the bed of a new hotel room where he slid into his latest lover’s body.

Actions speak louder than words, and so Brice picked a mirror plate from nearby and doused it in a slightly yellow snow. He thought it funny how closely this drug could look like pissed on snow. It prepared itself into lines with his razor from the strength of muscle memory, and he smacked Karma on the ass. She yelped and called him some stream of profanities that he successfully blocked out, firing back his own within his head. Her tirade of fission bombs was succinctly ceased as he waved the mirror near her and her face fell down upon it. She was an expert, always so proud at how she performed oral sex, but this was one thing she did better. Karma inhaled the semen of match sticks and household chemicals through her nostrils; one, then the other, and then back around again. Thrice she performed communion with her god and thrice Brice felt bile curl up his esophagus. The taste made him feel alive; his body was still working. He hated the feeling and so pulled the mirror away before Karma could kill herself, and set it down on the fashioned murdered tree by the bedside. It was adorned with a lamp, the shade of which Brice could swear was made of vellum. For some reason that would make his whole situation seem more safe, more sane, to know there were others like him in the world. He longed to know that there were those that stretched themselves across placards in front of high powered fluorescent lights in order to expose their insides to the world.

The ray of sunlit angel dust was gone, but the snow still came as it had before. Someone was talking about salvation on the television through a field of static. Brice was wishing someone would adjust his rabbit ears, and Karma was more than happy to oblige. Like Astroglide on glass she scampered around the room, cleaning out ashtrays and adjusting her life’s discomfort.

Brice saw nose bleeds and pancreatic cancer in her future, but for now he told her he had to take a shit. Pushing the door open, he entered the immaculately cleaned bathroom and wondered how Karma could be so good to him when she was so bad. He knew though, that she needed him like he hated her; absolutely. With this thought he became a cloud of hot shower steam in a cold bathroom; he floated out the bathroom window, into the car seat, and drove away from the hotel. Brice wanted to have murdered Karma, but he knew that glass plate left behind would do the trick, eventually.


The road was narrowly escapable as the tide was turning with each weight crashing down around; warmer air turning snow into the afterbirth of our Mother Sky. It slushed down around the car making it difficult to clear the viewport. The headlights illuminated the asphalt, broken and pitted. The pilot didn’t need to see those, though. They shuddered the car with each passing and he wondered how long it would be until he would gained luck enough to hit an ice-patched pothole and careen off into his rebirth; a tree branch through the glass shield and into his cortex. Wonder ceased at the silhouette of his mother-daughter-whore appearing on the roadside, innermost digit hoisted in the air, body wrapped in the skins of dead rodents. The driver pulled over, unable to resist like he knew he should have. The screams in his head were ignored and stifled by the pink fish net stockings peeking at him in his imagination.

Brice pushed the door open, and Mystery fell into the passenger seat.

Her forehead was damped instantly with beads of sweat at the sudden change of temperature. She expressed this with her pale skin becoming pallid, the shade of a cadaver brought back to life for one more fuck. Smiling, he answered her request for a wrapped tobacco tube and pushed in the dash board lighter. He instigated her approval with his five o’clock shadow, barely visible in the light of night-time highways accosted with poor weather. Wonder filled him at this new arrival spent in the lapse of a credit card. Her conversation came only in shivers, adjusting still from the cold she was withdrawn from. Was her mind on him? What would it be like for the two of them? Who was this stranger, so kind, who pulled her shrieking from the loving arms of hypothermia? Brice wondered much the same in quietude, driving on and turning the music up so he wouldn’t have to hear the answers to his own thoughts.

The lighter popped out, ready. Brice smiled a smirk on the inside, full of pride. The driver had never been the patient type; pulling the lighter out just as it was hot but not yet approved in it’s temperature by whatever mechanism it was that decided that. These machines and their intelligences, they knew so much, too much it seemed. Brice sat in a blanket of gooseflesh at the realization that this woman had distracted him from his mind. It wasn’t the music, it was her. He felt the discomfort of her calming presence in the car. Longing filled Brice at this notion; longing for her insides spread across him, holding him like an envelope. He was roused now, and wondered where he could take her. Fright was his answer once again as he already thought he could not leave her alone as he had tossed Karma to the wind. A decision or crucified Christ figures weeping blood for their mother. Would Mystery cover him in calamity, or would she take him into his womb where he would spend his efforts trying to be born again?

Mystery put metal to paper and sucked that fire in like she had her father many times before, choking her lungs just long enough to make her feel alive before an exhalation. She was wanting to tell this to the stranger that had picked her up, but was at a loss for words. Seconds passed in that drag, and after it was done she spoke up. Unheard, she turned the radio off, and the car almost veered off of the road. Silence filled the car but for the hum and rattle of too-old wheels on a highway with little upkeep; I-10 from California to Florida in an unending track mark across the belly of America. Her confessions to the stranger freed her. All Brice could think of as her words of molestation filled his ears was that he wished he had been her father, to have had the courage to take what wasn’t his, bleeding out her purity in pre-dawn moments of incest. A flock of crows scattered across the backseat where Brice had lost his virginity, the black faux leather split in razor wounds, white stuffing peeking out in wisps of age. The weeks passed quickly and the drive continued on to wherever the little red car would take them; hotels and drug dens, bars and prisons, churches and wishing wells.

The well they finally stood at days later was deep, the bottom unseen. Brice and Mystery had been tossing coins in pairs for over an hour, listening to them crash like babies dropped from clumsy storks against the wells brick inner wall. It was a pleasant holiday for the both of them, bond by the thin thread of full days spent together with no distractions. They had fucked, fled, bled, torn and bred. Brice felt as if he had made love for the first time since the day he was born, ripped form his mother’s womb through a laceration placed upon his mother’s belly. She sacrificed her Madonna like Caesar surrendered his empire for just one chance to go down in history for something other than simply being. None of that meant anything to Brice now as he emerged from the hive and into the arms of another woman. His entire life had spent floating from one woman to the next and the call of solitude had been strong; too strong for him to ignore and so he had defected from his fairy tale. Now he stood her with his sweet Mystery, her hair like fire burning down the crevice of her throat, hanging on either side in twisted pig tails still wet with whatever lubricant he had placed there days ago. Neither of them had showered in hours enough to add up to many days. While the smell of each other near was enough, they simply required to wear each others scents upon themselves. In those moments of separation – bathroom breaks and dreams – they still dressed in each others clothes. Mystery had wrapped her thigh around his waist, leaving the other on the floor for support on that narrow stiletto heel, sucking Brice into a feeling he would never escape. No matter how hard he smashed Alt and F4, her sequence of ones and zeroes would just not stop its cyclical command string. He would just have to consent to being owned by her. The thought kept a smile on his face from the instant he saw her light that first cigarette about a moon prior to their current holy moment.

Their wishes were unspoken, but they remained nonetheless, caught and interpreted by the genie of the well, down deep and frozen in place, coins rolling off its melting crown. Unspoken, but shared: bearing children, owning a home, school meetings, soccer games, SUVs and too much gas spent. These were all figments of their imagination, they knew the needles and blow would always keep them from those wishes, but they were nice to share unspoken broken promises. In any case, Brice felt comfort now that Mystery had entered his life, and that was enough. The pair made their way to that night’s pit stop, and Brice’s inner child fell into a deep, peaceful sleep inside of Mystery’s womb. The neon sign blinking “Lust Now Love – No Vacancy” strobed into the quiet night outside their window.

The snow had ceased the moment she got into his car…

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ramatheson

Brice could vomit at the taste of the concoction the Mescalero had prepared for them. It flowed down smoothly, but he swore it turned to worms and glass as it hit his stomach. His grimace was not able to be hidden, and the Mescalero nodded and smiled knowingly. The twenty-nine year old was going to figure out just who his Mystery was, and so the two of them had ended up here where they had read mystique was unveiled. He needed to understand what she meant to him, and so she was here beside him, drinking worms and glass in order to be there for him. The fact that he was taking a chemical to figure the woman out would have made most females disgusted, but not Mystery, no, she was complete in his completion. She knew what he needed, and she knew how to give it to him. If that meant throwing up and taking a backseat ride with him to the spirit world, then so be it. Mystery would cradle him in her arms like the new born infant he never grew out of, she would bare her breast and not flinch as his hypodermic teeth pierced the nipple. Her pure whole milk flowing down his throat of consumption, washing away the streptococcus.

Minutes passed and the pair left the fireside. They only had so long to drive to where they were going before reality parted ways with them. This wasn’t part of the deal, and the Mescalero objected fervently. Brice ignored him and left. Those two actions, disregard and abandonment, were tricks his father taught him well and so he put them to use whenever he could; it was the only way he could feel his father’s presence anymore. That was a lie, and he knew it. He was with his father every time he lit a cigarette and began the installation of his cancer. Son was chasing Father to the colostomy bag destination where they could become one, none, everything, nothing. All the things that poured out of Brice every time he wept, like apostrophes that kept hanging between the wrong letters, one space left or right of where they should be. The life he had led had been just the same, appearing correct at first glance, but obviously incorrect at a second examination. Brice split away and annihilated his fairy tale, knowing the only way that piece of punctuation would ever be fixed was to separate himself from the space where it should be and go chase it down his own damned self. Nobody was going to help him, and so he had split himself down the middle and fled like marsh birds from dogs and buckshot.

Again they drove on what was now a four-lane freeway, two lanes heading in each direction. The median made good driving, thought Brice. He didn’t have to commit to either direction when the wheels of his car were dredging up the dirt of the east and west separator. His Mystery objected at times, but the peyote quieted her rather quickly. Most of the time she only got a breath or single syllable out before her head would fall back against her headrest, eyes rolling around in their sockets. Amazingly, Brice didn’t feel the slightest bit of the effects yet, and so he drove on and on along the median, wearing nothing but his boxers, socks, and an unlit cigarette hanging from each corner of his mouth. The image of a madman, he ignored his mirror image though. It was always told him that looking into mirrors when on hallucinogens was a bad idea, and so he resisted Narcissus and chose not to swallow himself. Brice kept the visor flipped up, and had spread black electrical tape out across the review mirror and around Mystery’s wrists, locking her in a permanent fixture of prayer.

It wasn’t long before the evil spirits the Medicine Man had warned the pair about descended upon them in bursts of red and blue, screeching down from behind them. Brice prayed for exorcisms, but his prayer was only answered by the journey ending in a ditch on the side of the asphalt river. Unsheathing his phallus, he cut Mystery free. She begged him not to, but he knew his discretion was more intone with reality – she was extremely high on some sort of drug and so he would have to handle the situation in his sobriety. As the blue and black demons approached the side of his vehicle, Brice prepared his tools: wisdom and courage, the anger of his abandonment, the longing for his Mother, the hope of Mystery, and the forty-five caliber pistol he kept for such occasions. He had never been so in love. He had never been in love at all he presumed in all actuality. The man would protect his Mystery like an unthinking beast, the brain cut off by the muscle beating against his ribcage, just left of his sternum. His life was forfeit to give happiness to his wife. Their vows had been made in early morning anal sex, lines of cocaine, shots of tequila, and the caresses of her fingers through his hair that he had not felt since his Mother. The moment her nails spread his mane apart, scraping his scalp ever so gently until he fell asleep, he knew he would be powerless for the rest of his life.

The authoritative commands for proof of protection came through the opened driver’s window, and Brice smiled like a lizard, the tongue forked and dancing down across his chin. He could see the fear in their eyes; no, he could smell it. The rounds expelled into their face, shattering the mandible and dropping them like a two hundred pound sack of cherry tomatoes. Brice ejected from the automobile and fell down upon the hell spawned swine, opening the shirt, removing it’s carapace, and gutting it like a pig. He roasted in on a spit for hours, and Mystery and he enjoyed the meat. Sustenance filled them in ways not felt before, until they arrived later at their place of rest, where they found the greatest hope and fulfillment they had ever known. He found it by filling, she found it by being filled. The next forty eight hours fled in spaces of highway headlights, eyes scraping hotel room carpet, and playing under blankets with black lights. They often hid under the comforters from the serpents that were ever-present in their room. At times they would make their way through the downy shield Brice and Mystery had constructed. Their bites came softly and full of care. Venom from the reptiles would enter into the blood streams of the two eternal lovers, binding them in an infinite plane of parabolic ley energy. Hours passed like seconds until the two-made-one had finished their spiritual consummation. The lids of their eyes slowly heaved shut. They slept, smiling.


Brice awoke to the sound of gunfire. It was exploding all about him in the staccatos of Tommy Guns. He rolled from the bed, hit the carpet and shook. Mystery’s fingers fell upon his mane once again, her body quickly fell next to his. Her voice like a thousand glass harps, Brice quickly fell into a calm. The explosions of his waking moments were always like this. Terror grabbed him, his sweat exploded and his heart fired off at a million beats per minute. Many women had been there in the past, but Mystery was the first one that was able to calm him just by breathing the same air as him. He was still trying to get used to that fact; his morning terrors were such a habitual part of his existence that he didn’t know how to react to not being on murder’s edge for the first hour or two of his life every day. Adjustments would have to be made; boxers creeping up and socks turned just barely sideways in the shoe, the heel kinked in a wrinkle of annoyance.

Synapses calming, the nude man rose and stole his Mystery away to the shower where they cleaned the night’s sex away, only to replace it on the bathroom floor post-cleaning. Mystery took the top position; there was just something about bleeding her knees out on the rug as she grinded away on him that made her feel needed. Those rug burns meant he would die for her, and they both knew it. Something about the hot shower made Brice’s head swell, and he couldn’t help but wonder if her carpet matched the curtains. Even though she was naked, there was no way for him to tell. She was smooth as a tongue on mango skin; like a lamprey after a dentist visit to have the teeth pulled. All that remained was a fleshy tube of wet rubber enclosing him like an envelope, and he exploded into it in a singularity of super novas reversed and formed back into the star they once were. Her debt not quite collected in full, she tied him to her back and he followed her around for an hour like a wolf post-mating; the genitals too swollen to be removed. Her palms pressed the cheap faux marble of the sink, and his eyes stared into hers over her shoulder and into the mirror she was facing. She opened up to him in ways she never had before; took him in places none had been – at least his presence made her feel like he was the first. Every place he visited erased the traces of her prior demeanors, lovers, abusers. Mystery had been made full by too many men and women to count, but Brice was her first True Conqueror. Her orgasms came so quickly that she couldn’t keep count, and was topped off by His Second Coming. At that moment she did not fear death. His seed was so strong and full of life for her that she felt as if her shriveled womb could bear children once again. Mystery then realized that she had now done just that, for Brice was newly conceived within her at that moment. She cradled him like the newborn infant he was as the bathroom’s yellowed steam-preventing skylight spun counterclockwise above them, looking down.

Gone were the days of loneliness. Brice had found a home in Mystery that he had never known, not since the eighteen-wheeler of abandonment had run his mother down. He didn’t know where they were going, and he didn’t care. He longed to protect her from whatever it was that came after her. Often that was herself, and he did all he could for her. Her past was heavy like baggage, but he was determined to carry that load as far as he could; beyond where his legs would go, no that would be like many others. Brice would continue long after his legs gave out, pulling himself along with the nails and then using the nail beds after the nails had broken off. He would claw the dusty ground down to the bone of his digits, and then more until they were sanded away and he slithered like a snake. These words he spoke to her when they awoke, and she only believed them half-heartedly, her trust broken under the weight of the luggage he was trying to carry for her. One day, he knew, it would be completely transferred, like a file on a network at a low baud rate that takes so long, but finishes nonetheless. Their circumstance was a hindrance to the methods he chose – lines of coke, bottles of vodka, and penetration were the only methods he had or knew of to use when on the run from an unknown problem for an indeterminate time.

He was combing her hair. The strokes crossed her scalp, breezing along her cranial skin in trespasses of peace. Mystery was content, her life removed and replaced with the presence of the man who had picked her up that cold night, breathing warmth into her mouth. It filled her lungs with new life. Death had always been with Mystery. Her father had died when she was eleven, that stranger’s car T-boning the rest of her life into oblivion. The downward spiral of her mother had begun the instant the driver’s side had caved in, the metal separating the life from the man that had planted her daughters beyond the cervix. The rest of their lives would be revolved around a future check like the Round Up ride at the annual county fair. The speed of it would terrify them, yet hold them securely in place as well. The three women went round and round for years into crevices of betrayal and methamphetamine. Finally, she had broken away in the only way she knew how. Orphan ran away and changed her name to Mystery, attempting to find herself out on the back roads of Americana. The girl shed her family behind her, ran out onto the nearest freeway into the night and walked into the life of Brice within a week. Fate was a gentle mistress, and she had worked her perfect timing in Mystery’s life in a quite succinct way. That last runaway pimpster had had enough of Mystery not performing her payments, and so had left her there to freeze to death, just in time for her Knight in Shining Armor to arrive. He had driven up upon her freezing frame, whisked her into his carriage, and massaged her lips with his tongue until they were no longer blue with the ice of her past. Her father was lost long ago, but Mystery felt he was present again with each stroke of that brush held in the hands of her Brice. Many women called their lovers Daddy, and she had done the same, but not for long. He made her come that first night together, and since then she had called him Father.

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Dresdor

No offense, but if I picked up a book that was all long paragraphs like that, I would put it right back down.

ramatheson

do you mean the lack of dialogue?
or do you mean the paragraphs are too long?

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Rough Ian

This piece is absolutely choked with imagery. I found it extremely difficult to concentrate on the actual story because the similes, metaphors, and abstract analogies keep tugging my attention in different directions. Also, the clichés that are bound to pop up with such strong imagery can make an otherwise professional work seem like amateur script.

It is true that eccentric style often makes a nice read. Even a syrupy Bohemian edge like this one could add an interesting element to an otherwise mundane tale - but if you pour it on too thick, the reader starts to gag.

I suggest you try to keep your taste imagery in check. If you've read any books by Chuck Palahniuk, Tim Dorsey, or Douglas Adams, you can see how this style works well with much less conceptual indulgence.

I'm afraid all I can recommend in this case is a complete rewrite - but to a true writer, that's usually a gift.

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I apologize if my candor offends you. Please disregard my post if this is the case. Thank you.

ramatheson

well i have read them, and i don't think my style of writing is anything like theirs.

thank you for the comments though

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Rough Ian

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I apologize if my candor offends you. Please disregard my post if this is the case. Thank you.

gigi

Yes, that's why it held my interest. I have a rather short attention span for reading and writing fiction as a general rule... This piece is continuously stimulating. I'm really impressed with the integrity of the prose after such a length. There's no weakening, it's consistent.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rough Ian A disclaimer of sorts: as an editor I must look at every piece of written work with a mainstream point of view. This is bound to create a bias in my opinions. Editors more often than not lack the creativity of writers and we tend to look at written work in terms of mass appeal.

Bummer! lol But at least you recognise that



Great piece, Matheson.

gigi

ramatheson

IAN: no offense taken, i just didn't get the comparison Yeah, my writing isn't very mainstream, I mean...I've written poetry for 15 years and never written a story longer than like 500 words. This is the first thing I've stuck with this long. I think GiGi used the term "prosetry" one time talking about something similar...I'm a poet writing prose, so yeah, it's mostly imagery and metaphor, etc.

Thanks though, again.

GiGi: /bows Your comments are always so nice, thank you.

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ramatheson

Brice and Mystery arrived at the convenient store parking lot just before midnight hit. They sat in the car, waiting. Ants like people moved about gassing up SUVs and buying ten hour old fluorescently heated tubes of animal meat. They stuffed them into stale buns and smeared them with stagnant relish and crusted-top catsup bottle contents. Families sauntered past the cockroaches that hung like vagrants. Or were the vagrants seen as cockroaches? In either case they did not scurry at the approach of the calloused masses, in and out, in and out of that one-stop-shop of modern day conveniences. Panhandlers were ignored per usual. Brice would have helped where other didn’t if Christ hadn’t walked up to their car right then and there, leaning in the driver’s side window. His breath was acrid, and Brice handed him the green notes so as to end the presence as quickly as he could. Christ smiled (was he weeping?) and handed the tiny colored balloons, yellow and orange, to the driver. Exchanging brief unpleasantries, the dealer of numb love left and Brice took his Mystery home to their room.




They arrived shortly and dumped the large bag of the drug onto the bed. It splayed out in a rainbow of those two colors, foretelling their future like cast bones. Brice was never good at reading those sort of things, and Mystery wasn’t much help. It remained, however, that they both had the hint of what was to come. They had gotten rolls of aluminum foil, a bag of black Bic ball point pens, and some needles from a sandman known around these parts. He came at the daytime with his bag of dust and syringes, readying the nights slumber for his customers. The spoon was readily available. That would come later, for now they had a dragon to chase. They paid their hotel dues for the next six weeks using the money Mystery’s patricide had earned her, and fled into the room with a week’s supply of cheesecake, beef jerky, and water. Room service would re-supply them at a later date, but the two were almost certain that they would not even consume their current stock; subsisting off of each other’s skin and nodding heads.




Like ballerinas the pair shed foil into little squares, stripped ink tubes of their plastic armor, prepared lighters, and shred into balloons hiding secret treasures of addiction and numbing pain. The tincture prepared, they spread the tar like a too-dark snot across the aluminum. Mystery’s tube rested on her lower lip, and Brice held the foil plate beneath her mouth, lighting it from below. Their Lady Peace melted like lust into wafts of copper oil scented fur, boiling into smoke. She sucked like an infant on a pacifier, and held her breath. They repeated this ritual for five times until the tar was gone and Mystery was high. She methodically reciprocated the aid to Brice. He could easily have done this himself as he had many times before, but he wanted her to be there for him in that capacity, and as always, she was. They immersed themselves in each others presence like water, drowning in the clouds of acrid smoke and heady lethargy. The night was young, they were young, and time had stopped for them. The clock had lost its hands and they were eternal for that first night of many. Exchanging historic stories, they spent the night like cash they hadn’t had until then, an overdraft on a bottomless checking account. Their I.R.A was early, there would be a penalty for withdrawal, but when you had such a short time to live, who really gave a damn? Five more balloons were spent that first night. Their supply of one hundred would have to last six weeks, or so their plan said, and so they had procured the works. Mainlining used so much less up, it was much more efficient. It was stream of consciousness unedited by black-rimmed editors looking only to criticize, not critique a piece.




The night went on and sweat was present, beading at Brice’s forehead. He always seemed to sweat when he was high. Their love was kindled higher through the opiate, and neither was afraid of where it might go. Where it went was a six hour lovemaking session. This was the first time Brice felt like he had made love to a woman. The drugs made it impossible for him to explode, but their night went better than either could have imagined. He was transformed by the Heroine into a tantric sex god, crashing into Mystery like waves of the ocean guided by a moon much too close and overbearing. He had found the perfect acetaminophen for his life-long headaches, and she was wrapped about him all night long. As the first torrents of the Messiah’s blood, their sweat mingled into one another’s pores, a transfusion of life and liberty holding a torch aloft. The immigrants filed below in an orderly fashion, not wanting to stand out. The gate guards were lock stepping in place, watching for signs of suspicion as Brice and Mystery stood embraced and alone within that crowd.




The days passed into weeks and the crowded room of the various junk the two had strewn about the room; empty Dixie cups, spent foil, tar-caked clear plastic pen tubes, empty beef jerky packages, and cake crumbs. There was a coffee stain on the carpet from one morning when Brice had tripped on Mystery’s unconscious body after making some of that cheap hotel coffee they leave in the room. Like an early Christmas present, it was placed nicely in a faux wicker basket next to the television along with a couple of mints. You would think something given such care would provide more pleasure, but all this did was provide frustration as it poured out onto the tan carpet, leaving a large dark spot. The maids were going to hate him, he was sure of it. He wondered if he’d be alive to see their reaction.

They could see the water pouring down the half circle pouring device, long and steel, into the top of that train that had stopped on the rails beneath. It was pristine and glittered in the sunlight, just setting. Their supply was going to run out and the next step would have to be taken. Mystery was nervous, Brice was aroused. Her nerves eased at the sight of his smile, the sound of his breathe, the timbre of his voice. She eased back into the headboard, her back pressed evenly against it, flush. Her spine was straight for the first time in her life, and she was elated at the sensation of it standing strong against that wood.




The spoon caught the flame on it’s soft underbelly, and the water boiled. The tar melted like quicksand forming a tea colored liquid that make both of their eyes gleam. Cotton and surgical steel met as the hypodermic vacuum inhaled the liquid. Her arm outstretched and tied at the bicep, Brice searched for the path they would take. Mystery was healthy as could be and a reasonable track showed itself quickly. The flesh was pierced, the blood induced and a drop ejected backwards in an implosion of euphoria. Her teeth released and the cord fell away, leaving her only to herself higher than the sun, hotter than the Florida coast’s waters in July. She was finding a moment of clarity in her blindness and all the world was a flower spreading its legs to accept the tongue of a new lover. A thousand holes opened up and she bled out a warm blanket from every pore, nodding off into oblivion.




Brice watched her fade, smiling at her peace. His first attempt was a near miss, and he bit his tongue at the prospect of the bruise he knew he would have. The arm would swell, and so he muted that thought of pain with the injection of his Heroine. She whisked him away into the stars, a universe spread apart for his admittance. Secrets were revealed to him there that no man had known. Brice stole the maidenhead of the galaxy in a rocket ship made of flesh. His lust was abated and for a moment he wondered if sex would ever be the same.




With time the two began to land and realized their landing strips were each other. They would not have pulled the yellow and black striped ejection handles no matter what. The couple crashed into each other gladly, exploding in a fit of convulsionary fragments, still numb from their encounter with Christ. There was vomit in the bucket near the bed where Mystery had spent herself in a moment of consumption. How long could they stand that rancid smell in the trash? For now the two left it, knowing they would be more attentive at a later time, when the world had started feeling again.




They startled at a knock at the door. Brice moved up and out of bed in a sweeping motion, gathering that trash can by the one clean spot on its rim and bringing it with him to the door. He moved the chair back out from under the door handle, and opened the door wearing only his jeans and dilated pupils. The maid stared at him over her cart of fresh linens, grabbed some, and offered them to Brice. He smiled and shook his head. There was no way he was going to change the sheets on that bed. No, they would be tarnished with purity for six weeks and then lit aflame.




The maid took the bucket and with a barely noticeable grimace placed it under her cart. She would bring a new one back, she indicated, and pulled away with her cart. Mystery and Brice were left alone once again, and he collapsed next to her. The remote fired up the television, and the conscious member of the pair stared into snow for an hour before realizing the video was set to the AUX mode for the DVD player. The two had used it to watch some foreign film without subtitles. It was a two hour exercise for the red, white, and yellow RCA jacks on the television’s front panel. Those cables carried signals the pair ignored in their poppy haze; their eyes lolling about the sockets, drool making their own wet spot caused not by intercourse but by the love they felt within their veins for each other.




Their weeks passed. Time began to slowly move once again as those balloons dwindled in number. They were the size of a thumbnail, tied off like the asshole of a virgin. She was stolen away by her father, taken like a bird in a cage in the pre-sunlit morning. The parents that bore her could no longer bear each other. All the dreams of white weddings were taken from Mystery the moment her daddy had made her his own. He treated her as if she were twenty, which was more than twice her actual age.




She knew her daddy loved her, but he loved her in the way men do, the way that the nightmares of the dark nights come and steal the peace of sleep from you. Waking in sweat, you scream for your mother. Her screams were stifled by her father’s hand across her mouth. She could taste the dirt from his workplace; he never cleaned before coming to her bed. As her tongue tried in vain to push his index finger from the mouth, she found the taste of dirt and grime washed away in the cleansing of the tear water that flooded into her mouth. That comfort fled at the blast furnace on the back of her neck evaporated her only hope




He left her, leaving only the seed that had created her now oozing within her body. The cries of a terrified child alone with no mother to hold were stifled by the double barreled blast of her pillow. No matter how hard she tried, that needle just wouldn’t grab a hold of the tear ducts enough to pull it out. Instead, she pushed the syringe down into her iris, pumping her head full of numbness.




It was only now, in her cloud of Heroine, that she could feel that numbness fading. It was only now, in Brice’s arms that her life had meaning. It was only now, in that hotel room full of trash and spent needles that she truly felt alive.

The noose was getting tighter around his neck. Struggling as much as he could, he found it only grasping firmer. The breath was shortening, and he could feel nothing anymore but the exploding cannons of the capillaries just forward of his ears. There were voices distant, echoing. They spoke of life not yet had, of life soon lost and the eternal struggles of distant symphonies righting past wrongs. The Ghosts fled about him in the amniotic fluid, his waste pouring out into the ocean he was drowning in. There was no escape in this formation, this Polaroid moment of drowning and strangulation. What a way to go; either in itself would be bad enough, but this was just plain ridiculous.




Brice squeezed himself through the canal but found his shoulders just too damn wide. He was backwards, like falling into a pool after a somersault; up and down were riddles to him now. The murky waters around him were dressed in platitudes. There were fathers there, promising cheerleaders that they loved them. Empty bank account transactions moved to and fro in the stream about Brice’s heart, the stressors that ended all good things. They said monetary problems were number one cause of most marriages ending. However, Brice he had seen enough of the apathy between his parents to know better.




As the pressure built around him, he did his best to flee, but there was nowhere to run. As he went back and forth like a cat in a washer machine, the sky opened. Light slammed into his world for the first time and the white rubber-gloved hands entered and extracted him from his Mother’s womb. What was once so warm had now become so cold to him as the separation began. Shivering, Brice fought to return to his mother, but the cold instruments and hands said otherwise. His umbilical noose was removed, and with the suction bulb and a smack on the back, he was forced to breathe the rusted air of our world. Against his will, the newborn was raped into life. He had never felt dirtier than when the first molecules of the pestilence in our air had graced his skin. Wishing that he could go back to where he was before conception, he fought until his breathing stopped. Again, the horrors of modern medicine chose otherwise, forcing him to live. They protect the rights of the unborn, and deny those of the now-born. Abortion was legal, and Brice wondered why his mother had surrendered to his father’s wishes. The consistently refilled bottle of valium on her nightstand had all the answers he would ever need.




His Mother and Father brought him home proudly, parading him to all of their relatives, allowing him to be further poked and prodded. No wonder his pain threshold was so low. In various journals he had read that the touching or non-touching of infants determined their pain threshold. That sure seemed the case with him. He wasn’t sure if touching caused a high or low resistance to discomfort, but it seemed to make sense, however it was supposed to go.




The first four months of his life were spent as close to his Mother as he could be; his lips suckling the teat like the runt of a pig that he was. His only wish was to stay there, her warm milk easing down his throat into naps and bedtimes. Waking, he would cry for her, and she would be there. If only life was this in entirety, he would wish to live forever. Things were not as such, however, and Brice quickly learned his first lesson in abandonment. Ironic, the one he always felt was the most important – that of his Father leaving – was in fact superseded upon examination by the lazy betrayal of his Mother.




Her lactations were stifled against him at the appearance of his lineage. Their arrival cut him off like an alcoholic at a keg party, straight-jacketed into a lack of succor. The addiction was nothing but a fever of colic that his parents would have to deal with, once their post-partum depression had passed. The problem was, Brice didn’t want to wait the century that that would take. And so he screamed into the night in much the same way his Mystery had at the phallic assaults of her father. The ocean’s waves swooned that night, in those nights; the lack of sunlight causing albino mice to find the crawl spaces in the wall built between his Mother and Father.




And so he continued through life longing forever for his connection to the mother that died the day his Father left. His words were serrated blades, weapons of Divorce and Abandonment that cut Brice down. He never did grow past the age of six, forever longing to escape his life. Too much of a coward to just end himself, he chose to self destruct as slowly as possible. Maybe then nobody would intervene. He drove through his life waiting for that eighteen-wheeler to just fucking T-bone him already.

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