Chapter Text
It’s three days ‘til payday and you have thirty-three dollars to skate on. Why, then, you agreed to meet your ex for coffee––because he’s having another meltdown, because you’re a masochist for his bullshit––well, you just answered your own question.
The end.
Franklin Avenue is as ‘main street’ as it gets in your part of the burbs, but you didn’t walk here to channel Norman Rockwell. In a cobblestone strip of only four storefronts, you dip into a low lit, blue-walled joint called ‘NY Kitty’: a bohemian affair with Moroccan tapestries, a Spotify channel perpetually set to Radiohead, and Belle Epoch rizz (see: a long, emerald-tinted mirror behind a dark, wood bar all brassed-up with pseudo-antiquity and frills and quills).
’The Tourist” plays as you spot Derek in a back booth, select curls of his fiercely grunge hair shining under the welcome warmth of a hanging Tiffany lamp, whose thick glass boasts peacock colors (sea green, lapis, hard gold). The delicate pigments slow your breath as you approach, and you briefly hallucinate that you enter a shimmering mist of coin-sized flecks: tiny lanterns of nerve telling you to glance in the mirror one last time and remind yourself what he’s capable of.
But you don’t brace yourself, because you never cease to have empathy for the back of his head.
(It has no idea what his face is up to).
I guess it’s seen the sparks-a-flowin’
No one else would know
You lean into the vacant side of the booth, drop your bag against the wall, and slide in across from the man who actually cried while watching The Office (which you hate); the very man who wanted to physically spar your father for the very real damage that he did to you, but who also made apologies for pedophiles when you were randomly discussing the death penalty one night. Derek Helu: the odd-pudge weasel fuck whose idea of dirty talk was to call you a ‘hole’ and emotionally cheat on you with goth preteens.
If you had no weakness for musicians, you’d have no problems.
Idiot, slow down
“Why don’t you just quit,” you speak first, because you know this is about his job as a backwaiter for one of the more noxiously bougie restaurants in your all-too-small town. You also know why Derek doesn’t quit; too many cute girls who work as waitresses or as frequent the place on the arms of seventy-year-old sugar daddies. You were one of those cute things, once. You’re no longer in the service industry but you were always more woman than Derek deserved.
You study the glistening tabletop under your splayed hands before looking up to a spot of latte foam on the tip of Derek’s nose (it’s just the kind of thing he excels at being oblivious to––that plus basic hygiene, like hair-washing). You crack your wrist. Dumb, ‘cause it hurts; but you do this instead of sighing that Derek is somehow both the smartest guy you know and also the most hopeless.
You left him, in part, because he lacks ambition. Happy to skate, like your bank account. But skating’s for chumps. Under the slow drip of 90s melancholia (see: Thom York with bleach, backwards jeans and middle parts), you risk turning into a suicide shotgun (see: duh), but you find solace in the fact that you’d rather claw your way to substance than wallow in a minimum. Plainly put: if the choice is sleep or struggle, you’ll take the red pill.
“You know I can’t quit.” Derek whines, cradling a misshaped red mug of what you presume is his usual London Fog. The mug is Howard the Duck and it scares you, because ducks shouldn’t be uncanny valley. Derek continues sans novelty to explain, “I need another fifteen hundred before I can replace Roz.”
He means his car, but you’re shut-eyed and trying to be soothed by the Kitty’s aroma of toothy hazelnut as oscillates with an apricot burst––light and playful like crystallized sugar on top of a Christmas wish. You wouldn’t think a nutty coffee would balance well with an almost ‘clean laundry’ smell, but the result is an atmosphere that perfectly captures a ‘meet cute’. All butterflies and poetry in microgestures. But there’s nothing cute about Derek anymore, because it’s always an ‘I can’t’ in the form of a money suck or a ‘too good for’.
You open your eyes again. Say through a grimace, “Clean your fuckin’ nose, D,” while perfunctorily mopping the tabletop like your arm’s a rear wiper, because you inherited your mother’s OCD for invisible crumbs. “So don’t drop the defrosted flank on the way to some rich fuck’s table and you’ll make that amount in a week.” You dust your hands against each other, and add, “What’s the next excuse? Because we’ve been talking about your stupid car for months––”
“You think you know everything,” Derek snaps, and for whatever reason you flash on your last birthday with him in that grimy apartment you shared. Its sickly flourescents ever flickering in the bad part of town, that two bedroom sneeze-dream was a combination prison and roach farm, and yet your boy could do spectacularly thoughtful things like buy you a keyboard and TWO Mondo prints (which he also framed) of your favorite Kubrick movies: A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket.
One of these items alone would have been a wonderful birthday gift, but you got all three! Then as you were cleaning his ‘studio’ for the party you were throwing that night, you came across Derek’s ‘jerk off napkin’ (black with red initials, because he stole it from work).
Cue the fight before one-fight-too-many.
Back at the Kitty you slam your hands on the table a little more forcefully than you mean to, but it stops the flashback. Derek is only just now wiping his nose, studying the speck of foam like he were a kid analyzing a booger, when you shove yourself to your feet with half-a-mind to bolt. God how you just wanna bolt; but one look at the stupid disarray on Derek’s face and you roll your eyes, settling to weakly call across the space at Tyler (the barkeep), and order a champagne split––because NY Kitty is also a lush like you.
Thank fucking Christ.
You sit back down and pull out your phone. If looks could kill, well, let’s say you notice an upturned fly on top of the Steamboat Willie napkin dispenser that wasn’t there a second ago. Your phone background, Alex DeLarge, gives you a sympathetic look; but Derek immediately starts droning on about how Lucy (the seventeen year old hostess with the biggest tits you’ve ever seen) only gives the good sections to Matt (the backwaiter whose ass is so pert, you and the other bartenders used to bounce literal quarters off it).
That’s how you met three years ago, you and Derek. You’ve since moved on; finishing your graduate degree and currently working as a paralegal at a local environmental firm––while Derek still clears tables and dreams of being a rock star between defiling company linen during intensive ‘underboob’ voyeurism. You know Derek wants to screw Lucy, because she’s blonde and illicitly young, but also because everyone wants to screw Lucy. Your old self certainly did; but you lost touch with her when you stopped using sex as a weapon for self esteem.
“Jesus,” Derek’s already deep voice assumes a whole new guttural drop, the gnat’s buzz of his prior ramblings fading like the vrooooom of a long gone roadster. His shift in tone gives you chills before you even look up to see his face, but then you do look up, and right as the song changes.
Your mind struggles to reconcile the dreamy tune with Derek’s quiet panic, because his expression is not one that you have ever known him to make: chin tilted to his chest, eyes a level of careful you don’t care for––and you were with him the night after his last apartment burned down. Black smoke everywhere. He had to throw his dog, then himself, from the third floor window.
You accepted early on that Derek loved his dog more than you. She was his snowflake on a sandcastle in a typhoon during an earthquake. To say he dropped her from that window with utmost care is to be an airhead. He was dropping his life.
And, right now, his eyes are more careful than that.
While this new song is still in its intro, you’re propelled by morbid curiosity to look over your shoulder and glimpse the source of your ex-mistake’s alarm. It takes you a second to spot him against the Kitty’s ‘French Wall’ of giant, vintage poster art (babes pitching absinthe, waiter’s skating on blood wine and fuck knows what this is), but when you do spot him––when the wall seems to come alive for the first time in your experience and a previously innocent (albeit weird) montage turns more ominous––your veins choke on cement and you cough a cup of moth.
For a harlequin-style clown, this gangly freak is a grim motherfucker; but that’s not what scares you at first. What scares you is, somehow, it feels like he’s been staring at you since the moment you were born. Could he have seen you from the ‘fuck room’, Kitty’s virtually lampless lair to the right of the back of the bar? Was clown-Chad somewhere in there––that space that’s all floor cushions and a darker blue than everywhere else and mosquito netting as sections make-out spots––monitoring the back of your head, waiting for Spotify to turn to something more his style to stalk you by?
Because he’s not looking anywhere else, and he’s not drinking or eating anything. What he’s doing is shuffling too slowly while carrying a giant garbage bag over his right shoulder, but then he stops walking once he reaches your side of the booth and drops the bag behind him with a loud, rattling BANG––like there’s scrap Panzer plates and Mengele’s toybox in that shit.
Once upon a time in Hell. Holocaust in a bag.
You jump in your seat at the noise. If you had been looking at Derek, you’d have noticed that he jumped, too. Actually, you’d give anything to be able to tear your eyes from this yin and yang angular creep, but the way the Kitty’s melancholy glow vibes with his Prince Bigmouth aesthetic is more than a little like pop rocks. Boom, crunch. Crunch, sizzle. Dude's Chalk Dracula with Chesire brows and satin crumble. His black eyes are DND dice: roll ‘em and see if you can’t make the pink pucker.
Should cheekbones cut you just by lookin’ at them? Yeah? Then you’re sliced; once on the wrist, once in the––
“Uh, hi?” Derek wafts a greeting like cake-bread takes a fart, and you catch malaria in all the effort it takes to wish Derek wasn’t here. But if he wasn’t here, you wouldn’t be here.
(If you had the choice, would you want to be?)
No, you wouldn’t. There’s something wrong about lyrics that intone ‘sleeping forever’ and a clown in the middle of March who stands dumbly in the middle of a coffee shop, completely ignoring cake-bread farts before dropping to a bar stool, that he might keep ogling you like he knows what your breast milk tastes like.
It’s Monday night, it’s late, and you have a whole week of work ahead of you. Your firm is litigating a proposed government pipeline set to destroy four-hundred acres of Black Bear habitat. The bear is critically endangered and, frankly, so are your nevertheless valiant efforts to do anything about it. Not when Daddy Warbucks is the aggressor.
Maybe if Daddy looked more like Dopey on the bar stool, you wouldn’t be such a fatalist. Actually, you’re not even sure what you mean by that. But you ain’t in the market for a new mistake, no matter how appealing the circus is; so you crank your head back to the reigning worst (mistake), and you pull out a ten dollar bill to cover the split you ain’t gonna drink.
“Derek,” you slide your phone into your coat pocket. “Don’t call me again unless someone stabs your nuts or runs over your head with a tractor, OK?”
You grab your purse and start to scoot your way to freedom when Derek points to the bar and says (feebly, like Grandpa Simpson), “But your drink?”
(Derek hates to waste a buck)
So you glance at Tyler’s conflict re: where to put your brimming flute. ICP be loungin’ against more real estate than is necessary, and your eyes flit back-and-forth between the Boogie Woogie and the precious polyjuice potion. The bubs look tempting, but not in proximity to the dildo currently eyeballing you like he’s half-asleep while taking a constipated dump. Like he’s angry at his airplane-shaped shit, and you wrote the contract for the hole in the ground he’s squatting over.
Then you realize that Jack Nicholson wore that expression in The Shining, which makes poor Tyler ‘Lloyd’, who finally decides to set your drink by the elbow of Cruella in her dalmatian coat. Classically, Derek makes no effort to get the drink for you, and Tyler merely spares an awkward shrug to communicate that he did the best he could, but he’s neither a waiter nor circus HR.
Right on, you think. See who gets a tip.
You actually like Tyler. You’ve made out. And even if there were a way you could seize that increasingly needed beverage without disrupting Ozempic John Wayne Gacy, what’s *really* calling your bones is the emergency box of Froot Loops in your pantry and the episode of It’s Always Sunny you’re on. That way Tyler can enjoy his hand later, Gacy can go back to eating cranberry diesel and Derek can fuck the fuck off.
Everyone wins.
You wish you could be this brazen out loud. You wish you could look as menacing as Mike Tyson with his Jersey Shore face tattoo telling a little kid that the post-death reality is replete darkness––but you reckon you really look like Thumbelina in a broken tutu. Boohoo on my tutu, dear harlequin. Wanna plug my heart with jelly beans?
Jean Harlow with her pencil eyebrows knew all along that your drink was right next to him, but the show he makes on ‘discovering’ the glass, then ‘connecting’ its ownership to you, makes your stomach cramp. He’s Chaplin with checkerboard pajamas and a preference for finding his prepubescent lunch in the morgue, as opposed to at the third grade play (anything but Wicked, please)(true story: you directed a version of No Exit for your third grade class).
But you’re weird.
Using all caps Jim Scary collects your champagne and walks it from the bar to kneel at your seat, finally ‘voila-ing’ the achievement of un-spilling the glass whilst bringing you precious succor. Nothing about his passive-aggressive performance art should be seductive, but in a world where most would-be-suitors can barely pry their hunched backs from their gaming chairs to shoot a load in the sink, there’s an odd charm to a silent comic. They have to be surgeons of motion; orchestras without sound. The fragility inherent to how an expert pianist manages to hit eight HUNDRED notes a minute will ALWAYS be seductive.
Even if his preamble is embarrassing and makes your orifices clench.
Then you notice Hobo Joe’s rotting, tipless gloves, the years-worth of grit under his nails, and the dirty print he leaves on the glass––and you wonder if your future self can clench. You know, the one who’s left for dead in the parking lot after Bing-Bong eats her face. From the corner of your eye you know that Derek has disappeared behind his phone, and is of no immediate help. But you’re disinclined to take the drink from (or drop eye contact with) Unchubby Baskets; so you reel back your boot to kick Derek, when a digital ‘click’ tells you you just had your picture taken.
You don’t like this for a couple of reasons, but neither does Chuckles, who pivots his head like an old lady operates a motorized cart after getting her eyes dilated. In a tableau Edward Hopper couldn’t have painted to call ”Nighthawks’, both you and your strange, new friend skewer Derek with your gazes, only for him to emerge from behind his phone, laughing.
“What? That was sweet! He served your drink to you.” Derek wipes hair from his face in a way that used to get you hot but now only functions to stoke a violence. “You should thank him,” he adds, his joking manner swapped for an odd version of Mr. Darcy. Edwardian manners hiding a Henley misogyny and whatever frown Aubrey Plaza is wearing as reflects from his screen onto his rented-out eyes: that’s D to a ‘T’.
But Lil Wayne’s Bouncy House likes D’s idea, and swivels a rubber neck back at you with a dragon-toothed smile that made God shit a nail. After no response from you while holding this pose a few seconds too long, he springs into another one: a worse smile, God shitting whole ankylosaur tails now (ever seen one? It’s like a hammer. doesn’t exit cleanly and might bring a foot of intestine with it).
‘Til now, you haven’t officially said anything to Salt-and-Pepper Glenn Close. You’re afraid that the moment you do, you’ll be inviting a vampire in the house. But the sooner you thank him, the sooner you hope he’ll walk away; so you tense your jaw, which he clocks without seeming to look (the fuck hasn’t even blinked yet), and you say,
“From my cardioplate to yours.” You quote Harlan Ellison as you gently take the glass by its stem. If Bongo With Coffins For Teeth registers that you stan for speculative fiction, he does not indicate this––but he does tug the glass before he relinquishes it. Then you do something weird, because Bongo’s pinky dusts yours in retracting his hand. Because Derek was never the great lay he thinks he is. And you reach your fingertips to homeboy’s mittened knuckles, and you search his eyes for anything resembling the kind of delicate awareness that’s been a bear trap on your leg for your entire life.
You barely squint, yet you find little to anchor on. Maybe it’s the thick liner, but the clown’s eyes are so bizarrely almond. Flatter than other kinds of eyes this shape, his are more like mopey, melting clocks or cartoon seeds whereby to grow a pumpkin carriage. You can’t see his lashes at all, and his too-pink lid lines are furiously bright if not overtly inflamed. A central fold in a skullcap that hides his ears resembles a hostile vein pointed directly towards a nose that reaches too far down his lip.
If his teeth are real, they aren’t long for this world.
But his irises are mint. And his face, if it’s his, is remarkably chiseled. In fact, it’s nothing short of art. Being a sensitive soul, an intriguing face is more currency to you than a suitcase full of thousand dollar bills. That said, you’re hardly the type to touch a stranger, much less cling. You’re the shy girl in public who suppresses her passion for singular faces. So maybe you’ll regret your audacity, but you don’t doubt it means something to him, because his finger rubs a loose circle against your palm before he nods at your drink.
“I gotta go to a thing,” Derek announces from a galaxy away, sounding (and looking) utterly bored as he puts his phone down then ‘dittos’ the general emphasis on your untouched drink. “Wanna smash that already and call it a night?” he says, standing before you can answer––but as he’s putting his coat back on, you flash your eyes at Arthur Fleck on Bath Salts to find he’s doing a perfect imitation of Derek’s tight-jeaned, toe-walking, deviated-septum fuckery.
You laugh. Cover your mouth because the laugh, though emanating from you, was loud enough to spook you. By the way he cocks his head at this second slip of personality, it’s clear that you continue to surprise Ronald McDonald’s Licorice Lipstick, who himself just found the keys to the jeep.
You watched him ever since Tyler put the drink down, so you don’t doubt it’s undrugged, unless Beat Boy’s sleight of hand is next-level Houdini. As if to dare you, though, Bilbo pumps his eyebrows up, then back down––otherwise maintaining the same, deranged countenance without so much as a twitch or a fluttering lash (an effective tactic to both unnerve and make you shiver where you slither).
His facial muscles must have exceptional control, and you wonder if the same goes for other parts.
Fuck it, you think, and down the somewhat flat refreshment in a long, slow gulp. If this impresses Sirius Whack, he doesn’t show it. Likewise if the drop of champagne lingering on your bottom lip as you slowly bring the glass down titillates him to the slightest degree, his frozen glee like sick don’t chip.
Slower still do you stick out your tongue to collect the dribble. In a realm where eyes could get you pregnant, you’re the next Octomom. Frfr, this guy must live for awkward pauses until, and with what you’re beginning to understand is a trademark hyperbole (slash mein of chivalry), Slappy offers a hand to help you out of the booth.
You wonder what music he hears in his head as he mimes so farcically out of tune with real life, but you suspect his brain echos fax machine signals and toilet burps. Derek’s already at the door when you accept Krusty’s charm and once again touch the spongy material of his barely held-together gloves. You’ve still got cash in your other hand and step towards the bar to pay when Chuckles stops you and insists on covering your tab.
You tuck your hair behind your ear and gently dip your head in thanks, but as you take another step towards the exit, the clown reaches out and frees the same strand that you just pulled back. As it swings back in your face, flicking at your nose, you watch him (you’re becoming a little mesmerized, which probably means you need an orgasm with a man and not your vibrator for a change). Jestdemeanor Elliot (see what I did?) is frowning now, but his frown is more intoxicating than his hyena scream of a smile––and just as you think you’re walking past him for the last time ever, he thrusts his face into your hair. Shyly, almost incidentally, almost not at all.
Like he wanted to test if you were a dream or not.
You already want to scour Google for any local theater or Ringling explanation as to why a grown-ass man wears a costume like that in public, half a year out from Halloween. But those teeth are vile, splintered and almost wooden looking. Moreover, his breath smells coppery which leads you to suspect some kind of extreme gingivitis.
Fucking stop, you counsel yourself as you push through the door to the street. He’s obviously homeless and released from an institution. Your town’s not so small it’s uncommon for businesses to throw a vagrant a bone. Tyler probably gave the dude a free black coffee and a warm respite for an hour or two. But as you bundle your chin into your collar and hug yourself against winter’s valiant effort to stay relevant, you wonder at the clown’s mask and skull cap. What’s that hiding, mange?
Speaking of, Derek’s already getting into the very car he claims he needs to offload, and which he parked illegally before a hydrant. By his sudden swagger and disinterest in you, you bet Derek’s going to get laid––but you insist on a ride, the better to ensure you don’t get followed by Chief Little Hat. You always hated Derek’s over-stickered, silver, VW hatchback. It’s the ride of an E-boy, not an adult; yet somehow Derek pays his taxes (you think), and seems to wrangle a new, motorable girlfriend every few months (some fuglier than others).
He took you racing in this car on your first date. Took you to a mountain pass at night, and you remember thinking you might not see your parents again. You made your peace with dying on that night, which is ironic. Now Derek revs the car, much like he always does, only you worry he’s going to attract the attention of Dr. Hot Sally. K-Pop plays from the car’s radio (around :45), which tells you that Derek’s latest mark is at least half retarded (no tea no shade tho, cos Yoongi aight).
You’ve turned a year older by the time your ex-idiot shifts out of ‘park’. A look back through the Kitty’s glass door yields no sign of the sugar rush phantom or his big, black sack. Phew, you think, however diverting the flirtation was.
Flirtation?
I do it so it feels like hell
What’s that line from? You’ve been reciting it in your head since you first saw Barnum and Bailey, but the source escapes you. So it is here, with the recesses of your mind hiding something you aren’t sure you’re looking for, that you peel out from the curb and cruise the few blocks home with the man you’re glad to have shed like a Nazi lampshade.
Hm.
(around :52 with cc on)
You opened my locked door so easily,
“Oh my, I see the stars,”
The devil said
…
You’ve stripped to your underwear and an old tee that’s a little too fitted and a little too sheer to wear outside of the house; but it’s a safe place and a confidence-booster, and on a night where you can’t help but feel a smidge less-than (because Derek has a way of doing that, because you’re just the right amount of broken)––anyway, you need the armor. To tempt Toucan Sam. To look good for Dennis Reynolds, who resembles a registered sex offender and is lowkey the new Bundy.
Girls and serial killers, bruh. You didn’t make the rules. But your teeth are brushed, and your face is pampered, and your body’s buzzin’ on melatonin gummies. So you flick off the bathroom lights and spin towards your bed.
And then you see him.
On the wall to his left, the word ‘Art’ is spelled in what can only be blood (or else really troubling stool and he should probably see a proctologist). A haphazard arrow of the same filth points to Art himself, who sits cross-legged on your desk––said desk’s contents having been shoved to your floor in an angry mess while Art, statue as ever, perfectly mimes the poster of Charlie Chaplin that’s pinned to your wall between the desk and your bedside table.
At first your brain can’t process what’s happening, or maybe you don’t want it to (or maybe there’s no point). Immediately you recognize, though you wish you didn’t, Derek’s red and black jacket over Art’s knee. Instead of a string of thread pulled taut through his teeth, Art’s pretending to ‘sew’ the jacket with what you desperately want to believe is dental floss, but which you know good and well by the crooked shine on it is razor wire.
I must’ve been through about a million girls
I’d love ‘em then I’d leave ‘em alone
You grew up on a farm. Your dad put razor wire around the cow pasture. Once, when you were about thirteen, you were running from a copperhead and got tangled in some wire that went slack after a storm. Your dad, who was also your doctor, had to give you twenty-four stitches. The worst cut was on the top of your thigh just below your hip bone, and it never healed right. So you’ve got a two-inch, raised, scaly abomination that you’ve only shown to a handful of men in your life.
The first was your father. You dread the last will be Art.
When you don’t give him the reaction he wants (which would be what, exactly? to scream and try to run? shit yourself? puke?), Art’s ‘devil-icious’ smile flips on its ass––and his already black eyes become dead and bitter stars that had their planetary status revoked (poor Pluto). Now he descends from the surface of your desk in as delicate a ballet as you’ve seen since Black Swan, and shuffles in mute petulance to where you’re standing.
Ice-gut fear prohibits you from meeting his eyes, but he’s not looking at you anyway; he’s walking past you, and his fingernail drags slowly across your scar as he does so. Your cells lurch for the door, but Art’s a foot taller than you, and you hesitate. Any escape attempt might have to be planned, might have to wait for the right moment.
Suddenly you’re sweating and freezing all at once, and the usually subtle churn of your old house’s central heating sounds like rotating clubs on rhino hide on a daxophone (see: sour and licensed by the demons Hell wouldn’t admit). But this swift shift in perception is even more swiftly overridden by the tune of corroded, clinking instruments in mass plastic. To wit: you turn to confirm what you don’t want to know, namely that Art brought his ForceFlex© ‘awesome mixtape’ with him––but as soon as you see the bag, your eyes flood, and the tears sting.
The next sixty seconds pass like an atheist experiences a Baptist retreat. As Art continues rummaging through a new and unwelcome squishiness, every prior moment with him washes over you with clearer meaning; and your panic-authored spider senses allow you to remember things you didn’t catch before. Such as how his open-mouthed, initial appraisal of your searing femininity distracted you from the slow, masturbatory gesture his hand was making below his waist. Or how his hardbrow doberman’s sneer as he watched you from the bar stool belied the relief he actually felt as he was pissing his clown suit.
How his thumbnail scratched the lip of the champagne glass as he carried it over. How his putrid, baboon grin kept your attention from the air he was languidly humping beneath the table. Alternately, you couldn't have known that, behind that Gestapo wall of teeth, the tip of his long tongue was whirling like a Vitamix. That Art was imagining your swollen clit pulsing for mercy and him chugging your squirt like a desperate man sucks off a camel in a desert famine.
You don’t like thinking this way. If your analogies are repulsive, it’s because you know he’s going to be.
You rouse from this pre-ejacualte remorse to feel his chest barely touching your shoulder blades, at which point Art tosses something to the floor in front of your feet. Tosses it like a child casually asks for ‘time out’ by shoving a finger up his sister’s twat while looking directly at Mom. You know before you look that you’re going to run. Your hands make a fist and your toes coil.
Down on your shag, magenta rug, there’s not much to see; just six or seven inches of Derek’s scalp––but it’s enough to make you bolt for the open doorway until you feel a vast, blinding pain at your knee. The offender is a pipe wrench. A pipe wrench is a normal wrench that became a cannibal dinosaur. This one tool in particular is blackened by mold (you hope just that) and leaking rust; and because it looks like it was forged in 1792, you assume you’ll have at least eight different strains of tetanus just being in the same room with it.
A cocktail of panic and sharp nausea hits you, and that’s before you realize the hook jaw of the wrench is caught in ligament. Art yanks and yanks to unlodge it, oblivious to how you scream and lurch with each attempt. A sadist would find the scene hilarious, more so when Art finally retracts the thing and loosens scoops of you to the floor (it’s jelly and you can’t). Art’s not amused, though; instead he inspects the wrench like he’s worried he scuffed it, scratching his head and smacking his mouth all innocent and stoneface like Buster Keaton.
Aw shucks, lady. You tore my big, metal dick.
You ignore his pantomime to hobble valiantly for the hallway until Art pops your other kneecap, and you drop. The amount of blood from just two hits is discouraging, and if you weren’t so triggered into a nonsense hysteria (see: trying to scoop up bits of cartilage from the rug or flip severed ligaments back inside the holes he just made), you’d notice how Art does a whole ‘mute donkey’ routine where he laughs and points and slaps his knee, then points to his knee, then points to yours, then his again, finally exploding into the flailing hilarity of a coked-up version of a car lot balloon.
An orange car lot balloon; everybody’s least favorite starburst.
Derek talked you into taking a girl home from a party once. This was before you realized you drank to an excess because you couldn’t gather the courage to leave him. Admittedly the girl seemed more into you, as evinced by the fact she talked to you more, touched you more, and was generally more interested in anything you had to say instead of Derek. Incidentally you can only play one song on the guitar, whereas Derek is an endless vault of range and talent, but this chick wanted you to play the same song over and over again.
Then you excused yourself for a smoke. You still got high then. Though the plan was more for Derek to watch you and the girl, when you came back into the bedroom, Derek was balls deep in her. He looked up at you and smiled. As you looked back at him, the smile glitched; perhaps because he sensed you were indeed going to set fire to the shower curtain.
With much the same fury that you felt then, you slowly raise your eyes to Art, but he was waiting for your attention (claps his hands like a fucktard and taps a game of ping-pong on his face). Yep, he was waiting and hoping you’d be piping mad, because he wants you to watch him squat down to your level, poke what used to be your knee and paint a Chaplin moustache on himself with your blood. Then he springs back to his feet and goddamn expertly replicates ‘the little tramp’s’ methed-out pussyfoot dance from The Floorwalker.
His faultless execution of the famous pedophile’s nimble comedy elicits another monstrous scream from the pit of yourself, and you grab his leg to bite his calf hard enough that you actually draw blood through his costume. Your poor review pisses him off and he kicks your face, then yanks you by the hair onto your bed.
You hope the neighbors hear your wolf cries. They have to, unless this is all a bad dream; but the acrid stench from your armpits tells you it’s plenty real. The abrupt, dull smack of meat as you assault his upper body (because that’s all you can do at this point), tells you that you’re all-too-cruelly awake.
Your throat burns. Your arms taste like yard sale number four, but Art pulls away before you’ve worn them out. He’s consulting with his bag again and you’re reaching for your phone on the bedside table, until Art whacks the back of your head with a reel of used electrical cord. Moving over you so that his inner thighs straddle your waist, he next roughly gathers your wrists and ties them with the cord to the iron back of your bed (more like a ballet barre than a headboard, but you liked the rustic look of it).
With you disabled, Art spreads his arms and beams (ta da!), then vogues like he’s Grace Jones.
Aha, he gestures, as if reading your mind; and he leans waaaaaay over, always with inordinate vaudeville, purposefully foiling himself again and again (see: ‘oops, I knocked the shade off the lamp,’ ‘oops I dropped the thing, ‘oops I hit the thing when I picked the thing back up’)––until finally (phew!) he grabs your phone.
You were raised on Lucille Ball, but you never expected to be caught between her legs as she holds down your neck to unlock your phone with your face, then navigates with fingers like curled-back lily petals to your Spotify. Typing with one petal only, Art bounces on your waist and wiggles his tongue between his teeth until he finds the track he wants and taps ’play’.
Strumming an invisible violin in beat with the song, he just wants to set a romantic tone for you, but the gentility of Nat King Cole over what you fear is about to happen makes you hysterical again. You try to lift your upper leg to push him off of you, but you only end up cracking something that sounds too much like bone. So you’re dry heaving while he’s patting your exposed tibia with his fingertips before jumping from the bed and ’tramp walking’ to the other side of the room.
Your knee’s a lobster in brown, boiling sludge with slices of mice and hot dog floating in it, and your vision goes briefly black, so you can only hear how Art bangs around in your closet (which is too small for even a fraction of the racket he’s making). But somehow you want that racket to keep going because, as long as it does, he can’t be on the bed with you.
Again with a flashback, this time of being slowly fucked in the dark while a broken box fan rattles from the corner, the tired appliance fighting to be louder, and more sinister, than the manly moans that choke the space.
Alas the racket in your closet stops, and you blink your eyes to a cloudy functionality to learn that Art has liberated your metal hanging rod. He stands here, smiling of course with his head tilted awkwardly, waiting for a response from you. When you don’t give it, he unzips the front bottom of his suit (you didn’t even clock a zipper there, however small), wiggles his eyebrows and nods at you––but still you deny him any indication of dread, partly because your vision hasn’t completely resolved.
Resolved to connect the dots for you in terms of your options, Art slowly releases his powder-pale erection. From this distance that’s the only defining characteristic you can see, which you’ll later interpret as a small mercy. In short: he doesn’t need the rod. That thing will reach your throat through your cunt. But he bounces the rod off of it, once, twice, nods again (smiles as ever). Finally a very obscene but effective gesture makes it crystal fucking clear that he can either fuck you with one or the other.
Art pretends the choice is yours, that you’ll have a ball either way. You can hear his pitch in Morgan Freeman’s voice: “Medieval Times brings jousting to your bedroom, aren’t you a lucky so-and-so.” Instinctively you reject being able to hear Art’s thoughts and yank at the cord tied over your head, as if you can loosen it if you squirm hard enough.
Wrong choice.
Art frowns and acts as if pushing his erection back inside his suit is an impossible feat, but he gets it done. Then he licks the tip of the rod with a tongue that could also reach your throat through your cunt. You can’t see how your eyes go wide, both at the reality of his tongue and the fact you seemed to have chosen the worser dildo––but your naked alarm is catnip to a lynx like Art, who holds the rod out straight from his crotch and strokes it.
You watch porn. You’ve paid attention, through porn but also in your own experience, to how a man prepares himself to enter a hole. Men do so all kinds of ways, using this gesture or that, spit, lube, pussy juice. Ass juice. Liquor. Period blood. Gogurt. "What" is not the point. The point is that, occasionally, you come across a man who touches himself in such a way that makes you believe you’re in the presence of something greater.
There are powerful men who take sex for granted, however wild, whomever with. Then there are powerful men for whom their dick is an extension of the earth’s core, men who can wield the cosmos with their thrusts. Who can make their partner see God. These men touch themselves with a level of confidence that causes thunder, and makes your soul hide in the realm beneath your feet.
Art is one of those men, and when he leaps back onto the bed, he wears a deafening wrath––because you should know by now that the caves in his face are going to eat you. With his legs spread over your trembling form, he slams the rod against the bar on either side of your head. Once. Twice. Twenty-odd times.
You shut your eyes and flinch repeatedly, waiting for the deathly blow, but then Art drops the rod to your side (mocking you because you can’t reach it; you’re just helpless to lay alongside what’s probably going to kill you, or worse). He’s off the bed again and grabbing Derek’s bloody scalp, tiptoeing to your bedside lamp, and smearing the bare bulb with it to give the room a gruesome glow.
Ta da! Isn’t that nice?
Hey now! Lemme smear a dab of type O on my little finger…
…And give YOU a little Hitler ‘stache, too!
(BTW, you look perfect).
And it is here that a pair of Third Reich cosplayers get intimate for the first time. For whatever reason he leaves your skivvies on, opting to gently hold its fabric to the side as his mouth slowly approaches the body part you’ve never felt all that confident about (what girl does). But Art seems sickly pleased, his delirious smile replaced by a solemn expression whereby he flicks his darkly mint eyes to yours and feigns to choke on what he’s about to defile.
If you had lived the life of a sheltered princess, you might not be able to keep watching as Art performs a manic series of mute operas on his face. From choking to weeping to wailing to whisking circles in the air with his tongue at a speed you’re sure no real human being has the capacity for––he’s torturing you by delaying the torture. So what’s he gonna do? Bite your entire cunt off? Split it open, shove a pipe in there and funnel snakes through it?
In your prior exertions and a growing blood aroma and the dizziness of a mercifully empty stomach, your room has gradually become a minor rainforest: muggy and gelatinous and full of brightly colored poisons. Just when you think your consciousness is starting to fade from the freshly suffocating climate, Art does the absolute unthinkable and softly moors his long-fingered, jagged-nailed hands on either thigh, leans in, and kisses your slit.
The kiss is so sweet and shy and barely pecking at first that it makes your stomach drop. All of a sudden he’s the back-row band geek with his face in a cheerleader’s crotch, and it’s all he can do to keep from exploding in his pants or from his tear ducts because (golly gee!), he can’t believe his luck. He can’t wait to tell Mommy about this and write it in his diary for future jerk offs. Gentle, gentle whisper ‘will you marry me’s’ as his lips tremble and his Adam’s apple throbs.
You can’t help it. You feel it happening but you totally can’t help it.
Your pussy lubricates itself.
(And, to Art, this smells like vanilla cupcake with rainbow sprinkles)
So the band geek’s Valentines become the desperate, open-mouthed gulp of a soldier trapped in ruin with only moldy cheese left to survive on. Your flinching blossom is the sweaty Brie, and eating you will give him food poisoning, but the nosedive is real. Art will feast on you like this––the surface of his wide, rough tongue rubbing your reluctant, slippery bulb while his unnatural length reaches far enough inside to slowly tap your spot––until you let loose that first, pitiful moan. Your body’s betrayal is made existentially worse because Art doesn’t feel like a normal partner, more like an animal who might be tricked to satisfy you by smearing a treat where it shouldn’t go.
You start to tingle everywhere his tongue touches, which is indeed everywhere, and the tingle is electric. Warm. Like the inside of lightning. Though he holds your thighs down, he doesn’t scratch. Though he certainly could, he doesn’t bite. Doesn’t make a sound. Just fucks you with his tongue, prompting your body into trusting what’s only natural until you’re helpless but to breath faster, and louder.
When he slips a finger in, you grunt approvingly.
To resist (however pathetically), you try to imagine how Derek died, assuming he was at least given that much charity and not left somewhere to bleed out by inches. You want to think about anything other than what’s happening, even if this will be the kindest moment of the rest of your life.
Though you can only manage fragments, you start to ask about Derek. You start to ask Art to stop, not because you expect an answer, but to disrupt the inevitable orgasm. But Art is fingering you so expertly with slow, deep glides of the same digit that smeared diarrhea on the toilet lid of a pizza joint once––alternating between pushing his softly-curling finger as far as it’ll go (barely, barely to a point of discomfort but utterly to a point of delicious fullness), and then sucking your whole cunt into his warm, wet mouth; his tongue flicking your clit to a drunk, honey hum.
Two fingers next. Suck the whole of you in. Flick like a fleet rabbit thumps his fickle, furry feet.
Tickle, tickle, sneeze.
And so on.
(How the hell did he get so good at this??)
(Clearly there is no God).
You feel the familiar ‘gathering’ at the pit of yourself: the bundle of buzzing gravity that alerts you to a glorious, mind-altering plummet, ions coalescing into an iron canon to shoot you with beautiful violence out of its cheerio, to shoot you from yourself, all charged light and flying. In preparation of the finale, your body shrinks by just the smallest fraction into itself––and somehow Art feels it happen. You know because his grip tightens over your thighs, which are contracted and shaking in your readiness to spill.
You know because, to your utter shock, Art moans.
At first you’re not sure you actually heard it (after all, his mouth is kind of full). If it’s not a mirage, if it actually happened, it was a high, whiny moan that’s almost more like a single wheeze from a punctured accordion. Or a slide whistle. It’s the first sound to exit his mouth in the total fifty-odd minutes that you’ve known him, and to your immense disgust, it’s enough to push you over the edge. Your toes curl with the initial contractions and your hips buck beyond your control. A liquid warmth drowns you in the best way; and despite you’ve always been a quiet finisher, Art knows you’re cumming for him and lifts himself up to watch.
Meanwhile your Spotify has become a dickbrain (namely around :40).
As you cum, Art’s fingers keep fucking you, stabbing hatefully while his nails pinch segments of cervix, until all FOUR fingers veritably fist you up to the last knuckle. And though you are a little too possessed to look too closely, you’re horrified to casually note cottage cheese-like clots dotting his uncanny smile (which is already a mess, having rubbed his black lipstick to scaly flakes over flushed pink).
Did you have yeast you didn’t know about, or did this revolting substance come from him? Moreover the whites of his eyes are now a dark urine, but in your unique combination of disgust and helplessness, you look heartbreakingly gorgeous to him. So much so that Art will extend your orgasm, and he penetrates your asshole with something you’re not ready to identify yet, just as his fingers painfully press your G-spot, and hold.
The object in your ass plays you like a trombone’s slide tube from a Gershwin song, and you know that this object was never going to be sterile and factory sealed before it went in––but no doubt some unclean, improvised bastard of an FDA-approved product. You flash on Hot Dog Heather from high school. You flash on Eli Roth’s "Green Inferno" and the burning shits that one girl had. Unfortunately, none of this deflects from the fact your body is enjoying the sensation, rather it’s craving the prolonged bliss that Art’s concert of tactics provides.
Fucking softly-deeply as you roll, as the convulsions waft you like sleepy saltwater (see: the kind of sloshing slumber rivaled only by the antigravity of the International Space Station). Softly-deeply then hammer-stab until the next orgasm is triggered: softly, trigger, softly, trigger, and so on. But the sugar is too sweet, and an unpleasant urge begins in your stomach until you have to turn your head to the side.
You heave for too many times and with too much violence until the vomit finally comes: just bile, froth really, but you’re sure you’d rather die than feel this way one second longer. If you could, you’d beg for it, and maybe Art will let you, but he’s going to make you do it as he jerks your face back towards the ceiling, nails breaking the skin of your jaw as he forces you to swallow what your stomach wants to rid.
You gurgle through the acid for it to stop. When it does, through no mercy of Art’s, you spit your mouth clear as best you can while Art grinds your abdomen, perhaps courting his own release. You think of Peter Kurten, ‘The Dusseldorf Vampire’, who claimed to cum on spilling another’s blood. But Art doesn’t strike you as a victim of biological impulse, and indeed there haven’t been many who’ve even glimpsed his naked cock.
What makes you different? For the majority of your life you’ve been a wallflower. If you thought there was anything special about you, you wouldn’t have dated Derek; and you sure as shit wouldn’t still be hand-holding his narcissism. Bad things may have reduced you to a moonlight masochist, but more than one acquaintance has tried to convince you about a certain allure you have. Something more than aura, something people have told you they could feel.
But for the majority of your young adult life, you’ve tried to be unfelt. To be invisible, and thus impervious to more harm than you’ve already suffered. Say you do have a spark, though. Say it matters when it needs to. Could a psychotic clown possibly perceive this? Could that be why you’re still alive, reaching the height of synapse, despite how Art is leaning over your mouth and drooling and making you taste his drool which is too cloudy and somehow carrying globs of something––because maybe he wants a preview of how you ingest the height of *his* synapse?
You don’t want to look in his eyes. Anywhere but in his eyes. You couldn’t tolerate seeing yourself reflected in Art’s madness, in the last (sub)human artifacts that Derek probably saw, in two, grotesquely dilated (see: somehow oval) pupils that belong before a firing squad while seated in an electric chair with a lethal needle flopping from his arm. But he’s grinding higher up on your ribs now, challenging comfortable breathing, and his nails drag in the holes he’s making in your cheeks. So you look.
With his free hand, he’s drafted (see: hasn’t sent yet) a short sentence in your text thread to your mother.
He wrote: "I feel it."
You scream. The scream is thick with Art’s DNA. When given the chance, you’re going to hang yourself with the cord that binds your wrists together, or else bludgeon yourself with the pipe wrench. You can’t conceive of successfully escaping Art any other way, because there’s no escaping the supernatural.
So you scream, and scream, and scream, and only when you’re gasping for air do you notice that Art has stopped moving and is staring straight ahead at the wall––smile gone, mouth open but frowning, eyes dead but also annoyed.
You find a calm you would’ve never seen coming in the realization that it’s going to be a big, fat, bipolar gaslight until you’re dead. Art’s no different from ANY egotistical male you’ve had the misfortune to know. Not in that respect. He’s just more honest about his tyranny––and, horrifically, it’s beginning to comfort you.
You must look like a failed resurrection. Frankenstein was fresher waking up; but Art doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t seem to be there at all as he slinks from the bed, clumsily thunking your busted knees, zombie-lurching with hunched shoulders into the hallway and out of your bedroom. You hear him drag his oversized shoes against the house’s original wood, and then you hear nothing at all.
You don’t know what you expected. Percy Bysshe Shelley? A skylark? A ring belonging to the last woman Art killed, still attached to her severed and rotting finger?
Did he feather-foot down the stairs? You would’ve heard it creak. Did he dip into the bathroom or the guest room? It is not a large house. Built in 1972 but renovated in 2004, it was an affordable starter home––nevermind property is always a worthwhile investment––but the baby Victorian is old enough to be clunky, poorly ventilated in extreme temperatures and generally thwarting in terms of viable hiding places. In other words: there ain’t many places to go, and not much space to do much once you get there.
With Art gone, however, your survivalism returns (funny how that happens) and you immediately start to wrestle with the cord that holds you to the headboard. Even in the freak chance you free yourself, you’ll have to figure out how to walk, but the silence from the hall spurs your panic that you have to do something.
Some God you’re frantically hoping for, or else a twisted fuck who loves a cat-and-mouse, saw fit for the cord to slacken during your marathon torture-gasm and you’re liberated in under a few minutes. You’ll use the hanging rod as a cane, the rod being just long enough for this purpose; but if you’re going to walk, assuming the pain won’t kill you first, you’ll need not one but two splints––something to tie to your knees and hold them straight.
Normally a splint, especially an amateur one, would be insufficient to stabilize a wound penetrated by bone, but nothing about this night has been normal. So, with much difficulty, you roll off the bed. The roll and ensuing crash is the first of several pains to come as you enact your plan. You have to army crawl without benefit of much leg motion to your desk chair: a glossy, polycarbonate plastic IKEA product that you know you can dissemble quietly enough for makeshift splints.
To tie the splints to your legs, there’s an array of clothes scattered to your floor (grazie mille, Art), but you plan to use the two scarves that you bought when you visited Salem last fall. One scarf is beige with foxes. The other is midnight blue with kitty cats. Salem was a blast, because you and your sisters are stans for haunted things.
Funny.
With the splints on, and perhaps over-enforced, you practice walking by going to the bathroom for some Tylenol. There, you search for the final piece of your newly bionic self: a weapon. You reach for your shower caddy first. Your razor is on the dull side but it’ll work in a pinch, so you tuck it (face out) in your underwear (you’re looking increasingly Lord of the Flies), and you grab your hot dog flower vase, which says ‘Eat Me’ in ceramic mustard over a ceramic weenie.
Oh, you’ll eat him. You’ll die trying, but for a brief moment you’ll make Art wish he hadn’t been born. Maybe you’ll pluck his eyeballs out and force them through his piss hole. Then you’ll take a butcher knife and chop his cock off, then his arm, then shove those both up his new vagina.
Now, however, you creep down the hallway in the dark, save for what moonlight pours through a small window at the end of the narrow space. The guest room is maybe eight feet to your right, just past the guest bathroom. Yours isn’t a literal tiny house but it is on the parsimonious side of ‘cozy’. The hallway itself is maybe three feet wide, so you’re not surprised to notice something large and domino-themed beneath you as glimpsed through the slots in your banister.
A short drop down (but not short enough), Art just stands there: backlit by a subtle, fluorescent indigo that can only mean your fridge is open. Did he put parts of Derek in there between the strawberry cake and the leftover pizza? Does Derek’s scrotum float in your milk?
Do you really wanna know?
You need something heavy enough to drop on Art and knock him out. His stupid little hat can be the bullseye; but what’s the anvil? The toilet tank lid would give him a wallop, but will it put him to sleep or just piss him off? As you try to keep your breathing quiet and your palms dry (so you don’t drop the weenie), you look around for anything that would be heavy enough to rob Art of consciousness. Then you spot your pair of ten pound weight plates under the guest bed.
Twenty pounds from a decent height will probably do more than peace Art to beddy bye, and you suddenly wonder whether you’ll be able to stomach scraping what’s left of his head and neck off the hardwood––but now that you know how close he is, walking seems harder to do without a fuss, and you’re sweating like a marathon runner by the time you’re back at the railing. You’re pretty sure you’re already dead because you had to get the weights without your cane, or the hot dog, and you can’t actually feel below your thighs.
You suck your top lip into your mouth (salty salt) and watch Art for the slightest movement, but he gives none. Could he have narcolepsy? Best not to bank on it. You lean carefully on the railing and aim the weights. All you have to do is let go, but fly away hairs are sticking to your face, itching and distracting you, and your sweat mustache is sliding down and under your chin, tickling you. You feel like fever. You feel like worms are stuck to your goosebumps like crusted pearls.
Unlike the cat, you don’t have eight more times to die should you fuck this up.
(This is too easy)
All you can hear is the buzzing of the light inside the fridge. It always buzzed too loudly and now it seems to echo up the stairs.
(This is some kind of trap)
Bing, bong, buzzzzzzzzzzz.
You hold your breath. There is a charge to eye your scars, and Pennywise owes you big time.
(He told you he felt it)
Finally, you release.
…
Soon, soon
The flesh the grave cave ate will be
At home on me