Who Are You?

It stared at her blankly, all curls and stupidity. It was an awful present. It didn’t even meet the criteria for being truly horrifying, it was too bland for that. It had a stupid porcelain head and small stupid pink porcelain lips. It also had a dress. A frilly dress. Why? She did not like frilly dresses. She did not wear frilly dresses. If she owned a frilly dress it was shoved back in the corner of her closet, crushed and smothered and probably outgrown—a remnant of some Easter long-past when they’d maybe made some pretense at being religious for a weekend and dragged her to church.

They’d handed it to her excitedly, and even though she was only seven she’d understood that she was also supposed to feel or at least seem excited. But she was not excited. She’d said “thank you” as they’d expected her to and pretended some thrill she did not feel, as she was more confused than anything. They’d seemed satisfied with this, and walked away to attend some adult business or other. Now they were gone. But why had they given her this god-awful thing? Why not a nice stuffed toy she could sleep with, or drag around by its leg? Or the lego set she’d been asking for, the one she could build the ship with? Why this odd thing with the frilly dress and the tiny felt shoes that looked as if they were already wanting to fall off and be lost? And then she’d no doubt be in trouble for not appreciating things again. Was it smirking? It was. A self-satisfied, smug little smirk on its stupid pink porcelain lips. It wanted her to be in trouble for losing the shoes.

What was she even supposed to do with the thing? It wasn’t a doll to play with, and she certainly didn’t want to set it on a shelf to look at. It was creepy. But not quite creepy enough somehow. Had it been really and truly haunted, and come to life to stab at her in her sleep, now that would have been something. She could have explained that to Jeremy and Tom the next day, in the woods behind the house. They’d have listened with rapt attention as she’d described how she defeated it with craft and cunning and swiftly thrown blankets. How she’d bundled it up and stuffed it down the laundry chute and heard the screeching of its tiny knife against the aluminum as it slid to its concrete-floored doom.

Their eyes would have been large and incredulous as they were for all her stories and then they’d have jumped their bikes across the creek until one of them fell off into it and had to go home and change out of their wet clothes. But no. This thing only looked creepy, and was not actually creepy. It was not about to come to life or provide interesting stories. If it came to life it probably wouldn’t be able to move in that ridiculous dress anyway, it was way too puffy. She was sure if she took it out to the creek behind the house and blew it up with firecrackers they would find out and then she would be in trouble.

She stood silently behind her closed door and listened to the low hum of them talking to each other contentedly in the other room. She wondered what to do.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Just Like

It was a miracle I found you. Almost from the moment your hand took mine, I knew. At first you scared me more than the rest of everyone all put together, and then you became what kept me strong. In an ocean of objectionable strangers we came together, buffered each other, made it safe. I don’t think either of us could believe our luck, not really. There’s an awful lot of looking going on out there, but not much finding as far as I can tell. And so we connected, and then solidified our connection and began to build a life together. A home, a world of friends, a soothing pattern of activities all bathed in the warm glow of the familiar.

We love a world of observed drama, you and I. Storms from which we are protected. We love to watch our friends go about their whirlwind lives and listen to their stories and be glad we aren’t them. We love to stay inside near the windows when it snows, cozied into blankets with movies we’ve seen a million times playing in the background while we talk about many consequential nothings. We love to take walks in the rain, our boots waterproofed, our jackets lined with flannel, our inner world cozy and safe while the outer world does what it will.

That’s why we took this walk today. The storm coming in looked to be magnificent, and storms along the coast are more beautiful than most. You watch them roll in from so far away, and suddenly you’re in the middle of it, dune grass blown horizontal, green and blue and black waves crashing with white foam. I like to think of the marine animals all hunkered down deep under the water, waiting for the calm to come again, and wonder if it’s peaceful down there where they are. I like to stand in the cold with your warm hand holding mine and let it be my only connection to anything. That feeling, my own calm center in the midst of cacophony, is the thing I love best. Maybe the only thing worth loving.

And now my hand is empty and I find myself alone above the raging sea. Even in this green-hued darkness I can see your body laying on the rocks below me—contorted at an angle that does not support life. I know you are gone. My brain knows this thing. My unconscious mind, ever working, is making a list of the things I need to do. Call emergency services, report the accident, learn how your body will be recovered. I need to call your family and mine. I need to arrange a funeral, where will that be? We’re too young to have ever considered these things. My brain works over these mundane tasks as my eyes stare down at the blur of color that used to be you. Any moment you will stand up, this will not have happened. There’s an undo here somewhere. There’s a version of this story in which you do not lose your footing. Do not stupidly lose your footing on the edge of a seaside cliff and fall to your death. That’s a movie. That’s a movie I wouldn’t watch. That’s a book I wouldn’t read. That’s not my life. That’s not our life. You need to take my car in for an oil change next week – you always do that because you know I hate it. You can’t be gone. Who will take the car in? If you’re gone, then who will understand me? Who will hold my hand?

Process, process, process, my mind whirls around insurance claims and lists of phone numbers. Your phone is in your pocket, down there below and I don’t know if I have contact details for all your cousins. I turn to ask you if those numbers are written down anywhere, but there is no you there. I look down again, the waves are approaching your body now. Your body. When did you transform from being you into being a body? This minute? Five minutes ago? Will you never be you again, only a body on the bottom of a cliff on the edge of my life?

I do not understand who’s going to hold my hand.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

The Case for Not Leaving Home

The female approached me with completely unwarranted confidence, interrupting my casual conversation with the bartender. “So wait, now remind me what was your name again? Karen? Have you met my friend Brian? I know him from forever long ago. I mean, back in the day we all hung out together, maybe you were there too? Probably! Remember how much fun we had? Those were the days! Anyway, Brian this is Karen.”

I shook Brian’s hand distractedly, balancing with one ass cheek on the barstool and one foot on the floor. I examined my escape routes and looked for friends standing near me who might serve as possible distractions. Where the everliving fuck had everyone gone?

“Great to meet you.” I stretched a smile out of the morphing elastic of my lying mouth. I paid no attention to his response as I was trying to both take in and make sense of his choice of personal scent. Troubling.

“It’s SOOOO good to see you!” The female gobbled and babbled and bounced around as she spun some long-winded tale of days of goth yore in my direction. She was truly horrific, a spectre of whorish bad taste and consummate whining annoyance. I contemplated picking up the beer bottle that was next to my drink on the bar and smashing it into her face. I imagined the broken shards sprinkling down, raining through her horrible frazzled hair. Maybe they would tinkle sweetly down like tiny amber raindrops, right before the jagged bottle edge sliced open the bridge of her shiny, shiny nose. My mouth tightened in pleasure at the thought, and perhaps she assumed I was smiling at whatever banality was spilling from her wizened little mouth. I watched the crusty edges of her lipstick stretch and crack as she continued with whatever the fuck she was carrying on about.

My eyes narrowed as I contemplated the horror that was this female person. Her orange-foundationed jawline. Her low-cut printed rayon shirt. Her squinty, slitted eyes—her cheeks were threatening to swallow them completely. Why was she still existing, when I so obviously wanted her not to? How was it that we could physically cohabit the same space? Like matter and anti-matter, our combined presences in this place should not be possible. And she should definitely be the one exploding into nothingness.

“So Brian and I were wondering if you’d be up for a little three-way action later on tonight?” My attention snapped back in her direction, though I was loathe to move away from my almost erotic musings on her gory destruction. Stabbed in the face with a bottle and explosion both worked for me, actually.

“Sorry, what?” I was praying she had not had the blond balls to actually proposition me. Her and skeevy little Brian, who grinned expectantly at me in a quite trollish fashion. She giggled with feigned nervousness. It was clear she thought her revolting offer would be welcomed.

“Well, I hooked back up with Brian tonight, I haven’t seen him in YEARS and he’s so hot…” Another one of those repulsive giggles erupted from her mouth. “…and I thought maybe we’d go back to my place. But he says he’s not up for it unless I can find a third.” She pouted at me, and stupidly her curls continued bouncing around as she blathered and blathered. She had now forcibly inserted a truly horrific mental image into my brain and I gagged a little, swinging around to grab my sweaty pint glass from the bar to give me some time to think of a response that didn’t end in violence. I turned around just in time to see a thick globule of palpable desperation drip from her brow. It landed on my foot and rolled wetly across the black leather of my shoe. I kicked it away in disgust and watched it splatter against the wall.

“I really don’t think so.” It was all I could grit out between lockjaws. Brian sidled up closer to me and I realized that there was some rubbing of body parts I didn’t want to know about against my leg. I considered kneeing him in the crotch and wondered if it would get both of us ejected from the bar, or just me.

“You sure? It would be totally hot.” His breath swamped us in a beery, smokey cloud and I saw a hand snaking out toward me. Abruptly I stood. Fuck it all, I was abandoning this stool. I was abandoning this bar, I would abandon this body if that guy touched me.

“So very sure. I need to go, actually.” I grabbed my bag and made to move away, scanning the crowd again and wondering where my people had got to.

“What the fuck, you ugly cunt? You think you’re going to get a better offer?” He reared back, angry and sneering at me now. His cockblocked, dipshitted threesome partner stared in doltish dismay at this unexpected turn of abstinence. This was my least favorite part of the conversation, the part where the rejected male turns viciously on the female who somehow owes him both gratitude and pussy.

I looked at him, standing there all wide-eyed and limbs-akimbo, ready to attack me further with any small provocation. I looked at her, the fuckwit who’d brought this mess into my life in the first place. Her crusty lower lip trembled at the thought of going home to an empty bed without the fucktard. I sincerely hoped that at no point in my life “together with fucktard” would look better to me than “alone.” I looked around at my friends, laughing and talking to each other—presumably not suddenly submerged with me in my world of hookup horror. I looked longingly back over my shoulder at my bar stool, the place where just ten minutes ago I’d known peace and contentment. Then without another word I walked away.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

On Today’s Menu

People are so hungry here.

They take bites out of you that I’m not even sure they know they’ve taken. One after the other, flesh torn from bone until you’re shredded in places that you can’t hide with your clothes anymore.

I guess it’s not their fault, really.

I think that maybe they’re starving. They certainly seem to be. You fill them up, they want some more. Like naked craning baby birds they gape, open-mouthed, famished and squirming.

They look at me all hollow-eyed in the shops and in the restaurants. When they embrace me, I imagine that I can feel them estimating exactly how much they can consume. They poke at me online and I wonder if they have their ovens warming.

They telegraph their hunger, they broadcast it everywhere. They turn my brain inside-out with wanting to feed them. It seems so simple and right to give them what they need, until you run entirely out of you.

But share and share alike, right?

I don’t like to blame them. It’s just that it can get painful, to be devoured in this way. (They do it to each other too, it’s not just me. Oh, the chunks they tear out! I don’t know how they survive it. I have to look away.)

I can do this though. It’s fine as long as I rearrange a little. It’s totally worth it because it makes you so happy. I see that I can be whole and alone, or in pieces with the rest of you, and I choose you. Honestly I do. I really don’t mind.

It’s just that people are so neverendingly hungry here.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Pet Me

It took me weeks of prowling the back woods to find the one I needed, and you know I am not a four-wheel-drive kind of girl. But I found him eventually—though by then I walked in mud-caked boots and hadn’t washed my hair in days.

I thought it would take some time to convince him to help me, but once I made contact I realized almost immediately that he would never help me, no matter what I said to him, no matter the tactic I employed to persuade him that I needed what he had. In the end I had to resort to other methods.

His cabin was sparsely furnished and filthy, his isolation profound. The few things he owned were neatly stowed away, but the layers of grease and dust and other unspeakable grime coating every secret divot in those walls had taken years to develop and would have taken years more to erase. Fire was a better cleanser than anything else I could muster, so I immolated his body and all traces of his solitary life after I had extracted what I’d come for. Silver and leather and whispered charms and the proper receptacle—the hive mind can help you learn to do anything.

Now I’m back in the city, our city. This place with hot showers and clean towels and boots with heels that were never meant to experience mud. This place with dimly lit restaurants where warm bodies bring you rare steaks on white plates. You can saw delicately into them with sparkling knives and sate your craving in plain sight. I’m back in this place with dark lights and cold winds howling down lonely streets blown with garbage and wasted lives. This place I have both loved and hated. This place with you in it.

I have to admit that this was not always my plan. I thought at first I would ignore the pain ripping into me. I thought I could rise above it, but it turned out that I couldn’t. I only wallowed in it until it sickened me. I worked harder, I changed my tactics. I tried to let it enfold me, to experience it fully—feel it sink in and saturate every corner of who I was. I thought if I lived in it I could understand it, accept it. But it was too big, I couldn’t possibly absorb it all. I laid in my bed and thought of you and all the things you’d said to me, the things you’d done. I puzzled over them, I sought to unravel them into a pattern that made some kind of sense. But I couldn’t, it led me nowhere.

I thought then to destroy myself, to erase myself from the picture, to punctuate our story with clarity and finality. But that seemed at once too hard and too easy. It ended everything but solved nothing. So I was frozen, drifting, lost in a wasteland of confusion you had constructed for me. No solution appeared to be the right one—until this came to me on yet another sleepless, moonbright night.

Having a plan made it so much easier to go on. It took up most of my days and all of my nights. It took my mind off of the way you smell, the sound your laughter makes over the relentless buzzing of the crowd. It kept me from lurking in smoky bars waiting to catch sight of you, waiting for you to change. And then finally the maps were drawn and my knowledge was complete and it was time to go. As I drove away I felt a tugging at my back, like some vital part of me was trying to return to you as the distance between us lengthened. You felt nothing, I know. But it didn’t matter, I felt it enough for us both.

I’m back now and I can’t wait to see you. I thought I might have forgotten your scent while I was away, but now I smell you everywhere. The places you’ve walked, the things you’ve touched, the people whose hair you’ve stroked instead of mine. I am overwhelmed with your essence no matter where I go.

She won’t be calling you back, you know. She might have, I do believe she intended to before I took her fingers. And her ears and her sweet, soft lips. And then she was quite dead. So there’s very little chance you’ll hear from her. I hope you don’t  feel rejected when your phone lies dormant in your hands, when there are no tiny lights blinking up at you to indicate that you’re necessary to someone. I want better than that for you. I don’t want you to ever be lonely again.

Anyway, now it’s just waiting. Only six days more. You don’t know it, but we’ll be together then. We’ll be together forever. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that I need you to be a part of me. Inside me. You won’t take me in your arms, but I’ll take you in mine. I’m on your trail now, and when the moon turns I will take you. I will rip open your skin and gnaw at your flesh and tear out your heart and suck at your bones and finally you will belong to me, only to me.

We’ll haunt the streets here forever, you and I. We’ll walk in companionable, eternal silence. Better than whispered promises, better than clinging to each other’s hands, better than stealing meaningful glances from each other’s eyes. You will be in my eyes. You will be in my gut, you will be in my heart and my lungs and my every single aching breath.

And finally, since the first time you touched me, I will know peace.

This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Into the Gray

With the word "forever" ringing in her mind, Carolina braced herself to take the last step into the gray.

(Please click to see full size)

This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

The Lonely Dance of the Pearl-Grey Shark

I’m twisting in the darkness here, alone under this weight of water.

I try for your attention, I shimmer and shine in the one beam of light that shafts down under the waves.

I beckon you but you do not see.

I want you to come to me, I want to destroy you.

It’s cold, the water coursing over my rough skin never warms.

I make my way into blackness, sniffing out other hunting grounds, other prey.

But I do not forget.

This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

The Trouble with Annabelle

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The Trouble with Annabelle

The problems with Annabelle’s judgment in eating
began when she was quite small

With no time for veggies her desire for offal
was awful and she ate it all

Her cravings demanded that we be quite candid
chastising her for her choices

But she would not hear us, did not seem to fear us
She seemed somewhat deaf to our voices

She cried “Don’t be hasty, this heart is quite tasty!”
And munched it with evident glee

While Reginald’s form lay all broken and torn
a sight quite disturbing to see

Annabelle’s appetites never abated
no matter what we would tell her

So we had no choice but to lock Annabelle
with her victims alone in the cellar

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(Notes: This image is a mix of CGI, purloined photographs and painting in Photoshop. At some point I assume I will write a nice prose story about girls who eat hearts to accompany it. It is a companion piece to this image, which I created about a year and half ago.)

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

A Compulsive Liar Goes to the Grocery Store

I hope you don’t think it’s easy for me. I hope you don’t presume that things are simple in my world because of the way I am. I don’t do this because it makes things easier for me. I don’t know why I do it, but I know that it only makes things more complicated.

OK, sure I told you I was single and that we could fuck condom-free because I had just been tested. And yeah, my boyfriend came home in the middle of me giving you a blowjob and gonorrhea and he beat the shit out of your skinny white ass, but those kind of things just happen sometimes, especially in my world. And up until then you did have a good time, didn’t you? Don’t lie.

But seriously—this isn’t easy for me. It’s not. I had errands to run tonight and I was in a hurry and when that girl at the deli counter asked if she could help me with anything I couldn’t help but tell her no. Then I had to wait like a fool until she served everyone else, and wordlessly hand her my crumpled paper number. That was embarrassing. And then I ended up with two pounds of pork loin when I wanted half a pound of shaved turkey breast. And I don’t even like that pimento cheese, much less need enough to make sandwiches for all the kids at the homeless shelter where I work, because it’s their favorite. Hell, I don’t even like kids.

I was determined to grab the rest of my things and pick up my prescription and leave, but when the samples lady asked if I wanted to try new meat-free meatballs I told her that of course I wanted to try new meat free meatballs. Then I stood talking to her for at least twenty minutes, regaling her with all my adventures in culinary school, where I specialized in vegan appetizers. She believed me of course, until she saw all that pork loin.

The pharmacist asked me if I had any questions about that cream, and I didn’t, but I made up some involving the drug interactions with my prescription for snail fever that I caught in Haiti while I was on a mission there to spread the word of the Lord, and made her look it up in that book. She was really sweet about it though.

Now here I am watching this poor kid load one bag into my car, because when they asked me if I needed help with my bags, well… bag, I told him that my rheumatoid arthritis always acted up in this weather and that I desperately needed some assistance. I think he thinks I’m hitting on him.

So I am half an hour late for my date with your brother and I still need to get home and put this pork loin away. So don’t tell me that things are easy in my world. Things in my world take a lot of effort. But we should get together next week because my boyfriend’s out of town, and I just finished taking my antibiotics. Call me?

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Even You

The street sees everything. It saw you arriving earlier, hope in your heart and money in your pocket. It sees you stumbling out at closing time, somewhat less hopeful and with a few crumpled wads of soggy cash left to your name. It feels your toes wavering tentatively between your car in the parking lot and the after-hours bar down the way. It lays beneath you all broken glass and crinkled cellophane, with no judgment for whatever you decide. When your shoes invariably carry you in the direction of more alcohol it throws no obstacles in your way, aside from the odd displaced brick—which is really more the sidewalk’s fault.

The street sees you later under the harsh yellow glow of its lights, vomiting into a concrete planter full of tangled weeds and other assorted refuse. It sees you even later still, bathed in no light at all as you stand pissing against the side of a brick wall. It does not opine when you splash your own feet with urine and decide that probably no one will notice. Maybe you didn’t notice it yourself.

Tomorrow the street will see you strolling to the grocery store in the bright happy sunshine, shades protectively sheltering your bleary, wearied eyeballs. It sees you picking up cigarettes and comfort foods to nurse your hangover and then silently the street observes you carrying those overloaded bags back home, your feet somewhat steadier than the night before.

The street sees you racing flat-footed to your car at 7:55 on Monday morning for that interview, and feels you peel away with a pang, hoping you come back soon. When you do the street is there for you, though it’s littered with cigarette butts and condom wrappers – that nagging detritus of the weekend’s shame. But it welcomes you home with sun-soaked asphalt, washing you in the one last remnant of a long, hot summer.

The street sees you on Wednesday afternoon, surefootedly leading your prospect into a business lunch, smiling your large, false smile and flashing cash you can ill-afford, hoping to get that commission, get that job.

The street has seen your kind before. It’s seen all you can do. You cannot impress it, you cannot shock it, you cannot make it angry. The street is well-versed in the drunk and the sober, the calm and the frenzied, the hopeless and the hopeful. It has experienced all humanity has to offer. But even so, despite your ubiquity, you are a part of the street’s never-ending, ever-changing story, and to it you now belong.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

How She Got Along in the World

In the end, she grew a thicker skin. It was quite yellow and bumpy and callused, and it protected her by keeping anyone from wanting to be around her in the first place.

In the end she was able to let it go, but then it floated away and she was never able to get it back again.

In the end she was able to laugh it off, but then “it” turned out to be her right pinky finger, and she had been using that.

In the end she didn’t let it get to her, which she accomplished by constantly carrying a plastic riot shield.

In the end she tried to walk it off, but once she got going she decided to never come back.

In the end she let it go in one ear and out the other, and eventually it took most of her brains away with it.

In the end she brushed it off, but was quickly worn out from the physical exertion involved.

In the end she became less sensitive, and then burned herself quite badly in a hot bath.

In the end she decided that platitudes were unlikely to be the answer, and she remained exactly as she was.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

No Longer Required

She used a knife. It was clean or rusty, jagged with serrated, gripping teeth or cleanly-honed and razor-edged. It was thick and hefty or a sliver of a thing and it really didn’t matter the shape of the tool, it was the job it did that was important. She used the knife to cut out the parts that had anything to do with him. She used it to remove those things that didn’t fit anymore, or seemed ill-suited to the life she wanted to lead now.

A spot on her hip, the place his lips had been, it had to go. The pain burned beyond description or was almost unnoticeable, and she did it swiftly or slowly and with great, deliberate precision. But that part was gone and once it was done some other sections must also be made to go. There was a place on her arm, it had a largish freckle and once he’d stroked her there and so she cut it mercilessly away. Awkwardly she sliced at her back, where his hand had loved to rest, and the side of her face where he’d slid his thumb while he told her she was precious to him.

She threw the old parts into a bucket, and she thought it would be more fitting if it were stainless steel, but it was blue plastic and not fitting at all. The blood ran slickly down the plastic sides in little pools and rivulets, it didn’t stick or stain or smear garishly across a smooth metallic finish. It was too bad. But then another piece slapped into the bottom and joined the growing pile of parts she no longer needed, and she forgot about the material from which the bucket was unfortunately made. The cuts were all-consuming now, and satisfying in a way that she’d never before experienced. Her labia, of course, had to go—that was a given. She debated for a moment but ended up excising one nipple and leaving the other. You always needed at least one nipple, and he’d shown that special preference for the left. So it too slapped wetly against the growing pile of flesh in the blue bucket, and then she shifted delicately across the tarpaulin to reposition herself for the next cut—sliding precariously in her own blood as she moved. It was warm, but beginning to cool. As things had a tendency to do.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Clean, Clear, Cloudy

It wasn’t like she wasn’t going to drink it. She was looking at the bottle and pondering whether she was going to drink it, but really the decision was made and it was going to be drunk. It was already drunk, in the finality of reality, just not yet in the present tense.

The bottle was clear and cold and so was the liquid inside. What it did to her was hot and decidedly murky rather than anything crystalline. But that was afterward. The crisp burn of that initial drink always presented the razor-sharp illusion that clarity would be forthcoming— although that had never before been the case. Maybe this time.

So she was going to drink it. It was inevitable. And yet still she pondered the bottle, the glass, the counter top, debating. He’d only left a moment ago. He could come back. Anything could happen really.

He wasn’t coming back, but he could. There was no law of physics preventing his return. Except the one that declared that it wasn’t going to happen.

She resented the space he left. She resented the silence, not full of his words. Not full of his sounds, his smell, his energy. She resented him for being not-there, for daring to go. She resented herself for her dependence. And she contemplated the bottle, the thing that would fill up the space and blot out the empty house. She was going to drink it. Drink it all.

She fingered the glass, feeling it warm slowly under her hands, seeing it smudge with the oils from her skin. The smudges bothered her. They didn’t fit this tidy picture. She picked up the soiled glass and rinsed it in the sink, drying it with the cloth that hung there specifically for that purpose. She set it, newly pristine, back down next to the bottle and listened for the sound of the unopened door. No, he wasn’t coming back. And she was going to drink this bottle of liquid magic and forget that fact.

She picked it up, unscrewed the lid and inhaled deeply of its contents, which she then poured quickly down the kitchen drain. Yes. She was going to drink it all. One of these days, when he was busy being gone. But apparently not today.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

A Conversation

It started out as a conversation about curtains, and ended up as a conversation about everything he’d ever done wrong.

She didn’t know what business he had opining on curtains, anyway. She’d only asked as a sort of rhetorical silence-filler, more to hear herself thinking out loud than really elicit his judgment. Who knew he’d have anything to say about anything?

For his part, he just didn’t like the god-damned curtains, considering them not only ugly, but somehow oppressive and stifling. If part of the money going to purchase them was his, he’d go ahead and say if he didn’t like the fucking things.

“It’s not as if you ever gave a damn about this place until five minutes ago.” she bit out spitefully, wrapping fistfuls of fabric into great messy wads and shoving them back into the plastic packaging.

“Excuse me for not wanting to live in some kind of crazy funeral parlor-slash-funhouse, all right?” He stood with his arms folded, a bit concerned with where this conversation was suddenly heading, but semi-determined to see it through now that he’d started it.

“This is just like you.”

Oh shit. She was hissing the words out now. And it was never good when things were just like him. Or he was just like things. Neither of those were good. Maybe he should back off.

“Look all I said was that maybe…”

“Oh I HEARD what you SAID.” White and red plastic bags crackled violently under her hands as she finished packing the offensive curtains away; and then he watched her stalk out to the hallway, heard the closet door being yanked open, the bags thrown inside, the door slam shut. It couldn’t really slam because of the carpet in there, but he heard how she intended to slam it, all the same.

“What you seem to not consider, what you seem to never consider as you spout your opinions about the things I do, is that perhaps home decorating is not your fucking forte, and you should stick with picking out gatefold LPs or Japanese-only pressings of CDs no one ever wanted to listen to, or overpriced television sets that take up half the motherfucking wall. So why don’t you confine your opinions to the type of goofy game console we need to buy, or what new version of some other time-wasting piece of crap we need to invest money in this week? Maybe those things can be your areas of expertise, hmm?”

She was back in the room and doing some kind of self-righteous straightening up now. Pillows were being forcefully fluffed, this morning’s paper was being viciously tidied into a rigid, angry pile. How could she make newsprint rigid? He couldn’t even square it up again after he read it.

“…and maybe you can leave the curtains to me? Since apparently you were only happy enough to live here with bare fucking windows for more than a year? Letting the neighbors look in? Making it impossible to even sit in this room in the morning?”

Now every sentence sounded like a question, but he knew better than to answer.

“But no. No. Even though you can’t get off your ass to do a damn thing, you can certainly talk some shit about what I take the initiative to do. Although when you’re sitting there in the dirtiest jeans I have ever seen, because you haven’t done laundry in more than a month, I really would suppose you might have something more important to think about. Really.”

Now it was her turned for crossed arms, and they faced off at each other across the room like wary gladiators.

Heh. Wary Gladiators. That would be a good band name. His mind wandered pleasantly away from this angry little room.

“You inconsiderate ass, were you listening to a word I just said?”

Whoops.

“Yes, I heard you. I shouldn’t be doing… things. I should do other things, and leave these things to you.”

“Are you being a fucking smart ass?”

He shrugged ruefully “Not on purpose?”

“Look.” She was quiet and calm now.

Calm was very bad, and set all his skin to prickling.

“I just don’t think this is working.”

Wait, how did we get here? His heart was beating furiously now, his attention laser-focused as all of the blood went rushing either into or out of his head – he couldn’t tell which direction it was going.

“No… sweetheart no. It’s just curtains. They weren’t so bad. I didn’t really look that closely. Let me see them again.” He was all flop sweat and appeasement now. This wasn’t right. This was some weird nightmare argument. Where was the morning alarm? He wanted to roll over and cuddle against her back, to inhale that warm smell at the base of her neck and plan a lazy Saturday in bed together. This was definitely not right.

“It’s more than that. It’s everything. It’s the things you do.” She looked away now, her eyes inspecting the carpet, which he suddenly remembered her asking him to vacuum. A few weeks ago.

“It’s the things you don’t do.”

She looked back at him and he saw a terrifying thing on her face. He thought it might be resignation.

“I’m unhappy here. Being with you makes me unhappy.”

He sat down heavily on the sofa, stunned.

He’d always thought all conversations should have an emergency reset. It seemed he was a little too late to put that plan into action.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Countdown

It was seven hours and forty-two minutes until the party started, and so far Cassandra’s day had felt like a series of stops on a low-budget bus tour of a grotesquely humidified Hades.

She squeezed her car into the yellow-striped space closest to the doors and stepped out into a hot swamp of exhaust fumes, festering overfilled garbage cans and fevered consumerism. The stench of it smacked her wetly in the face, but she barely noticed.

The mall was chilled and busy, humming with people who needed things, or at least needed to need something. Her first stop was the clothing store where she hoped to find a dress. It was three hours and fifty-six minutes until the girl working behind the counter was breaking up with her boyfriend. It was three hours and fifty-two minutes before she would come home an hour early and surprise him jacking it on the couch  – having pathetically frantic phone sex with that whore. Three hours and fifty-four minutes until he explained to her quite calmly as he zipped up his jeans that, yes, he’d been seeing that whore on the side —and he really thought they both needed some time to think about things. In the space of those four minutes, in the dirty living room with an empty bag of potato chips on the floor, the last two years and four months would somehow come to mean nothing. But for now the girl smiled, distracted and polite, and asked if Cassandra needed any help. She did not. She found a suitable dress that she bought without trying on.

As she left she saw a young woman sitting on a black lacquered bench, patiently waiting for her husband to exit the video game store. It was three years, four months and a day since they’d been married.  It was four years, eight months and nine days since she had realized that afternoon by the lake that this man was the only possible mate to her soul. It was twenty-six days and two hours until he would be crushed to death in the small blue car that got such great gas mileage. It was twenty-nine days until she would sit on a red overstuffed pew in a cavernous church, numbly listening to a strange man wearing hair spray praise her dead husband, whom the man wearing hair spray had never met. The woman turned as her husband came out of the store, excitedly describing his purchase, but then her phone rang and she shushed him while she answered it. She chatted with a friend as they walked away together, their hands seeking each other out automatically, their steps falling into an easy matched pace.

Cassandra stopped next at the nail salon, and there she chose a color that matched an accent in her new party dress. For twenty-seven minutes she laid back in a vibrating chair while a small dark-haired woman (Three years until her first child was born. Eighty-six years until that child died.) tended to her toes. She looked over at a young girl whose mother was getting a manicure. The girl was seven and wore an outfit almost identical to her mother’s. She swung back and forth in the chair, feet dangling off the ground. It was another seven years, three months, twenty-two days and thirteen hours until a sweet, sweaty boy at a pool party would convince her that yes, everyone was doing it and, no, you couldn’t get pregnant your first time. Turns out you could, actually.

Cassandra’s last stop was the cosmetics counter at the mall. Tapping brightly colored nails on smudgy glass, she waited for the sales assistant to fetch her particular shade of red lipstick. It had been seven weeks and three days since the assistant was told that the lump under her arm was something more than nothing, and it was another seventeen months and nine days until she would be told that, despite her young age, the cancer had spread too quickly and there was nothing to be done. Impatiently, Cassandra waited to pay. She had things to do, places to be. It was six hours and seventeen minutes until the party started and she still had to go to the grocery store. There really wasn’t much time.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.