She Gives Me The Fear
by Hertzan Chimera
Tuesday 14: She has poisoned me again.
Of course I have never written a single story in my life, but tonight,
I
thought, just to be on the safe side, I would start to chronicle what
might
be my last days on planet Ergot. That's what killed the first settlers
to
this fine isle, you know, in Pocahontas' time, the ergot, the poison of
bread, the breaker of the staff of life.
That's what I would call the bitch if I didn't love her so much.
But how she gives me the fear. Any time of the day or night, if I let
down
the guard, I get it right in the middle of my mind like a sleazy betacam
plugged right into the nerve centres of panic and dread. Her horror show
of
beauty. Makes me sweat just to think of her potential to allure, if there
is
such a verb.
We met thirteen years ago before I was a broken necked invalid in some
hospital. Car crash of sickness with her starring as some garish whore
wanking me furiously. She was killed outright and I survived, physioed
back
to health and never forgot the dead look on her face. The cloudy fluid
leaking out of her torn right eyeball. The badly broken jawbone sticking
out
of her soft downy cheek. That face, that beautiful face, her beautiful
face,
almost disengaged from the reality of its wounds, is behind every torn
back
curtain or jerked open door. Every snatch of reflection in the mirror
is
filtered by her broken visage such that I cannot breath.
I didn't even get her name. Just wanted a soft silk palming in the furious
fast lane of every new millennium; the new designer drug of every cheap
thrill seeker.
She comes at me with a loaded gun and chases me through the choking streets
of claustrophobia, I cannot scream, the release won't come. Won't come.
Friday 17: Love the taste of my knee.
This is the only thing that quells the fear - to sit in my boxer shorts
late
into the night with the WalkMan on full belt, licking my knee in a foetus
of
comfort in the centre of the draughty hallway. People stepping over me,
sucking their teeth in disgust. Listen to the wind as it trails pamphlets
for the Night on the Right Side of Hell. A club she would have been a
regular at. I can't get therapy, for Chrissake, I am alone in this caper.
Maybe tonight, she will forget my name, my mobile number, her ram wiped
by
some accident in a car, her face smashed into the windscreen a broken
neck
of airbag explosion at the height of my ecstacy. The damp undergarments
of
eternity.
An axe swings in from down the chill corridor, remember that chrome ball
of
doom that drills your brains out so you fall in a shrivelled mass of nought
on the cold marble floor? There she stands, her cape of lamb's leather
lifting in the Hollywood breeze. Her steel heals. Her eyes without a face.
She has me in a neck lock before I can scramble to my feet. What have
I done
to deserve this? I ask her without making a sound. The words never come.
Never Come.
Saturday 18: Chained to her lust.
Raped time after time would be a stupid statement; once you are raped,
you
are always raped. The vomit never ends. And as she leans in for just one
more round, deep gashes all over my body plunged into like a sicko would
split an American Pie. The most brutal of foes, nostalgia.
Where am I now? Grand Central Station in some stinking pit of filth near
the
men's toilets - just dropped in for tea, the vicar pipe organed. When
is she
gonna let me die, just let me fall away from her grasp and be sucked down
on
to concrete by the drag of grav? Wind in my hair as I look down into the
well. Thirty seven stories of remorse zipping up at the speed of vertigo.
No one picks me up off the sidewalk as my brains trickle out of my flattened
skull. The loneliness, the sheer isolation of death sends a spiral helix
of
fear through my nervous system. Reanimated like the zombie I have become,
I
chase through streets tearing out throats with my teeth, my eyes roll
like
milk in yolk buckets. Watch me stagger stupidly towards you, a clash of
teeth with virgin skin and I am sated for a few more nights.
Saturday 25: A night on the wrong side of hell.
My forehead is the shape of an axe. I have been headbutting the wall
all
night in memory of her soft beauty, her silk of smiles, her lacquer hands
like chinese dolls of purest handiwork. Her surface will never crack.
Will
never run dry. She slits my throat at the bar and my words spill out onto
the bar, spattering the barman who asks security to get me the hell outta
there. Wrong idea, pal. I am the fearless, the unhauntable. The uncrackable.
I take out my cheap dirty gun and drill some holes in him. Behind me,
Julia,
for that is the name I have given my sorrow, cradles me, her calfskin
glove
wrapped around mine. Her finger curling mine around the rusty trigger.
We are one finally, this Julia who gives me the fear.
Nutboy and Crazygirl oiling together in a slaking mass of murder and
degradation. Just think back to all the times we had eaten each others
faeces, drank each other's dread, broken fingers of stupid innocent victims
of our playtime in the playground. The memory is unbearable sometimes.
But Julia understands.
*****
THE END
First published in the Urbanite, issue #12, 2001
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