Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 2:5 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 2:4 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
They always came in quietly, with their long faces– as if it has ceased to be something done out of genuine joy. Something within them compelled their purchase– as if contractually-obliged, their memories bound by sharp spines which continually remind them of the distance between the ear and the world within the song. One of them was a somber woman, never smiling even once while she was in the store. She’d been working at the offices around the corner but was released because quote-unquote she was unpleasant and unprofessional in every way. For a while she considered giving up on finding any work, just waiting alone in her apartment to see what would happen once the savings had been bled dry. She filled her time with aimless wandering, often having stepped into the video-store which was this damp and slightly dark alley-way lookin’ place with videos and entertainment diskettes littering racks which stood up against the wall and a bored lookin’ guy reading a magazine behind a sticker-adorned counter.
“What did Judy mean to you, Lyudmila?” Susie didn’t know why but suddenly she’d found it important to take pictures of them as they walked in. They would be out-of-focus fragments, the sudden capture of something which had disappeared into nothingness as soon as the flash had faded out– for once, Susie thought, it would be them who could be seen on glossy film. “Someone like her,” she thought, “is that someone who’s just supposed to disappear?”
“I mean like we lost the one person we could let in, you know” and she was sipping on a sodie pop as her pink boots occasionally met while her legs swung freely in the air– unhurriedly shooting the breeze, sitting on the counter. Unlike Lyudmila, she was always smiling– her shark-teeth made Susie’s knees shake with angst she couldn’t recognize. “I can’t explain but the world outside of the ones ‘tween the speakers seemed really scary. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like she was someone you could be. As long as she sang, I forgot who I was. Have you ever lost your identity? Like, you didn’t know who you were?”
They differed in shapes and sizes, in names and colors but there was always the consistency of a reverence & a grief for what had become their own personal confidant. Judy was their idol, someone on which it would be possible to project all fears– someone through which you could imagine yourself as someone different… someone who wasn’t filling all day or filling in spreadsheets or taking shit from the rude customers who don’t even look you in the eyes when they count their coins… you could imagine yourself as somebody brave enough to admit that there was hatred in their heart, brave enough to turn themselves inside out and show that the hours/minutes/years had left their mark and indeed that you were someone remarkable enough to be exposed for the horrible creature you were… captured on Susie’s camera for all to see, in the midst of debasement or hiding your drunken face as you struggle with your keys. She’d open her wings and hold her fans close, using her body heat to keep those who’d never cracked through their shells: “I know you guys; you are the hopeless and the desperate. I’ll keep you alive.” Oh LORD; the messiah complex of a righteous loser.
“I was never comfortable working in an office. The oppressiveness of it all, your co-workers gawking at you all the time to make sure you were working. I’d started hating how I looked, despising the hairiness of my chin and the size of my feet.” Susie says ‘cheez’ and snaps a pic of the guy in the black suit, instructing him to fix the direction of his hair. “And Judy made it better?”
“It’s hard to talk about but, I felt liberated. Here were all the things I’d been taught to covet for my own fun. Her high sheepish voice, her awkward girlie-ness and that strange smile and the dreams of being held in big strong arms– but I couldn’t get myself to desire her. I tried, honestly, I did. I imagined myself…”
Susie lowered the camera and stared deeply into his eyes; she wondered– oh well, maybe he was just a creep but she felt so sorry for him that she wanted to hold him in his arms and feed him fruit while he gently fell asleep, not minding his receding hairline or crooked jaw.
“I imagined myself cornering her and placing my hands on her body. She’d yell and tell me to go away but would pull me closer with her arms; I felt that I was supposed to make her a woman right there and, but…”
There was a sudden silence; even the ecco-jams had come to a stop. Emmy studied the twitching muscles on Susie’s face, knowing that there was some connection between the office-man and Susie that he’d never understand… something which rattled in their bodies, where there was nothingness for him when he searched.
“When I pulled on her hair or her skirt, it hurt me and I didn’t understand why. I cried and screamed, even though I thought I was the one doing it,” and now Susie suddenly started to cry too and her sobs were so loud that not even the cardboard and the asbestos-covered walls could deaden them. Emmy pulls a grimy piece of tissue paper and tries to hand it to her but Susie grabs his arm instead and uses his sleeve to wipe away the gunk pouring from her nose.
The salary man begun with the tapes familiar to Susie’s eye… yes, watch the men who have no features to speak of– whose bodies fade into the homogenous goop of male, his taut muscles and curvature of rump fat hanging from his hairy thighs. At first, he took joy in being the perpetrator of violence, the arms which held hands high above and ignored the pleas for help. Through a lens there is a face, it could have been the face of the girl next door or the cute cashier or the school-chum who’d make you feel ashamed & stupid by rejecting you… a face recognizable even though you’ve never met its acquaintance, twisted into horror by the male form who presses its fingers into lovely flesh.
He’s on his knees now, everyone else staying away from the sad shape which cast its ogre-like shadow onto the rugged cave-walls. The tapes with their violence and the tears of a girl who learns to weep as a professional would, they’d lose their luster soon enough and the salary-man no longer sees himself in the tall & dark form who facelessly penetrates the tied-up waitress. He with his job which relentlessly wears down his nerves, who has turned a once youthful face into a quivering blob of sweat, who wears his suit not with pride but with the foot prints of those who have used his flabby body as a bridge… he takes off his shirt stained at the armpits, folds his pants and lays himself down on the bed– he brings his hands up and tries to squeak, like the little girls in his tapes would before hands would make their mark on his neck. He realized he had changed beyond return, watching his ugly gesture that he’d rehearsed from his favorite videogirls in the mirror. It was not the power that he felt, the joy of revenge in making that “bitch” pay for arousing you… he pulls from a bag a pair of cat ears and puts them on his balding head, imagining that the hair on his back would be the fur of some cute little kitty cat. “Meow,” he says with his deep voice which was so quiet it barely shook the folds of his throat. He’d begun to feel what she’d felt, on her back with the camera luridly watching each shiver and the movement of each little toe as a meek & tiny meow falls from her lips. “Meow,” does he even realize that his fat ankles will never be as delicate & sweet as his heroine’s curling & petite paws? “Meow,” does he even care that his fat & sweaty lip will never be as candy-colored & tender as the girlie’s cooing kissing heart? “Meow,” it resonates from somewhere so strongly it can penetrate even the deepest of fleshy barriers.
“When the revolution comes, men like him will be the first to go,” Emmy said plainly. He scratched his beard as the salary man in the black suit quietly paid for Judy’s new single and stumbled back into the orange approaching twilight, becoming only another strand of plankton flowing through the blue ocean and maybe each of them had a poster on the inner side of the closet door– her chubby arms, the slightly crooked slant of her left incisor, the laugh which was slightly too loud and too awkward to be forced; they all leaned onto the wood with all of their weight, listening to the splinters clatter on the floor and hoping that it’ll hold back the waves smashing up against the dam.
“Hey but what if it was that asshole who killed her,” the high school kid screamed as she shook her friend who was but one in a sea of slight variations on a singular teenage archetype. Susie tried to capture all of them in the miniscule frame of her disposable camera, their ragged haircuts and colorful keychains & stickers softened by the blurry lens. “Which asshole?” Susie asked. Some of the girls scoffed, perhaps with fear that the potential sex-lives of their idols were more like mirages felt by the thirsty trudging through the desert. To the kid who doesn’t know any better, she may mistakenly adopt the idol’s perfectly manicured private life as a template for her own life– she’s yet to realize that the songs and the movies and the cute little articles & interviews were only illusions designed to be seductive, to suggest that maybe with mommy’s credit card and a good eye the attention, the camera time, the money, the fame, the love & that warm feeling when everyone’s coming to see you and just you; yeah, all of that could be yours.
“All the men in her songs either ignore her or demand things from her,” one of them said as she chewed on sunflower seeds. “Demanding assholes,” the teenager screeches, “all of them!” A teenager who was a little big for her age gave an addendum, “same thing the man I was going out with did.” Susie held her in the center of the lens, the baby fat on her face hid the sad smile of a lonely child. “He was gonna leave his wife for me, just assuming I’d drop everything for him.” The teenagers laughed and made loud eww sounds much to the chagrin of Emmy who was trying to figure out a ploy that would make them leave– “maybe say they’re giving out free temporary cat tattoos.”
“Mine said he was going to kill me if I told his wife,” a teenager wearing thick glasses said as she awkwardly scratched her ankle which led down to her tattered shoes. Susie wondered if there was something beyond the lens she might capture– the girl had completely dissolved herself into a role, doing anything she could do to fit in amongst the teenagers who were now calling for the death of that guy. “You should have told his wife everything,” one of them sneered. Another shook herself, alit with frenzy as she shouted: “he probably has a daughter your age, the pig!” Susie thought of the man who may have stood outside the door, demanding that he see Judy during the night– did she so badly need someone’s approval that she would seek it in the hairy arms of some wealthy benefactor who could easily look past her quiet melancholy and violent temper if it meant an escape from a wife who could only have been charged with the heinous mistake of existing? The teenager cleaned her glasses with a pink handkerchief as she tried to bury her feelings deep underneath the calls for blood which revolved around her, “he said his wife had gotten fat and didn’t appreciate him.” Susie wondered what it was about his family that he found so objectionable, so inherently disgusting that he was willing to chase the skirt of a young child at the risk of throwing away everything– do they hate their daughters so much that they will doom them to competition at such an early age, knowing that the only way to grab his attention is to stay young & willing? Did he grow scared of Judy, what she represented as his daughter begun to realize that she’d become an object of desire– did he, incapable of living with what he’d done, threaten Judy with strangulation by the same loving hands which had already once forcefully pressed themselves into her neck? Susie pretended to throw up, the entire crowd of teenagers cheered and imitated her dramatic hurls with the accompaniment of laughter and it was through this ritual & rite of intensification that for the first time this she-creep felt she was someone who was part of something wonderful & free; for the first time ever yeah ever she could grab someone by the cheeks and say “hey I know now, we’re in this together.” Somehow, it was something like the opposite of loneliness.
A group of older kids stood by the deprecating jazz-funk records with elevated brows, stroking their thin beards as their hands felt at special edition key-chains– “limited edition,” he says as he brings up to the light a plastic swimsuit model posing in front of a giant kill-bot. They were Emmy’s crowd, the so-called erudite intellectuals who shunned the pages holding esoteric truths and the equations which could quantify the uneven edges of the world in favor of pursuit after material which slid so wonderfully across the skin, distrustful of those academics who shun the sensuous, who don’t get that there’s more wisdom in the violent screeches of Smokestack Johnson’s plastic alto than entire wings of a library. They were the lost children of the land from which things will rise in the East, casting its shadow onto those in its valleys– they who had seen the nakedness of their father, and rather than cover their master’s shame they reveled with pure fucking glee in what it revealed: his liver spots, his weak limbs, the way the skin moved when he coughed up his phlegm– why I could knock him over if I wanted to, no longer afraid… and so it goes, such was their curse to be the mud on which one will step if they wish to have harvest from their land. “Their land?” asked no-one in particular. Emmy’s friends pissed away the nights cognitively-dulled by cheap stimulants and easy noodles, drowning in the pop culture runoff that had raised them, lying on their couches while their tongues spat vitriol in arguments which only ended in armistice, treaties agreeing to settle their differences with high-stakes rounds of Moirai– a game banned for its distinctly-foreign sensibilities and wanton violence. Susie noticed that a poster of the sniper character named Lachesis was kept behind the glass counter, the skulls of demons crushed beneath her steel toe boots while hordes of horned creatures erupted from the red abysses to pull at her legs.
“How do we know she’s even dead,” a woman dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit covered with cartoon women’s legs sez rhetorically as she slunk lower & lower into a bean bag chair. Susie approached with the viewfinder to her eyes, hoping to capture the moist surface of a tofu dog covered in cheese as it slid into the mouth of a dandruff-y man who proudly displayed his tattoo of a number set she did not recognize. “Eight eight eight eight,” she said as the man smiled and once the chili sauce had stopped its goopy run down his chin Susie realized man, she was pretty hungry and she clutched her stomach which growled like a damaged air conditioner. “You don’t think she’s dead,” Emmy replied with a chuckle. One of his friends who was furiously typing away on a mobile terminal made one of those obnoxious laughs and sez, “you not read the latest on MUSIC/JUDY? Where you been?” The man who had spilled chili & cheese onto his shirt laughed, “did anyone actually see her die?” Susie thought of the images she’d seen, blood splattered on the pavement; the brain chunks which seemed to shine like a pretty piece of plastic just like they would, that’s what made it suspicious… “Everyone’s seen ‘Revenge of Chunklette’ and ‘Circular Saw,’ I can’t believe anyone was fooled by those special effects,” he said while tapping a martial rhythm onto his keyboard. The entire group laughed while Susie puzzlingly wrote the numbers “8.8.8.8” on her arm with a half-depleted pen, trying to put away the creeping questions which were poking at her synapses. Yeah, she’d seen those and many other films, full of screaming women and long jabbing knives– so was it all studio magic? An orchestrated ploy to sell singles and irreversibly etch the name of a teenage girl who’d had so much potential and love in her onto the hearts of all of us? Did all the variables & functions which had been set into action far before Judy was born into her place– far before there was a “Susie,” too– did the series which erupted from them converge onto only this point in history, all other universes rotting away like castles in the sands of a beach? “Who am I to deny that I’m only an actor, a node in a net,” she announced to Emmy’s friends as she expended the film in her camera on their pimply & greasy faces covered with the stupid grin of a creature who believes it has transcended its cage by acknowledging that it is trapped. The realizations only further cemented her path, such was the insight Princess Casio shared with her subjects as they watched from the gutters above– licking the trashy residue on her paws, she’d lost her ability to feel fear even as the dirty hounds with their large teeth growled at her from the streets below the electrical poles. To this kitty-cat, it didn’t matter whether the laws which supposedly governed all interactions in this world were true or not– Susie had been set on a course with a velocity too great to be diverted, such is the nature of everything and the kitty-cat truly believed it is this liberation which has empowered Susie to move exactly as the trajectory of her motion could predict. “At a certain point,” Princess Casio reasoned to Tandy, “it’s hard to tell what’s pushing her along– Bastet’s long dark arm pressing on her shoulder, the routines & algorithms bored into her brain by their systems, or just her own perverse heart guiding like a windsock.” Sharp and Atari meowed in response, their whiskers shivering in the currents of the chilly afternoon wind.
A lonely figure stumbled towards Emmy, a hand in front of a pale face as a meek voice asked for something called “Dial ‘H’ for Hysteria.” Emmy laughed, realizing only after it was too late that the usual awkward charm would only increase the agony in the interaction between them. “Typical,” he grunts as he moves behind the counter– from the drawer he removes a jewel case, decorated with colorfully-drawn beetles & crickets. “That’ll be,” Emmy sez before realizing that Susie was peering over his shoulder and the lonely figure slid the money towards him while the jewel case disappeared into its embrace. “What is that,” Susie stammers as Emmy tries to position himself in the hopes of touching her with his back… he blushes when he feels Susie’s arm on his neck, apologizing & coughing before moving away. The lonely figure jumps a little bit, unsure how to answer as a hand went closer to its mouth. “Dial ‘H’ for Hysteria,” a hollow & feminine voice answered. Susie watched the way the figure’s taut legs shook in its tight jeans, how the black sweater clung so delicately to the figure’s skin. It was the most beautiful apparition she’d ever seen and she cursed her own stupidity when she brought the viewfinder to her eyes, depressed the shutter, and realized that she’d already expended all of the film within it. “It’s music, by my favorite,” the figure turns the jewel case around to reveal a woman dressed in army fatigues holding a sword to her head. “Her name is June, though she goes by the Virgin Blossom;” Susie cried out, recognizing the eyes on the soot-covered face of the woman on the case as the same face which had stared at her while her legs & arms were covered in burning computer chip & silicon… those same amber eyes which had transformed into a swarm of horrendous bees poking at her eyeballs as they lunged themselves from the paper posters outside. “Bees,” the lonely figure said with laughter which revealed its crooked teeth.
“She’s known mostly as a fuck-freak creep who acts crazy on TV. She’s Judy’s sister if you can believe that– I guess was,” the lonely figure said as it walked through the pop section of the store. “They look like each other but make really different stuff,” Susie paying attention as the lonely figure pulls out a jewel case of Judy’s debut single from a cardboard box. Even though her mouth was laughing, her hands underneath her chin above a pastel blue shirt adorned with a tie– her eyes seemed inert, unchanging as if flawlessly copied onto each successive image… of her in a bathing suit, of her with a leather hat and a toy gun, of her pretending to be the captain of a ship; the eyes always seemed to be on the verge of something, the lids taut with stress and the eyeballs somehow wetter than they should be. The lonely figure pointed, “they could be twins;” Susie wondered why the lonely figure could not see that the eyes were an ocean of difference, each with their own fish and plant life and wooden boats that do a ‘lil dance to the waves.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m clinging on to her,” the apparition showed its crooked teeth once again with a hollow chuckle escaping from its mouth, strands of hair entwined with empty rolls of electrical tape. “My parents don’t know what I’m doing with my life, they don’t understand that… I guess I recognized something in her, and it made me think we were the same in some way.” Hmm… Susie thinks to herself as the apparition filled the air, absorbing into its body the molecules of dust and smoke which filled the air with a thick aether. If they’d laid a grave for June’s body, it would be covered with not only the gravel of the ground but also the grime underneath our fingertips and also the disgusting muck which forms on the face after a particularly high-spirited crying session– watch the crowd, some of them drop in jewel cases but some of them drop themselves in. “Sad sad world,” the apparition concludes; the only time this voluminous cloud forms into anything tangible is when it holds something of Judy’s in its hand, latching onto the sights and sounds on disc as a method of expressing something so brittle it would only crumble ‘tween your fingers as you look through the sand for it. “It doesn’t make sense if you dig deeper,” just as a network is meaningless if Susie only blinks her giant eyeball in the direction of one measly node. You can pull away the curtain from the window and see nothing of the 100 million things, communicating together– “like a stoplight does with a crosswalk,” and now we all move and “like a light does with the concrete” which fires its starting gun in anticipation of all things which move only at night. The apparition is meaningless, nonexistent without the things which surround it… its eyes look at Susie’s face, inert & observant.
“You know; she’s playing down the street to-nite… no mannequins allowed… if you’re interested,” but Susie only clutched her stomach in response which grumbled & howled like some huge bear in a guts-colored cave. The apparition was silenced, standing tall with an amazed expression. “Are you hungry?” Susie responded only by opening her mouth and pointing towards it with a finger, turning the apparition almost a pale shade of blue from loud laughter as drool steadily formed in the crevices ‘tween her chompers.
“I think I have a donut in my purse or something” and Susie’s eyes got all big & yearning for the lemon-y treat that the apparition pulled from its black plastic bag, its surface so shiny & sticky in the dim light of the record store. “You can have it,” Susie graciously bowed and took the fried food from the apparition’s hands as if it were a gift from some other world-y divine who had intervened. Susie bites into the donut with 10-ton power, her careless chomp sent strands of off-white goo flowing in all directions… it splattered onto records, walls, Emmy’s glasses, and worst of all on the apparition’s black blouse where it left a slimy & slowly congealing stain.
“Oh no,” the apparition yelped while Emmy smelled his glasses almost out of instinct, noticing the subtle tang of the lemon. “I’m s-w-orry,” Susie said while continuing to chomp on the lemon-flavored confectionary. The apparition smiles and takes a long drag with its finger across the surface of its blouse, the lemon-y flavoring dripping from the digit as it goes towards its mouth. Susie’s loud chewing gradually came to a halt as she watched the digit enter the apparition’s red mouth, noticing how the skin of its pink lips shone like the sweetest of all donut glazes. Strands of saliva fell from its chin as the tongue circled around the digit, searching for every atom of flavor; Susie’s ears turning hot, imagining what the ooze falling from its mouth onto the blouse might taste of… and each dripping made the stain larger, growing in intensity & luminescence as its mouth swirled around the flavored-lined finger. Abruptly, the apparition spits the liquid into its hand from which puddles of saliva gathered onto the floor, looking all gooey and white… “yuck, I don’t like lemon filling,” the apparition said as its mouth glistened from the artificially-flavored goo, congealing structures forming peaks & valleys as if its skin was the silvery surface of some distant ice giant. Susie felt waterfalls escaping from her own mouth, thick strands & rivers of ooze bubbling & alive with entire milky ways of white strands which promiscuously mingled within their microcosms. Within each drop an entire spectrum which when unraveled would reveal what has become now the totality of her being, a double helix roadmap to the uncharted territory held within the ever-dissolving boundaries of her body.
“What were you like as a child?” The apparition asked as it searched for a tissue in its purse. Susie chewed with her mouth open, occasionally stopping to demonstrate the chewed chunks as she’d molded & manipulated them on the tip of her tongue. “My mom,” Susie said without much thought, “said I liked to hide in closets & ovens a lot.” The apparition had a curious sense of poise to its questioning, “what were you hiding from?” Susie swallowed another gulp of lemon-filled donut. “I guess I was hiding from them.” The apparition looked confused, “them?”
“Come out little Susie, I’m not going to hurt you.” The feeling of the hollow coldness inside the spaces underneath the tabletops begun to freezer-burn the edges of her extremities, she remembers squeezing herself ‘tween the Bunsen burners and the graduated cylinders. Susie was not born with strong limbs or a tall stature; she was not the ape-like creature who discovered that the broken branch could be used as a club to force the submission of its peers. Susie instead found comfort in the translucence of water, the way a shadow would disappear when it ventured into the dark. The world made her feel impossibly small, improbably silent & irrevocably alone when after school time the orange sunlight would beam itself through the large windows– the wood of the desks and the laminated floors had an uneasy amber fever to them, as if they were about to fall apart and melt into lava.
“Susie, I know your hiding spot,” the voice beyond the darkness proclaimed. Susie softly opened the door, knowing she’d have to go home eventually or face the wrath of Mother Goose and her fearsome shriek. Susie was wearing her raincoat, a dark red which she believed would help her protect herself from the threats which loomed beyond the class-room walls– goblins and demons, zombies which could never surpass the enchanted plastic armor she wore ‘round her shoulders.
All of these magical defenses however, fell apart the minute those herbal-scented arms found their rest on Susie’s head. Only in the most secretive of moments, when the shades are pulled down and the blinds are shuttered– only then would she admit that the uneasy attention lavished upon her by the friendly middle-aged woman she’d sometimes call “mother” mistakenly really did leave her with warm satisfaction and a feeling of being wanted. Rejected by the other girls who found her bulkiness & messy hair damaging to their social standing, mocked & humiliated by the boys who found her an easy & willing curiosity at best; “no,” she’d say to herself quietly, “I won’t tell anyone about us.” That time after gym class, the birds were humming quietly– ‘member the fungus growing on the edges of the showers? It was the only time this strange body of hers seemed to really exist at all, captured in the dark on the 35mm camera charting the waters unexplored as Miz Teacher asked Susie to take it all off. That was the last time she’d ever felt as real as the celebrities she’d spend the rest of her life hunting.
“Please, into my hand honey. Please. Darling, I need it.” Miz Teacher stuck her hand in front of Susie, who was raptured away by her own daydream to somewhere far from here. She imagined towers which extended into space, people living in spires resembling ant hills. She dreamed of spaces in which physical forms were only like the equations she’d seen on the board, where no longer matter would be privileged over the incorporeal. Susie opens her mouth and strands of goo fell from ‘tween her teeth onto the woman’s hand, who cradled it as if it were some kind of salivary jewel.
“Uh miss,” Susie suddenly realized that the apparition had been staring at her for quite some time, concerned at the pouring of drool onto her recently-cleaned raincoat. “You have some stuff falling under your chin.” The apparition wiped away the donut-emulsified saliva from underneath Susie’s chin as she would for a sweet little baby. It seemed Susie was stuck in some kind of weird infinite loop, constantly reliving the past through one frightful absence of consciousness after another. “Hey, do you think a rocket could really fuck up your brain?” “Rocket?” The apparition was puzzled, yet tremendously intrigued. This strange creature, its raincoat covered with donut-crumbs and lemon jelly, had seen things she could have only imagined from scouring BBS boards for the details & sensations of lives she could never lead. She was watching the exit of an errant mutant fed on a caustic diet of reality TV and national paranoia, hungry for more as it punctures the barrier which had once entrapped it– an exit punctuated by pleading bows for forgiveness and the wistful cries of Emmy desperate for an answer:
“Oh there will be stars in the eyes of everyone you see / there will be raindrops falling from the trees.
Yea’ baby, oceans and rivers will flow with champagne / On the day you and I will meet again.”