Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 2:6 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 2:5 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
Now that orange little disk out there in the atmosphere has sunken completely into the waters, in its place the glow has become grey with the moon’s twisted rabbit’s teeth illuminating the black surfaces which seat themselves beneath the lit-up windows which seem like horrific entrances into worlds of glowing hot light. The stars seem like they’re violet, no green, no silver; peak through, the stranger’s living room seems so much warmer than anything you’ve ever known. From the corners arise the night watch, the hobos with vino flowing freely from their mouths and their companions. Vampires stalk their prey, and the youth fade into the shade where forms blur & become only haze. Susie holds onto the nervous talkative crowds, the youth who don’t know shit about the coldness of the stoop as you lay your bedding down or the simple & earnest way an act of horrible violence takes on a delirious psychoactive quality when the moon pulls on our waters.
There were two women with skin like that of volcanic rock, blue lipstick perfectly drawn onto their lips and hair colored like candy. Their make-up ran like a rainbow spring, tears of joy spilt like pea-soup for their idol as boys with misshapen eagles of haircut and the United Colors of Plaid funneled themselves through a small passage into the underground insides of a dilapidated parking structure. Susie felt arms & playful shoves all around her, “you sure smell like you belong here” one of them intimated. “Too ugly to be a mannequin.” Their jeers & cheers for the show to begin clattered throughout the parking structure, snapping & collapsing onto each other as they faded into nothingness. The only lights within the hot concrete car-tomb came from cars, with the white headlights being softened by a mixture of brake & turn-signal. The grounds were covered with snake-y vines, covered in something that felt like fine chalk and they flowed into the large amplifiers and racks which were covered in stickers of cute cartoon doggies and girl mascots. She pushed her way towards the front, finding herself among the teenage girls dressed in ragged clothing and adorned with poof-ball haircuts who shrieked in anticipation as nondescript women & men dressed in black assumed their places as if they were only coal miners standing by as the lift lowered them closer towards the earth core.
The mad cheers of the audience threatened to deafen Susie, who held onto her ears as a girl dressed in a tutu and a leather jacket wailed like a banshee. “I love you, June!” She was enveloped by the crowd, which beat as one like a heartbeat as waves of turbulence soared through them and the heat which burned at the edges of her skin threatened to melt them all together. Amidst the screams & the shoves, there is a sudden silence. An almost skeletal figure materialized in the dim darkness behind the drum set, drawing looks of anticipation from the band-members who held onto their instruments & sticks with shakes in their wrists. Susie looks to the left, to the right; we are all enraptured by the skeleton’s costume, a pink princess getup completed by a plastic tiara. Its pearlescent cloth hung from the skeleton’s thin arms loosely, a misshapen parody of a mythology filled by a figment who with its own matter of existence reveals the absurdity of the frilly lace and the wide perch of the long skirt. The skeleton reveals itself from the shadows, stepping forward toward the microphone only inches away from the audience who gasps as the beautiful shimmering edges of insect wings flutter in the wind. “Hello, everyone.” Her voice trembled, almost threatening to lose control as it approached the final syllable. Susie tried to keep herself from crying ‘cuz it was as if that black-n-white poster had come to life, its piercing eyes now squirming with light and its expression… she was a cheap imitation of Judy/Lolita 108, scars where there was perfect skin; unease where there was youthfulness; bones where there was baby fat… but she felt a shiver as her amber eyes searched the room, probing into the inner lives of the strangers who’d decided to come for her.
“I’d like to say first of all that I’m grateful for your support. My sister and I, we were estranged because we… well; I’m just going to say that I miss her and I wished I could have told her that before this happened. This world has a weird way of pulling two people apart, even if they were joined together.” There were claps of appreciation, cheers & warm verbal hugs emanating from the sympathetic audience. Each person here, yes even Susie, were drawn to this woman somehow. Her struggles & sensations became those of the people who’d surrounded her, possessiveness for people who didn’t realize they possessed anything in the first place. “I would die for you!”
June smiled, saying nothing as the band counted off and jumped into their first piece; a rapid-fire dance number, complete with synthesized brass which elicited the image of a marching band being squashed by a super-computer. Discordant notes which pummeled at the stomach and blasts of guitar feedback made the spines & bodies of flesh pressing into Susie grow weak, limbs & legs shaking themselves like palms in a tornado. Susie was the only one who remained stiff like a reed, bodies bursting into water all around her, watching carefully the way June prepared herself with deep breaths before uttering a loud guttural groan which shook the pillars of the parking structure & threatened to rupture the concrete beneath them. The teenage girls seemed to lunge at elbows first, hoping to inflict injuries with smiles– June herself convulsing like an orangutan stuck on an electrified fence, wings jittering like that of a fruit fly with its legs caught on brown tape… and Susie stood there with tears in her face ‘cuz June seemed with the tense limbs and buggy jitters to somehow express something so recognizable she almost shrieked & withdrew with shame as the bass rattled every bone in her ribcage.
The walls of the parking structure burned away like wax, grey concrete pouring down into a liquid-y soup. June’s words seemed like lanterns lit far away in a dark swamp, creatures pulling at your legs as you try to find your bearing around snake-like vines. She unearths the sarcophagus, she opens the treasure chest, she discovers the shore through her telescope– a woman knees are dusted by the sand, June sneered to the delighted applause of the front-row as she set her arcane conjurations into motion. Susie felt the words burn through her mind much like they did when she’d login to the network, so much information that it became a matter of choosing what to understand and what to forget entirely.
“What I’ve wanted all along / you placed within the palm of my hand.”
She can reach out, hands outstretched; their fingers touch for a second. She can feel the silk fabric under her thumbs, colored a light blue which reminded her of the blue mother and her heavenly waters filling her with the lust for freedom amongst the waves. Extend your arms further and you can feel the coldness of that translucent cage, sniff as hard as you can and you can get only the faintest taste of the ocean’s salt. Tears welled into the eyes of all within earshot, those who know nothing about what it means to be a slave– to be a possession disposed of when it no longer serves its purpose.
“‘foolish girl’ / I answer, ‘never to see the color blue.’”
The lord with a flick of his wrist places the peasant fool into her cage, to no protest from her sisters in chain. The women who served beside her had grown to hate her with the hatred that only pain could bring, a hatred for those who have sold the dignity of their bodies for their own gain and no-one else’s. A hatred one feels for a fool girl who clutches her silk in the belief that it may set her free, a hatred one feels for such a damn fool… fool, fool, but they bow their head in silence as she shrieks. They place the cage into the sand, the cold ocean air burning at her ankles and wrists. June emitted a blood-curdling howl, the audience echoed, the building shook and the instruments buzzed as the pink-adorned skeleton flings her tiara to the front-row and shook her body as if a million volts had suddenly rattled through every extremity– she falls onto the crowd which extended their hands upwards as if offering June to the skies and her voice plummeted from a school-girl squeak into the rattling rumble of some gigantic beast while her wings invited the curious fingers of many eager to feel its fine material.
“Who is free / will learn of slavery
Who that see / will know blindness.
Blindness.”
The soldiers who had dropped their torches onto the petroleum-soaked cage recoiled with absolute horror at the sight of the peasant girl whose skin had turned to goo– whose face had turned into a black mask of mud, her eyes red from the flames and her teeth black from the ash. The whirlpool of fire within the cage now enveloped the peasant girl as if it were now a part of her body, and her hoarse throat croaked with promise.
“I won’t find heaven / I won’t know hell.
I will arise from your graves, its stench and the smell.
stench and the smell.”
June remained on the ground, as if she’d already been buried ‘n the feverish yelps from the guitar grew into the terror of some miss-strung violin. The anticipation of the song’s final verse had created hysteria among the boys & girls of the audience who now lunged at each-other’s shoulders, hoping to smash themselves together into one form.
“Say ‘foolish girl’ / I answer, ‘never to see the color blue.’”
They’d covered the cage in sand, returning to their homes & families with uneasy shivers and quietness in their words. The lord laughed at the superstitions of his flock, who insist that they’d never heard someone scream the way the peasant fool did. As the moon sank into the ocean, the soldiers stood at guard as the lord made his way to the chambers of his mistress. He removes his clothes, first his fine robes then his undergarments, and approaches the silk-adorned covers which bulged at the side of the bed. With a devious smile, he pulls on the covers and expects her naked body in waiting only to be greeted by the shiny blackness of a carapace. Its wings flutter, and in panic he smashes an oil-lamp onto it and it jitters with pain as flames caught onto the beautiful silk and incinerated the wooden bedposts. The lord runs in his nudity through his palace, watching his soldiers overwhelmed, eviscerated by the gigantic beetles which had broken out of their domestic huts– out of their kitchens and their bedrooms– and bore themselves onto the royal premises. He felt black mandibles press into his sides and wondered if it was his wife who would now devour him.
“Say ‘foolish girl’ / I answer, ‘never to see the color blue.’
I will never see the color blue.”
The band sputtered to an ending, striking a coda with what seemed to be the unearthly insect swarm buzz amplified to a million decibels which shook Susie’s bones like she was strapped to a B-52 Stratofortress flying over the burning rubble. She pulled herself away from the noise, falling over the merchandise table, staffed by a particularly unwashed rooster-kid filling its nails who protested with angry gestures as jewel cases and cassettes tumbled from the plastic boxes neatly arranged with accompanying price labels. The amorphous creature built by the bodies of adoring fans contracted and then spat from its center a girl wearing a roughly-knitted sweater who slid across the floor, one of her shoelaces trailing behind her as she clawed at Susie in a fatal bid for composure. As the girl pulled on Susie’s yellow sleeves, their eyes met– Susie noticed that she did not blink, and the darkness under her eyelids as dark as coal as her lips stretched into an uneven grin.
Almost by instinct, Susie formed her lips into a puckered kiss but the girl only pulled Susie closer and her nose fell into the girl’s ratty hair which smelled of turpentine. The torn sleeves, the dirtied sneakers, pants uneven while eyes seemed fixed onto the distant horizon; Susie pulled herself away, the image burned into her head that of a shattered creature sucked empty by the sound. Squashed by the elbows, the moist backs, the heat of the humans enveloping you heightens you to a fever pitch. Your boundaries sweat away and what is not taxonomically-related to the warmth which envelops your ears seems almost immaterial– nothing as important as the sweetness in your head while the noise clears away anxiety, depression, the very thought of any fucking insincerity that would pull you away from this instance as your hands float in the cloudy air and your hips sway without rhythm to the growl of a metronomic bass line. “Oh shit” was all Susie could muster before that moment ran like sand into a shore of groggy & headache-y feeling and it just becomes unbearable, the way it made her stomach groan and her sweat pass into her eyes with salty droplets making her blink with horrible pain. June’s pink ensemble had deprecated into a ragged mesh of shiny plastic fibers, her socks black with the residual dust & smog scattered by the automobiles. Her shrill screams had now become hoarse whistles of a yell overtaken by the screech of distorted guitars which singed cochlear hair cells into a death cry of ecstasy. Arming herself with a beer bottle smashed on the side of a speaker, she puts the jagged edges onto her arm and slashes open her skin from where a river of blood spilled onto the front-lines which had their eyes peeled with expectant intensity– glasses and knitted caps stained red, their hands outstretched to catch some of it in their hands as her insect wings drooped down with the weight of sweat.