Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 3:3 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 3:2 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
June was falling asleep at her post, hoping that a deep sleep would wrestle her away from her boredom. The sound of droplets falling down onto the roof was relaxing to her ears, a subtle rhythm to sync up REM waves to. She watched through her almost-closed eyelids a man’s uncertainty, trying to choose between a film and a television show. He finally sets aside the television show and cautiously moves up to the counter, and June felt too tired to remark on what was a great romantic comedy. She shot him a quick glance and noticed his age, and wondered if he’d be watching it by himself, and perhaps would imagine himself as the character within the screen, charming and incapable of feeling loss as the subject of a homely chaste girl’s affection who just wanted to feel wanted by someone. He politely nodded his head and places the coins on the counter, holding the door open for the young girl with a back-pack ascending the stairs– looking away when she bore into his eyes with a haunting glare. She was holding a cassette tape in her hands, and she smiled in response to June’s recognition. The girl’s long frizzy hair shot off into random directions, and she tried her best to mask her bitten nails which were always in proximity of her mouth. Even though they were the best of friends who shared feelings of abandonment and an unwarranted sense of what your school-going teen would call true individuality, June felt unsafe around her– she had an aura of unpredictability; you could tell behind those sleepless eyes hid a calculated mind which regarded its exterior as simply an equation needing to be solved. The girl dropped the VHS on the counter which produced an obnoxious plastic clatter. The sounds of nail-biting, tooth on finger– falling between her sentences, as if she were marking her punctuation with a gum-deadened click.
“This was great, neko girl.”
click
“I enjoyed the part where the guy’s arms get ripped off by the alien. Neko love.”
click
June simply smiled and propped up her head with her elbows, wondering how long the girl had been up and keeping herself alert with canned coffee and jellybean candy while still dressed in her pajamas. She’d show up to class whenever it was convenient for her, taking advantage of parents who were too busy to involve themselves… it seemed a wonderful way to live for June; she was growing tired of rewinding tapes while her uncle napped on the rotting couch upstairs, wishing she could be whisked away on a pirate ship with forty sails and…
click
“What are you up to, neko?” June shrugged her shoulders in response.
“Have you finished that Voyage to Cythera game yet?”
click
The girl climbs up on the counter and her bare knees stuck out as she swayed her legs while still chewing on her fleshy & torn digits. “It’s so peng. I haven’t beaten it yet, but already the Mistress of Chaos is talking about eviscerating me or something.”
click
“You can cop the sequel, if you want.”
June moved away from the back of the counter and stepped towards the rack at the front on which the magazines and tabloids were kept to mask the plastic-sealed smut costumers would ask for; June’s uncle stressed the importance of convenience when it came to video store service, asking no questions when they coughed and pointed towards which brand struck their fancy. June pulled from the middle a broadsheet on which a beautiful woman is photographed sitting from behind a glass while feasting on a piece of flesh; there’s a pixelated-face next to her and at the bottom a text-box raised rhetorical questions regarding his identity.
“I’ve been trying to do more reading, actually,” June said with an inviting self-depreciating tone. “Reading helps you really be neko; product rots your terminals.”
The girl laughed and pulled her backpack off, letting it softly thud as it dropped on the counter. June opened to a page which showed a shirtless man in the window of a hotel with a cigarette in his mouth and an angry stare likely towards the camera-man, and the text around him spoke of a mental breakdown brought-on by a stressful dip in career-earnings and the threat of imminent scandal. “They say he’s been locking himself up there, like he’s some kind of Rambo– telling people to come and get him. Everyone is looking up at him, he’s a big ape on top-a skyscraper,” click trying to hide her giggles as June felt a glimmer of shame claw at her conscience; she’d seen too much, recognizing the name but not the face so unlike the way it had been prepared for broadcast, a sunken mask of fear and embarrassment where there was once beauty. June looks up at the girl who seemed lost in her thoughts while she chewed on her nails and pointed at the picture of the actor.
“Creep shit,” June said in off-handed seriousness, not sure what she was expecting for an answer. The girl scoffed and pushed herself off the counter.
“Don’t you want it? My ‘lil neko girl, just think of it… publicity, fame,” June watched the girl play with the zipper of her back-pack as she spoke with absent-mindedness, as if reading from a script herself.
“Be the top-seller; the reason why house-wives buy the magazine, the readership of blushing moms everywhere. Maybe that’s why Auntie-in-Law doesn’t like him… or maybe that’s because Judy likes him.”
“They’re all just trying to get camera time,” the girl said as she pulled out a black revolver and deftly loaded it with six cartridges, ignoring the invitation for mutually-experienced gripes with family members. June felt herself freeze as her brain ran simulations as fast as it could; trying to calculate whether running or standing completely still netted a better probability for survival. She stammered a bit, “w-what the fuck?”
The girl closed the cylinder with her other hand and pointed it out the window, following a line of aim towards June but pulling away before the barrel’s line-of-sight ever fell on her body. “It’s a gun. Cool, huh? Just like the movies,” the girl chuckle, puffing out her chest as she posed with the revolver. June couldn’t help herself but laugh, as the surreal nature of this display had gotten to her– “just like the movies,” she said to herself. “What are you gonna’ do with that thing?” June closed the magazine and pushed it away from herself while the girl mimed a duel with a quick-draw from the pocket of her blazer. She made a bang-bang sound with her mouth, twirled the revolver around her finger, and hid it away in her belt. June held her laughter with a hand in front of her mouth, trying to convince herself that she was simply a victim once again of a spiteful sense of humor. The girl walked to her back-pack again and pulled from it a videogame cartridge, handing it to June who accepted it with a slightly dazed look… “There’s nothing two neko girls can’t do together.”
click
Her room was dark except for the light of the television screen changing its colors every 59.94th of a second. There were curtains drawn up against the window to prevent the creeping-in of the afternoon light. She feels at the controller and finds the A button with her thumb, pressing in response to the questions posed by the misshapen and blocky Mistress of Chaos… The world is veiled in darkness, the winds have stopped, and the seas are restless and wild while the Earth begins to rot. Did she really think she could have stopped her? She imagines her character falling to her knees with tears of happiness in her eyes, relieved that it was all coming to an end. “You’ve travelled to Cythera seeking fortunes… but you found only the remnants of something once worthy of plunder; how foolish you’ve been to have accepted stories as fact.” June reached for shrimp chips, keeping her hands inside the aluminum packaging while a series of complicated knocks drowned out the airship sounds coming from the tinny speakers. “Dinner time,” she heard Judy’s gratingly thin voice say. She coughed & grunted as she pulled herself from the ground, her hair tangled and her thick robe heavy with moisture.
The four of them were hunched over on a plastic table adorned with stews & rice, a small light bulb hanging from a crack in the ceiling and the sounds of television screens throughout the apartment complex cause the smallest vibrations which could be felt when you put your face up on against the laminate. Judy was dressed in fashionable pink-red colors, an adorable bow above her acne-less face. June didn’t know if it was jealousy; jealousy for the ways she captured the attentions of all men, even their father or… she shudders, wishing she could peak into the recesses of ‘Daddy’s’ mind and hoping to find all her disgust, revulsion, her fears justified by something. Supposedly they were born as twins but as they aged, the differences pulled them apart with their mother’s fine features; the nose, the broad face, the small frame, becoming Judy’s assets as she fumbled & stuttered her way through the talent shows, “aww how cutely she plays the piano.” June’s antipathy for her father ultimately blossomed from her recognition: she’d begun to adopt his bulkiness, his loathsome personality, the hateful way he phrased his words, his chin, the stutter in his eyes, and the more she recognized herself in him, the stronger her hate grew… the more she become exactly that which she loathed, and the more she in turn would spawn the disdain of her father.
“Hey Junie, could I have some of that too?” She turned to her sister, who was motioning with her hand towards a pot on the table, and opened her mouth, allowing the stew to flow from her mouth down onto the table, eliciting a shriek of horror from Judy which gave June a great feeling of pleasure. “You’re so gross,” Judy yelled but not without a bit of laughter as well, yet that small moment of togetherness was violently interrupted by the sounds of plates clattering loudly onto the table. “Enough,” the father intoned while the mother sheepishly looked down towards her stew with great indignity on her face– as if the threat to her reputation with others was more unbearable than anything which could come from her daughter’s mouth. “Go to your room and stay there, like you did the whole day.” June looked back at Judy, and the fear in Judy’s quivering eyes made June laugh even more than before. “Something is wrong with you,” their mother quietly said as she blew on the stew before her. “Maybe you should send me away,” June sneered as she rose from her seat with her bowl in her hand. She looked back towards her father, a feeling of pain coming into her throat as she watched his heavy face contort into a smile. “I would, but you’re too fat for any pimp to buy.” June threw the bowl into the sink, where it clattered & shattered into a million chunks of which each found their own little corner in the many dark shadows of the tiny apartment. Judy felt her make-up run and she buried her face into her napkin, only to find after wiping her eyes that neither parent had much of an expression on their face.
“I tried to leave it all behind when I moved in with my uncle,” June hung her arms from the balcony, sometimes dropping her spit onto the cars passing underneath them between sips of chamomile tea. Susie watched the liquid splatter onto the windshields, wonderin’ if it was being mistaken for rain. “But he never hit me, he never hurt me or anything and he did support us, but the way he talked to me really bothered me. He treated Judy like a jewel. I don’t know why.” Susie patted her on the back, not knowing really what to say beyond… “Hey, it’ll be alright, nice lady,” and June almost inched out a smile from her wet face while squeezing Susie’s hand in response. “I really don’t know why I’m telling you this.” Susie almost hated her for that lie. Both of them knew that a girl-creep leering at a woman in the shower registers not even the slightest droplet of significance without something to record it with, some fragment valuable to those who dish out importance like a resource ‘round here. “It’s because I’m a real loser creep, ma’am.” June’s eyes blinked vacantly. “We’ve got so much in common; you know– like we’re almost twins.” June looks at the cars passing by underneath on the highway, lights illuminating dark corners of the concrete buildings which all seem identical in the murk of twilight. Night was the only time she felt truly present, bodily forms melting away ‘n allowing the inner lives which usually only serve as the background radiation to daytime industry an empty space onto which they can project. It’s why she feels dread sputter into her chest with each gaze towards the emptiness underneath the freeway’s elevated structures… only in nighttime do you think: jeez what if there really is a crazy lady with a cut-up mouth who disfigures you if you say the wrong thing? “I think if it wasn’t for that video store, me and Judy would have never spoken again. We could at least watch the same things, and some kind of sisterhood came outta that.”
Susie was sprawled out on the street, with Sylvie looming over her dressed in a pink petticoat getup with pony-tails hanging under her ears and white & pink make-up which under the halogen of the street lamps made her seem like a doll’ed-up corpse. In her hand she held a bottle of brown liquid, sloshing around with each awkward sputtering movement of her arms. Susie tapped her head and saw blood flowing down from her hand, and with a confused gurgle she motioned towards the two lovers who were entwined by hand– the woman shrieked with disgust at the bloody hand which waved at them half-heartedly, her man pulling her away with a concerned twitch in his bulging eyes. “Now… I’m sorry I did that,” Sylvie said as she tried to balance herself with the street lamp. “But… I think you,” hic, “I think you had it coming.” Susie groaned with pain, but a certain relaxation had softened her limbs and the coolness of the street’s concrete gave her a sense of comfort as it soothed her blushing cheeks. The blood running from her head had become the physical manifestation of her shame & guilt, precious sanguine flowing away into the world as if it were only an excess in need of expelling. “You broke my trust… you took my money… and you don’t have anything, so I can’t even get you back for it,” slurring half her words as her shiny black buckled shoes poked into Susie’s eyes. They’d both cheated, lied, stolen; they’d taken advantage of each other and now were left only with the other as a reminder of why they’d ended up drunk on a street corner.
Susie kept her body still as Sylvie acted out her violent fantasies– and Susie is now putting her hands together and hoping for absolution, hoping for whatever it was that had gone wrong to be set right. At first, with Susie on the camera and Sylvie on the bed, it seemed like the natural extension of an intimate friendship. Sylvie’s body would be acted upon by the world, validated by the hungry eye of Susie’s cheap VHS camera… she preferred its grainy quality because it gave a sense of taboo, as if one were peeking into moments only the downtrodden & irredeemable had the pleasure of experiencing. Sylvie’s soft arms, her veiny thighs, the cool look she had on her face while men whispered violent phrases into tongue-licked ears– they were only tools with which Susie enacted her revenge upon the world, making us come to terms with what we have chosen to ignore for the hopes of our own sanity.
Sylvie looked back at Susie with a horrible feeling of disgust welling into her throat, trying to suppress her gagging as businessmen wearing masks rubbed their hands all over her oiled-up skin. “She doesn’t feel anything I feel,” she quietly muttered to herself as a powerful hand begun to undo her jeans. Sylvie stopped looking at Susie with the affection she’d grown to have, none of the thankfulness seemed to strike her with tenderness as it used to– for saving Sylvie from that dreadful life she felt closely approaching, for holding her closer when the winter’s bite frosted the windows, for saying “I’ve always wanted a sister but now I got something wayyy better.” She started to hate Susie, for having that perpetual grin as if she knew something no-one else was smart enough to know. She wanted to bash Susie’s head in with the camera she held closer & closer until a feeling of violation begun to set in, as if her only friend had now only become the eager bystander who invited lust & the deeds it inspired. She wanted to stab Susie in the heart as her mouth drooled onto the dirty floor when she slept on the couch, the same couch where Sylvie was held down with her mouth covered as… Susie said nothing, but Sylvie knew the absolute fucking joy Susie had as every part of herself was reduced to a mere object of a man’s joyless aggression & lust for domination. She could hear the camera’s whirring approaching closer, the horrific display growing in size as humans became body parts became flesh reduced only to their mechanical purpose… and Sylvie began to realize that her own purpose, her only use to Susie was a canvas made of pink & brown & red onto which her dreams of human desperation & desire could be splattered. “You want to hurt her, don’t you;” he shivered with fear, of being found out or being revealed. “That’s what people like doing, they like hurting her.” Susie salivated with joy as the boy grew into his role, his tender shyness turning into spiteful rage. “Think of Sylvie as every girl who has ever rejected you.” Sylvie’s tears became a part of the performance, happy tears of honesty as the boy pressed into her. “Don’t you want to control her? People love controlling her.” Sylvie looked into Susie’s eyes but turned away from embarrassment, shame for enjoying this… becoming a physical representation for everything she hated but could not express. “If no-one was watching… if no-one found out… if there were no rules, no laws… this is what you’d do, right? You’d fuck her and you wouldn’t care how much she cried.” The boy grunted with delight; his lips moist with gooey liquid as his tongue searched for the crevices on Sylvie’s mouth. Sylvie’s body shook with pleasure, trying to put away the terror that ate away at the sensible voices which screamed with no effect all ‘round the dark blackness within her mind. “No,” she said as she tried to push away his hands. She wanted to say that this was only Susie’s fantasy, not hers– not his, not theirs… but how could she say that when they’d all line up at the store, her minds delirious & their bodies aching with anticipation for the million atrocities taking place on each frame. “No,” her voice falling off as Susie closed in on the undoing of a sweater’s buttons. It’s Susie who wanted to hurt her, who wanted to be hurt, who wanted everyone to know what that hurt was.
“I’m so sorry,” Sylvie weeping as she cradled Susie’s blood-red face. But Susie wept along too, ‘cuz ultimately she knew that it was all her fault and the encrusting upon her head and the smell of iron in her nostrils were reminders that she could not escape human cruelty. “You were everything good that happened to me,” Sylvie rubbed the blood from her face onto her sleeves. “No man has ever hurt me like you did, Sue. No man has ever loved me like you did.” Do you remember what she looked like back then? She was wearing a big cotton overcoat she stole from her father. You fell in love with her the second you met her. “You can call me Sylvania,” she said with a sniffling nose. You envied how careless she seemed, how nothing in the world seemed capable of bothering her very much.
A man holding compact-discs stopped you on the way to the path further up the hill leading to the internet hotel you’d been staying at ever since you were kicked out of your apartment, pressing the jewel-case onto you while Sylvania had a dangerous-lookin’ grin on her face. You angled the front-side towards the light, the orange-yellow revealing a girl in a latex-y affair, her modest cleavage pressed together and her hair teased into a large wooly globe. “She’s a kind-of a rocker chick, you know?” The man was dressed in a cap and a vest and occasionally glanced to his side with suspicious glares towards Sylvania, who was circling him like a shark. “Ever seen Android Strike? That’s one of her fashion inspirations.” She jabbed the man in the lower-rib with two fingers, eliciting a yelp and a jump from the disc peddler, several discs clattering to the ground with sharp plastic rattles. “What is your problem, lady?” She laughed mean-spiritedly as she stomped on the disks. “How would you like it if I dressed you up like that and paraded you around town? How much you earn selling young girl bodies?” The man shoved Sylvania away from himself and begun picking up the disks and Susie swore she heard her say “I’ll find out myself I guess” before she casually struck the peddler in his nose with her knee and told you to empty out the vest, and you searched through his pockets while he screamed in pain and held onto his nose from which blood seem to pour out as if it were tap water. You found a couple of bills and Sylvania (“hey call me Sylvie”) gave the man another firm knee to his body before pulling you away by the sleeves, laughing only a little bit out of sheer adrenaline while the poor man groaned in what must have been terrible pain and she pulled you into a great little noodle spot she’d come to love and you laughed & munched on noodles till the sun came back up again. It was a long time ago but if you were in school again and someone said “hey, what’s the fondest memory you have,” yeah that would be it and you remember how Sylvie tapped the table and pointed down at the table while making eye-contact with the old geezer working at the bar. Susie watched the way she shook the packets, going for four of them to pour into her coffee– counting the money with smiles, losing count once and starting over again: “20, 40, 60…” You slurped at the noodles, your teeth yellow with pride and Sylvie laughing at you as you tried to cool your tongue with frenzied flapping of the hand.
“So, tell me,” Sylvie cleared her throat after sipping from her coffee. She folded her hands together and had a gleeful expectant smile on her face. Susie played with a strand of noodle, dead in a little puddle of broth. “How’d you end up here?” Susie remained quiet, never making eye contact as her chopsticks moved the noodle as if it were a little flatworm. “’cuz, people like us I think we always have some interesting story you know.” Susie looked out the window, imagining how the lives of the creep with the oily haircut and the lady with the umbrella must play out. “But but so, were you a violent kid? Did you hurt animals?” Susie can easily recall the geometry of the many closets she’d hid herself in, still feeling the material in her hands when she reaches out: the plastic, the wood, the varnish. With the doors open, the sunlight could melt away any of the sensations & images floating at the edges of her retina… but close the doors ‘n plugging yourself into the world behind the eyelids feels as easy as falling into a wonderful sleep on a comfy pillow. Numbers and shapes floated in the black river filled with little droplets of noise, falling to blurry pieces of static when you tried to focus onto them– like, as if they could not survive the stress of attention… too brittle to be anything more than impressions of some deeper world. The mocking laughter & violent fists to the head did not exist here, with time & practice the numbers and shapes could form themselves into manifolds, planes, n-th dimensional objects & spaces so abstract that they gave the illusion of representing some greater reality existing underneath the surface of the tedium & trivial day-to-day on-goings– the milk drinking, the copying of what was on the board, the teasing of the opposite gender… they’d mock her for staring out the window, out of the bus, they mocked her but it didn’t matter because it didn’t seem like she was there… they’d poke at her fat & pull at her hair but jeered in dissatisfaction when Susie’s only response was an empty look affixed to some distance too great for the eye to make out.
Susie felt the wind from the window brush past her face, and a tremendous sense of shame made her jump towards it but a hand on her foot caused her to tumble down onto the floor and she thrashes about for a couple of seconds before realizing that now she and June had become wrapped up on the floor with gross water moistening their clothes. They exchange strange eye-glances… “I thought you were gonna jump or something.” Susie laughed, harder than she’d laughed for a while but she didn’t know why. Something about that seemed funny to her. June let go and looked at her hand, bits of dirt & hair dripping from the fingers. There was a nagging sensation ‘tween her ears, the feelin’ that she was guilty too… that the desire for control of your own history, your own experiences, your own world… what leads you to recreate it through pointless junk media, reliving the same experiences in a constant loop with only the slightest change of each iteration– could that be the reason why June doesn’t just whistle away the words & sounds that come to her mind, suppress it with coffee & sugar until it becomes another background hum among the refrigerators & radio transponders? “I’m a hypocrite” she says, dulling Susie’s laughter with her hurried confession. “All I do is try & get some kind of revenge, and then moan about feeling unsatisfied when it doesn’t change the past.” Susie pulled herself back up again; patting the many wet patches on her clothing like that would do somethin’. “You can’t change the past; you can only relive it… and it hurts to do that. Holy shit, it hurts. I wish I could forget it… the quiet insults, feeling like everyone’s going to get you, the hours I wasted in my uncle’s fucking video store. I can’t change any of that but it plays in my head like some damn TV marathon. I can’t get over it.” Susie’s face contorted into an uncomfortable spasm, rubbing her head as she rapidly paced the room. June kept herself on the ground, feeling tired & worn… her wet hair resting on her face as she propped up her chin with her hands. “I think I know where she is.”