Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 3:4 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 3:3 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
The trees, packed into concrete squares and held upright by steel, passed by the windows of the train with loud flashes of smear ‘n there was no trace of the bright sun as the skies had turned a beautiful monochromatic canvas on which the little rabbit moon could freely move. Though the police had closed off the inward train traffic for the night, the trains moving towards the outskirts of the city– the domain of those who live on estates without guarantee of water, sewerage, or even electricity, their trains were sparsely populated and the rust rubbed off the poles if you touched your fingers to it and the air was thick with alcohol & urine flowing freely from the habitants who called dibs on the orange plastic benches and pulled their newspaper covers groggily over themselves. “It’s where you live if you can’t afford the rent.” Someplace they say, far away from ‘ere, communication is not instant– there are no news cycles nor quick-access to user networks, there are no tones carried by electromagnetic fields through the air and there is no movement through the walls & floors… no unceasing exchange of signals through copper wire.
Rather, this world moved by the pace of steam and coal, where feedback was a matter of days ‘n they would have to take the train just as you did to beat you over the head. “They? I can’t imagine who that could be,” June responded. They have always been there, the ones who live in the cloud-floating castles or the monsters in the lake or the creature that discovered that the wooden branch swung violently on the backs of others was effective beyond reproach.
“Aw shit, there I go with that paranoid stuff again,” but it wasn’t her fault that she had no other way to express this feeling she’d always had ‘n maybe if she’d ended up with a copy of some Holy Book they’d have some transcendental name like G-D or Brahma or Ahura Mazda or maybe just dào itself. But no, the fucked up thing about being born isn’t that the world is so wild & cruel– there are a lot of good moments you see, but the fucked up thing is that it does nothing to prepare you for everything else ‘cept grant you a body to make its ebb & flow physically known and your over-sugared & oversexed mind/brain is left only with childhood prejudices, bad memories, poorly written fast-food media, and wild assumptions to get that body from a pretty pastel-colored 1st birthday to its final performance as the white sunken corpse for your friends & family to gawk at while the creep on the big imitation Farfisa plays a low-key version of some trash stadium song because they found the juxtaposition between funeral & rock anthem to be the ultimate aesthetic expression; ‘cept they didn’t really know what juxtaposition nor aesthetic really meant but hey you can’t argue with this because it feels so good ‘n it’s so fun to let yourself go ‘n now they all know the song so pop pop, mama, mama mia they all merrily join in ‘n it goes on and on, and on, and on and…
Her uncle’s video store had been bought by a conglomerate some time ago, its rain-damaged wood and cloudy glass gradually replaced by bright plastic and big signs which advertised the latest releases. Its bright neon lights illuminated the adjacent streets devoid of movement or color, a beacon a-top a hill late into the film-buff’s night. Up the stairs mister, with your hand on the cold rail and your canvas sneaks trying to dodge the cracks in the pavement. June pulled on the back-room handle but the door would not budge– Susie goes down to her knees and rubs a finger along the edges, black gunk falling from the digit. A quick cursory sniff brings to mind the sour smell of burnt plastic, its caustic footprint etching itself into the back of your throat.
“It’s magnetic tape,” but June just kind of shook her head with revulsion as a hand pushed away the gunky finger.
“Try the bathroom window, that’s how I used to sneak out,” but Susie viewed the unstable metal grates with suspicion and refused on the principle that she’d snuck into enough bathrooms today and so she waited under the light, restless with anxiety that one of those scurrying figures out there in the distance might snatch her up and sink their sharp fangs into that wellspring underneath her neck.
“Golly,” she quivered as she placed her hands over her most vital veins & arteries– what shook her out of an anxiety-induced daze was the spontaneous movement of the automatic sliding doors punctuated by a blood-curdling shriek, followed by a horrific stench that made it almost impossible to maintain inner stability. The plastic smell had now taken on a peptic quality, burning the nose ‘n bringing tears to the eyes. Susie traced the path around the building, one of her hands firmly planted on her mouth… and by a puddle squatted June, her arms around her knees and her face hung down like a particularly-ratty coat on the hook of some withered rack.
As the fumes surrounded them, it seemed like the passage of time itself was stunted by the thickness– Susie was trying to push her legs through up the steps towards the blinding light revealed by the opened entryway to the interior of the “Video City.” The fumes cleared themselves from the building, its details rose from the fog– yes, Susie can see the counter now where oversized candy-bars and recommendations adorned its shiny blue surface. She can see the black boxes, and the racks, and the large life-sized posters of long-forgotten stars & starlets. She sees the signs: “comedy, action, comedy-action,” but from them hung globules of black tar-like goo. The smell grew greater, the acid now making her eyes well up with liquid ‘n the plastic stench overwhelming her palate.
She suddenly feels an obstacle block her path, and she tries to step over it but instead trips on its oddly soft exterior. At first, the overwhelming urge to accept the wonderful sweetness of the blue-yellow carpet seemed so strong but a sudden fear struck her when she felt the obstacle begin to move– bumping up against her body, and she reaches for it with her hands and presses into its warm surface. She feels skin, soft villous hair, sock, a sneaker.
Susie screams (“aaaa shit!”) and pushes herself up against what feels like the many sharp edges of cassette tape containers, her heart spurting blood with great difficulty into an increasingly sweaty & nervous head. The fumes spread thinner, shapes appearing from its thin veil ‘n she could trace the lines with her fingers now… mounds, bags of skin, nipples… clothing torn. A large body of flesh reached for the tapes strewn around Susie, its stumps bending gracefully to force the thick magnetic tape into its grasp. A rumbling shook the walls, the floors, and the flesh contorted itself back into the hazy unknown.
Susie followed the trails of tape moving away from her, dragging herself with nails embedded deeply into the dirty fibers of the carpet. She reaches out for the figure with her hand, finding warm flesh under her grasp, and she pulled as hard as she could… consumed with a suicidal desire to discover, well she wasn’t sure but when the creature begun to twist itself she realized that the cloth trapped within its folds was a beautiful pink fabric ‘n she felt the heat of the flesh surround her as the light began to disappear. She mounted the flesh, climbing it steadily while hysteria set in, realizing only now that she really didn’t want to fucking die ‘n she forced her feet into the folds which made the creature gurgle with pain but… at the surface, out of breath & wheezing, the gurgle was too familiar to be that of only a creature ‘n with renewed ambition she continued to climb, forming handles from the folds of flesh ‘n never looking back down to see… and she found at the apex of this organic mountain only a face, and she traced the contours of the face with her fingers which were so lovely & beautiful that she was almost consumed with the urge to kiss its malformed perimeters.
“I finally found you,” Susie said with relief ‘n she fell to her hands & knees with tears of joy. “I didn’t know you were looking for me,” the creature spoke in its light & nervous voice– trailed by a cute giggle.
Susie sat next to June on the stoop as she nervously sucked on her sixth cigarette ‘n Judy continued to chew on the thick plastic tape all bunched around her fingers like black flat noodles. Her body, once a masterpiece of mechanical precision & design with each curve somewhere between wholesome and salacious, had now grown into a formless blob which pressed into the weakened & brittle walls of the “Video City.” Her hands and legs, still soft & youthful, jutted out from the rounded mounds of flesh and her torso had spread itself into three or four different discrete snake-like bodies grown to unimaginable proportions, only one of which had a working head adorned with pig-tails. Susie lost count trying to keep track of how many cassette tapes Judy had eaten, her own stomach grumbling with desire as she tried to forget how much cash a pic of this could have gotten her.
“She must really love all of those movies,” Susie uttered while trying to suppress her coughs. June let out a figure of smoke charmed as a serpent as it faded into the cold night-air, and then she started laughing and put her arm around Susie’s shoulder and pulling her closer before babbling “welcome to Video City.”
After June ran through her packs, she paced around the video-store and her feet gingerly stepped around the hundreds of black cassette boxes splattered & scattered all over the floor. She tried to look away, but the fascination started to hold her rapt. How could this weird creature, this large blob of flesh, be her sister? How many hours of comedy, action, and comedy-action must she have consumed in order to grow so large she threatened to burst apart the building? What had compelled her to disappear and was it out of desperation that the record companies forced her into a mass-televised suicide… or was that the plan all along, but she had no answers and a horrible feeling was sinking into her heart that made each breath like a lit cigarette burning on her skin.
“What the fuck are you”– she wanted to scream as if it would help but it wouldn’t, and one look at the face between the folds of cutaneous fat made it clear that this was that person she had shared so much with… the genetic code of their father and mother present in the way their eyebrows threatened to meet within the middle, the way their nose widened at the base, the way the wrinkles formed underneath their hairline. She leered at her own arms, dreamin’ a ‘lil about what would happen if she grabbed one of those sharp plastic corners and rammed it into the veins… would it gush with blood, or motor-oil which sputtered through her body with each panicked gasp? The doubt never withered.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” June’s voice quivered. “I thought you were dead.” Her hand begins to touch the freckled patch of skin she believes must have once belonged to Judy’s arm. Judy’s twitching smile twisted into a fearful grimace and the limbs of her body moved with crackling plastic underneath their incredible weight. Susie scratched her face with little understanding of what meaning the silence between them possessed. She had no siblings, nor much family even to speak of– all of them had abandoned her, perhaps as June abandoned Judy to the sharks in the blood-filled pools of mass-broadcast entertainment.
“You remember that summer when we almost binge-watched all of The Bubblegum Girls? Dad would never have caught you if it wasn’t for Auntie-in-Law’s big stupid mouth.” June’s laughter was dulled by the walls covered with dripping plastic, and there was a strange lonely silence in the way the laughter died off into a chuckle. Susie felt second-hand embarrassment hung up in her throat, her eyes full of twinge at this casual sentimentality which could never bridge the distance which had grown between them.
“I don’t know why you stopped talking to me,” Judy blurted out with her round cheeks beginning to moisten like rocks by a waterfall. “I didn’t do anything,” and the supporting pillars of the building began to groan & sputter with movement as June & Susie looked upward with shivers of fear. June tried to embrace with fearful dribbling on her lip as much of the flesh as she could with her arms, “no it was my fault– I was jealous, believe me… please.”
Jealous that they picked the fresh-faced cute little girl who honed her craft and not the plump sleepless banshee who’d wasted her hours with frivolous comic-books and titillating cassette-tape yes and jealous that momma & dad would always accompany Judy to her recitals yet never once calling Uncle to see how she was doing but the real thing that fucking irritated her was how nothing in the world seemed to bother Judy as much as just being awake & conscious bothered June.
Jealous that she could parade herself on television, sing those ridiculous songs– never once betraying a feeling that something about the way the men looked at her and the way the girls bought up anything she put her name too was weird & disgusting & something no-one with any feeling could bear live with.
Jealous that never once did Judy seem like she was alone, broken by the world & abandoned… an unbearable feeling of resentment the runt of the litter would have towards her nestmates.
“You hated me just because I like the songs. I couldn’t help that I liked them. Everything I knew about that stuff came from that music. I thought I loved it because, well the same reason everyone else at school loved them, I never knew…” The older she got, the harder it was for June to maintain those old binaries. The normies-v-creeps, the straight-v-outcasts, those who really feel vs. those who may have only been simplistic p-zombies– her hatred was the hatred of those who feel as if the entire world had conspired to administer a punishment personally, but the love she begun to feel for Judy revealed that she only had herself to blame… scared & insecure & lonely, she withdrew from the world as others new and plunged into a self-constructed reality full of androids & insects in which each dizzying chamber of impressions served only to validate & secure the conviction that it was the world and not her at fault.
Susie approached Judy as each tear dripped onto the floor, carrying along with it cracked flakes of artificial skin which had become strained & fragile by the stretching. June recoiled in horror at the sight of metal exposed, lightweight aluminum parts which held within them the memory banks & processing units that had given her sister life.
“I’ve seen them, sis. They all look like me.” June begun to shriek as the masses on Judy’s body expanded yet again, the hydraulic fluids and malfunctioning battery systems spilling caustic fluids from cavities & fissures. “That’s how I found out who I was, or what I was, I guess. She tore through the window and I screamed and I threw things and I yelled don’t hurt me but I saw her and I realized that she looked like me and I couldn’t kill what was just me. She told me she’d killed her previous handlers because they wanted to ‘retire’ her, which meant taking her apart and she told me that I was next… and I started to panic because they told me that all pop idols would have to retire at some point.”
Susie tried to hold June steady with her arms as her enraged feet created black trails on the floor from the trashing of her limbs. It was the same ritual she’d seen on stage, that unbearable energy which burned at your fingertips demanding release. Drained of that energy, June went limp in Susie’s grasp and her eyes closed with little resistance as Susie felt the rapid thumping of her heart. She replayed the day’s events in her head– had Lolita 108 acted in defense of the closest thing she had to a family? Is that why Lolita 108 spared Susie’s life?
But it was Susie who was set onto this path, not the man who was split in half with his blood splattered all over that hotel room… or did Lolita 108, lacking any resemblance of human vice, underestimate the depths of Susie’s obsessive perversity?
She wanted answers, but she didn’t know what questions to ask and for what seemed like hours she watched Judy fill her mouth with cassette tape. It didn’t seem that strange to her anymore, as it was so similar to what Susie herself did in all of those lonely hours. She binged on those tapes, those compact discs; those magazines in order to fill what she reckoned must have been some kind of movie or television-show-shaped emptiness within her. Judy was not programmed to experience that emptiness, yet somehow developed a tremendous need to fill it. Something within the active subroutines of her operating system had become convinced that the necessary procedures to complete her instruction, the perfect emulation of a young adult, included the physical consumption of all media she could get her clammy & restless hands on– but it seems never enough even if you keep chewing on magnetic cud, the consumption continues until there might be a real decent chance you’ll fuckin’ burst.
“You loved those old stars, huh…” June intoned with softness. “Well, people like Susie are the reason all pretty girls with beautiful voices die young,” and Susie squeezed June’s arm while wondering if all the pictures, all the scoops, all the intimate details gathered through telescoping lenses and email hacking were part of the reason why she had disappeared from public view. A tremor rose up from her feet, strong enough to catch June’s attentive & probing gaze. What name do we use for that infamous pop star? Known for her tales of heartbreak and dogged political expressions, who after retirement lived on only in the tabloids & gossip programs. A body that never represented anything more than a corporeal agent which enacted with precision the celebrity built & maintained within the broadsheet.
Yeah, maybe the original flesh & bone mold still walked around but that physical unit– or perhaps the many physical units needed to create the illusion of a working pop star, they had ceased to function a long time ago and now her totality of existence is only the sum of whatever information circulates of her through the user networks and media broadcasts. The physical form is just a liability when it ceases to be useful, when it fails to support & propagate the ideal it was enlisted in service of.
No kidding, I’d hate me too.
“I guess I should tell you, you don’t have that long;” Susie added. Judy ceased her eating and looked towards the windows covered by the blinds; their glass shattered under the shearing weight of their steel frames.
“You weren’t built to last. Parts of you are gonna start to come apart.” June studied her sister’s legs, the arms, the metal bolts becoming flaccid under pressure & the capacitors leaking fluids. The technology of the organism was primitive, yet not too removed from the decay of the human body.
“I guess that goes for both of us,” June interjected. She again felt jealousy stir her heart into a hurtin’ mood– jealousy towards Judy for consisting as an entity of more than just a physical body, something June felt was impossible for herself no matter how much she begged the world to change her.
“You were made to love those songs but the songs are getting really fucking old now, so they don’t want you around anymore.”
“Yeah, they were lies… finding love at the beach, the picnics, waiting for him after work, taking off my uniform and being touched, kissing under the palm trees, knowing that you’ll never be lonely… I didn’t know what I was singing about, but I thought they were real. Too young to know what they mean, but we knew we were supposed to feel something.” Judy snickered with the cruelty of a vicious hyena; her teeth visible through an ugly smile she didn’t know she possessed.
“The world in those songs, ‘girls with flowers in their hair, someone who would always be there…’ they were just lies, not meant for me… they filled my mouth with hopes & dreams but knew I’d never fulfill them…” And such was their revenge; not content to simply go about freakin’ out the neighborhood like June did, they rebuilt the world in their own vision free of loneliness & pain and populated it with an army of child-soldiers armed with their gruesomely catchy songs and sappy lyrics. Even though they’d lost their personal conflicts a long time ago, Dr. Sanyo-Infinity and the Duchess wished for perpetual war on their own terms– each kid with a nice smile and a creepy song setting out to make good on the failed promises of their pasts, haunted by the ghosts who come more to life with each dead bit stuck to a polycarbonate disc.
“I thought it would be like the movies, where I’d fall in love and nothing else would matter.” June wanted to blame Judy for being so damn stupid, but it wasn’t her fault. She was bred in a test-tube in which only the reckless & easily-misled microbes of youth could thrive, paradoxically while youth increases its distance from you with each passing year. It’s not that she didn’t want to grow up, it’s that she was physically incapable of it.
“I hate them…” Judy cursed her creators. “I hate them for doing this to me… for leaving me like this… I could never do what I was supposed to do.” Judy knew what love sounded like, what it looked like, how to tell the world about its wonderful sensations, but she could not feel it. “I hate them…” Judy repeated tiredly as her chewing slowed, bits of mushy cassette tape mixed with saliva falling from her mouth. “I hate myself too.”
Susie had abandoned her childhood, choosing to sleep through her teenage years, hoping that her dreams would replace those awful moments of lonely silence– but Judy had nothing except her memories of teenage pop-star fame, the totality of her physical presence and its continuation in the press media hinging only on the pretense that she was speaking to “the teenager in all of us.”
Though others found comfort… or fuck even meaning in regurgitating the crimes of the past and resettling them through emotionally-inarticulate tropes, Susie dunked the head of her younger-self till its arms fell dead and its head submerged deeper into the well of her murky memory. In the absence of this prototypical self, a powerful lust grew and Susie now realizes that her fetish for youth was only her own way of enacting revenge… without any way of changing the past, without any way of drowning those who had hurt her along with herself, all she could was greedily hope for a way to seduce a young girl & punish her body & contort her body into feeling the pain she did… just so she wouldn’t feel so damn alone, and in that sense she was just as fucking hung up on her childhood as everyone else was.
Judy’s body expanded once again, the pressure underneath the synthetic flesh stressed beyond its operating capabilities which caused coolant to flow from the cracks & powerful cracks of sparking electricity to spring forth from her exposed wires. Her eyes grew sullen; her lips hung slack and her arms moved with greater difficulty now as chewed cassette tape covered her body with black bands coalescing into a patchy cloak. Her gaze falls onto June, who looked away with horror & denial that this was more than just the little sister who one day simply showed up at their doorstep. Now every glance seemed to remind June more of herself, and the horrible feeling that it was her up there with her body so engorged that the walls of the “Video City” were collapsing onto it and that it was her up there with wires & hydraulic fluid revealing themselves with every stretch haunted her so badly that even the darkness of her closed eyes still reminded her of Judy.
“Sis… June,” Judy’s jaw moved unsteadily with each croak. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m really full.” June screamed while covering her ears, trying to find refuge ‘tween the racks of comedy & comedy-action and finding only Susie who was trying to cheer herself up by reading the synopses of the back covers. “I can’t do it, Susie! I won’t do it. No fucking way. It would be like killing a part of me.” June cowered in the corner, wishing that she had more smokes as she nervously played with her lighter.
If it was still morning, if she still had her camera, if she hadn’t been kicked around & had her ears blown the fuck out– if she hadn’t fallen into such an obsession, she would have ignored it all and dialed up every gossip broadsheet & tabloid in town… followed by the biggest damn bowl of spaghetti she’d ever had, with beef spare-ribs that had been barbequed with sesame and green onion on the side. All her life she’d been the fly on the wall, the mysterious voyeur, the girl who watches from the side & steps in when all the predators have left without their scraps– but she didn’t wanna be like that anymore. She no longer desired Judy’s body, no longer dwelled on her insecurity because she knew that she had to do the right thing.
“It’s not you… you’re gonna be fine,” Susie whispered all fucking zen which confused & slightly repulsed June a bit who wondered if now both of them had completely lost their minds. Why did this girl-creep, her face a little too full for her head and her ugly yellow raincoat clashing so strongly with her sneaks and hair fuzzy & oily with strands circling her scalp in fractal shapes– why did this girl-creep lunge through her bathroom window and completely destroy any chance of having a decent shit, going to bed, and waking up in the morning to have some eggs and head towards that stupid office with the loud air-conditioner and the co-workers who couldn’t help discuss how crazy you looked the other day?
“I was fine, until I met you hours ago.” She sneered at Susie without making eye-contact, her feet impatiently tapping as her fingers felt at the edges of her lighter. She regretted saying it seconds after it left her mouth, and she hid away her face into her arms. Susie lowered herself next to June, feeling some of the tape stick to her ass as she watched Judy regurgitate the cassette tape she’d consumed.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I just really liked you, and I didn’t know what else to do about it.” June didn’t raise her mouth from the muffling fabric. “You like June, the woman who screams on stage. You don’t know anything about me.” Susie pulled on June’s arms; her voice unsteady… she felt hurt by that.
“That’s not true. I know what you went through. I know what they did to you. They did it to me too…” it seemed now like no-one need to explain who they were, and June realized that their lives had now somehow become irrevocably coupled… it terrified her that two people’s histories & personalities could so easily melt into one, without noticing that their boundaries had fallen away.
June looked up from her arms, her face red and her nose puffy and her lips receded into her mouth as if to shield them from the horrors of the outside world.
“If you really like me,” June said without humor. “If you really like me, you’ll burn her to death.” June pulled on Susie’s hand, unclasping her fingers before placing her lighter into its sweaty palm. “If you really like me, you’ll kill the only… I guess thing that I could have ever called a family.” Susie stared at the brushed metal curves of the lighter, admiring the way the light created slivers of reflections as it struck its exterior. “Shoulda never have built her in the first place… motherfuckers.”
Think about it Suz, do you really want to do this? Would you really want to kill this stranger because you had a big creep hard-on for a woman you just met today? She played with the lighter for a couple of moments, twirling it ‘round her fingertips. Susie didn’t see for herself any gain in this, no bowls of bone soup or fried eggrolls would come her way from burning this girl down to the ground… but the yearning, the desperation in June’s eyes inspired so much agony that she’d do anything to make it stop.
She makes a single flick of the lighter, then another one– and the flame caught on the spaghetti-like strands.
They sat by the sidewalk, the puddles underneath their feet as the heat of the building pleasantly restored feeling back to their faces & extremities. First the plastic turned to magma-lookin’ goo which expanded forth from the store onto the street, pouring from the windows and vents and flowing down the bricks while the neon lights shattered and the signs crumped into black masses of smoldering carbon. The smoke rose from the “Video City” in a big black bellowing cloud, its yellow-y curves illuminated by the flames and disappearing into the air. It was kind of a kick to see how quickly the black cassette tape ignited on contact with the flame of the lighter, though June felt her stomach turn from the noxious & carcinogenic fumes and she ran out into the cold of the night before the flames begun to cover Judy’s skin. The racks were alit, their paper coverings blackened by the heat and the cardboard cut-outs turning to dust which fluttered through the wind and at the center of the building the mass of flesh begun to blister & char black. Though the poor mass of girl remained silent at first, the flames had damaged her processing units and from her alit mouth they could hear the impromptu performances of those wonderful songs they’d been playing on the radio in honor of her passing since morning.
As the flames turned the supports into bent & cracked noodles of orange-yellow matter, Judy’s voice oscillated rapidly– a chorus of dissonant voices sang along to the lyrics, syllables and phonemes sometimes accelerating or repeating until crashing into a pixelated soup of sound. Though they’d embraced each other in fear, finding the flames both terrifying and romantic, they couldn’t help but sing along to the catchy tunes which rattled from the blazing “Video City…” it’s the way she’d wanna go out they reckon ‘n they played Judy out as she sizzled into a pile of flaming gunk with a sing-song to which the words go:
I could be without money / on the street without a dime
I could be without clothes / fancy jewelry oh so fine
I could give up my name, my home / I know it would work out
But baby, it’s your love, your love / your love I can’t live without
Oh oh
Oh oh