Stalin in Purple

When the death of a young girl shakes a suburban white town to it's core, young cartoonist Robert befriends a man named No-Good, and they both whether the storm that is murder and wasp stings. The sk

 

When I was twenty-something, a fourteen year old girl was killed by a yellow construction shovel, somewhere deep in the night by the freeway.  She’s full of mystery, because no one knows exactly what happened to her.  Either she was suicidal, or drunk as hell.  Around town I heard lots of stories, like about the white foam on the corners of her mouth and her heart shaped earrings.  Somewhere on route 7 in the brown lot of a construction site, a mechanical shovel was blindly chewing at a mountain of dirt.  They said she dribbled, pulled up her skirt over her a*s and then laid down in the dirt mound with her back side in the air.  And that’s when the shovel dug it’s teeth into her, crushed her into red, white, and yellow pulps and pieces, and swallowed her up like a dinosaur.  She left all the stuffed animals on her bed behind, and maybe even her conjunctivitis drops, still on her counter, her name printed on the label.  

 I found out about it one morning as I walked on a sand bank in town on a cloudy day, with bare feet on, because I liked to pretend it was a beach.  Nobody really walked on the sidewalks, usually all covered with blackened gum and the feet of white people.  But no people walked on the streets, no kids, no old people.  Instead, there were black and white copies of the girl’s face, taped onto shop windows, all closed and dark.  

The picture was dirty, but she had long hair.  The twirly kind, and teeth long like my teeth.  I guess she was a performer or something, very popular, getting a lot of jealous s***s to say some nasty things about her.  Even in death they do that; you don’t f**k with dead people, man.

I stood on the stretch of sand that was birthed by a small man-made lake off of a condo complex, filled with blue buildings.  It was it’s own little Salton Sea, accept nothing really died, yet the stink was there.  In the center of the lake, there is a small island with a single tree, where yellow swans often go to lay dirty, wet eggs and swallow can-tabs from Crystal Pepsi’s and beer left by people my age.    

As I watched the morning mist rise and wriggle like a jealous woman off the glass water, I stood and held a plastic radio on my shoulder.  I listened to the local station and they talked freely about the dead girl.  I imagined gnats in eye her sockets; not only hers, but all eye sockets in the world.  Especially my own.  
I took off my glasses and immediately felt nauseous.  

The staticy man in my radio talked to me: “A tragedy hits Dangbury this morning, Kurt uh, a fourteen year old girl- hear that?  -fourteen- was killed last night in a construction accident.  Uh- young Shiri Abdullah of-- what high school, Kurt?”

“It’s Redfield High School.” said Kurt, probably somewhere out there in the station chewing the ends of his pencils in utter terror.  

“Redfield High School!  I’m sorry to say that Shiri Abdullah of Redfield High School had passed away last night in a construction accident and I believe investigation is under way. Very, very sad, Kurt.”

“Yeah,”

“Very sad indeed.”

Kurt and his boyfriend were bothering me, so I turned the dial as far as it would take me to a number station.  Number stations comfort me.  They must be part of a big government communication conspiracy, but i still love them.  
I walked up the sand bar to the parking lot where I had left my platform shoes.  I put on my socks as I listened: Five--five--one--zero--one--five--nine--six--, the robotic voice of a woman, and sudden intervals of public domain music, and the single tone of a television, or sudden deafness.  Even the number stations were talking about the death of Shiri is gruesome detail.  

I walked on mainstreet with the number station blasting, and i noticed that everything had fallen into the void. The 7/11 was closed, it’s door covered in probably a hundred strands of pink ribbon, fluttering in the breeze.       

Garbage bags blew over flattened cardboard boxes in the street.  Everywhere, pictures of Shiri were stapled, taped, gummed.  There were layers of them, wind blown and water logged amongst an organization of lawn flamingos and brown grass.  Even by twelve noon, the fog hadn’t laid up, and not a man woman or child was on the street.  I sat in the middle of the sidewalk by myself, chewing tobacco, staring up at the black and white face of the dead girl.  
Girls like that never fancy skinny cartoonist boys like me. It broke my heart, it really did.  Nobody fancy’s skinny cartoonist boys.  I’ll never have children.  

I must have stayed on the ground for an hour, the radio being my only friend.  But in the distance I began to see my first signs of life.  Under a blinking stop light, flooding in from the cross-walk that stretched from the gay bar to the Chinese grocery place, was a hoard of sixty, maybe more highschoolers.  They moved across the street in a never ending line, like a river or a dragon.  They were quiet and ran without gravity holding them back, like we were all trapped on the moon.  Their hands were pressed on their red and distorted faces as well as on each other.  Dressed in black veils and dresses, the soft sounds of weeping rose out of the distance.  Even the boys wore dresses.   

This was the day I lost my radio, as I began to crawl on my hands and knees toward the scene. The number stations sounded behind me and spoke like angels.  I evolved, and began to walk on two legs.
They were ghosts, maybe, only for a day.  Even as I stood twenty feet from them, they were quiet as hell.  Their faces were loud, scrunched and once and a while gasping for air, but no other noises came out of their open mouths.  

“Hey, you guys okay?”  I said as they trailed past me in a never ending line.  No one answered me.  Once in a while, a short haired lady or two with great, Moby Dick size a*s cheeks would stomp by me beside all the students, shaking the earth I stood on.  Their hands gripped the leashes of smiling therapy dogs, Golden Retrievers, wearing little blue vests that read “Please Pet Me”, brown eye crusties in their tear ducts.  They stomped by me, barracating me from the students, like Nazi officers on their way to the chambers.     

The more I watched them, the more they became a weightless blur of grief, the occasional footstep tapping in complete silence.  I only looked back for a moment as I walked towards a telephone pole.   They melded together like black water, their bodies splitting and turning into birds, flying into a white sky.  One day, I would make a cartoon about it, as I lay in a hospital bed, waiting for surgery.  I would somehow relate it to the Regan administration as Shiri danced in a long dress made of tears; all tears, and paper; my paper.  

I hid my face from them on a telephone, buzzing with electricity, covered in staples.  A wave of hope for the future, and the reassurance of my existence flooded into my body when I saw a piece of fax paper stapled on the pole that was, infact, not about death.  Someone was selling a station wagon, for about four grand; practically nothing.  It told me, first off, to come to the empty lot by the baseball field, as that’s where the treasure laid.  On the paper, a colorless, lo-fi image of a car was printed.  The ad was in sharpie, running purple from the humidity:

   Buick Roadmaster Station Wagon for sale.

With wood on the sides like your Congressman’s eyes.

There’s blood in the carpet from my daughter’s menstruation,

And a hole blown through the window,

From a gunshot that popped my breast augmentation.  

Run’s on Bicentennial pride, ecstatic, ready to die.

Meet me out back, be my man, and call me Jesus,

I have a Station Wagon for sale.  

I decided to find the baseball field and go for it.  The teenagers would never stop crossing the street, and I needed to escape.  Another corner of a piece of paper was peeking like a snail from under the ad, so I ripped it down, and found Shiri smiling back at me.  Damn you Shiri.  I crumpled the paper.  Shiri your dark eyes are making me want to die too.  I ripped the pieces up one by one.  Shiri why were you foaming at the mouth, were you rabid?  Were you in a terror that only a young stick-man like me could know?  I started swallowing the pieces of paper, one by one, tasting the metal infused in the ink from the copy machine.

I frittered away the afternoon before I decided to go find the man with the station wagon.  On the peak of a hill, scooping and overlooking the baseball field and police station, I noticed night was beginning to set.  Days are so short, and I’ve hardly seen another human being since the morning time.  

I walked down the hill and stared up at the vast pink and orange sky above, like New Mexico, a jumbo jet gleaming a billion miles over my head.  

There were no cars, just a few army trucks, motoring their way down south to New Jersey to take care of the recent hurricane damage.  They roared by like sand colored elephants, and through the back of each truck I saw some men in blotchy camouflage and sunglasses.  I would’ve given anything to touch them.  Army men get me all bothered and happy.  

  I approached the entry of the field, fenced off by a chain, spanning for about a hundred yards through the back of an elementary school.  I stepped over the chain on to the yellow grass, and then I saw all the streamers.  Millions of pink streamers were tied to the end of the chain-linked fence, fluttering in twilight.  I want to make a cartoon about it at some point, because they were like dancers.   
As I kept walking through the field, the silhouette of what may have been a car at the end, I observed the police station; it’s triangular pillars, cell tower and all.  The officers were standing out of their gray cars in the lot, touching each other and weeping, their guns hanging by their pelvises.  
On the steps of the station I saw their German shepherd, sitting with a cigarette in his paw, and mascara running down his hairy face.  On the dog’s arm was a patch, so he was clearly quite nicotine dependent, at least at the time.  He looked my way and we met eyes, and I tried to communicate with the dog by telepathy.  I told him I was sorry for the work he did, and to quit nicotine  If he got a stoma in his dog-throat, I would be heart broken.  I gave him a hearty salute, which the German shepherd returned.

On the red clay of the baseball field I began to approach the station wagon.  It was a slate blue, infact with wood on the sides but no holes in the windows.  I admired that the ad was sort of truthful.  
The driver’s side was open to the sunset, revealing a giant man with his head on the steering wheel, and a green bong in his lap.  I liked his grey plaid, sewn all over his clothes.  It was like a Nixon administration nightmare.  

“Hey what’s up.  This still for sale?”  I cleared my throat to get his attention, and my voice never sounded more nasally.  The man turned to me, fit like an amazon woman.  He blinked until my image came into focus with eyes so red they could have been filled with blood; he was either high as hell or crying, but probably just high as hell.  We both smiled stupid smiles.

“This for sale, bud?”  

The man still stared at me, his neck and shoulders wavering.  Then he finally spat words into the universe.  “Yah.”  

“Heh”  I dug something out of my fingernail and wiped it on my bellbottoms.  “Do I really gotta call you ‘Jesus’?”  

“Huh?  Nah!  Nah, man.  My name’s No-Good.  The Jesus thing was just a spur of the moment thing, cause I’z a poet or something, I guess.”  

“Oh,”  I stepped closer and held out my hand, then we shook heartily.  “Put it there, man.  I’m Robert.”  

“You’re really tooth-picky-little, Robert!”  He laughed a chesty laugh with yellow teeth and warm cigarette spittle in my face.  He wore other people’s high school rings on his hand, like a bounty hunter who wore badger’s teeth.  Big man, I thought.  Big, hearty, sad man.  He looked like an old man of manual labor, so I don’t know what was with the greasy car salesman get up, maybe he had to be in character in order to do such a thing like this.  His plaid leisure suit fit his old man-body well, though.  Very well.  I’ve made so many cartoons about him.  

In the inside of the station wagon were several towels covering the connected driver and passenger’s seats, and everything was swallowed with the thick musk of weed.  I glanced over to the police castle, and they didn’t seem to care.  They slept by it; they wept to the sweet smell of skunk.  

“This steering wheel leather, or something?”  I tried to break the tension as me and No-Good sat in the car together in silence.   Meanwhile the sun fell out of the sky.  

“Bud, if it was, I’z be selling this car for a lot more than four grand-- I’z tattoo the steering wheel if it was animal skin, actually.  With a little needle and s**t, you know.”

“Why would you do that?  S**t’s expensive.”  

“Why not man?  It’s skin, skin is made for tattooin’.” He touched the steering wheel as I touched the steering wheel, and there was a magnetism between us.  “It would look cool.”  

I sat back and just smelled the car.  The paper in my stomach was beginning to swell like fungus.  I worried if I would split open, right here in front of the car man.  Maybe it was just Shiri.  I was pregnant with the reincarnation of Shiri, and she was growing inside me to be born again only for me to die.  Then someone would consume me,  I would grow inside them, and the cycle would begin again.   

“Hey, can you tell me why you’re selling your car?  You need a car, don’t you?”  

No-Good picked at a scab on his face.  “Cause I need the money to go upstate.”  

“Oh,”  I said.  “You going upstate for something special?”  

“Yeah.  I’z running away man.  I’z running away from something bad, man.” No-Good rubbed his eye sockets.  “It’s just I gotta go start over, man, and cleanse myself. I’z gotta hide too, it’s part of the cleansin’.”

“Can I ask why?  Or is it something private?”

“It’s private.”  

There was darkness oozing out of his leathery pores like ink.  The contours of his beer gut where all beer guts in America.  That’s when I noticed the rest of the scab on his face; it was a part of something larger.  A bruise.  A big combo of purple, gash, and bruise colors on his temple.  “Can I ask how you got that thing on your face?”  

“Heh, I got hit by a lady’s purse.”

“Oh s**t man.  What lady?  I haven’t seen anybody around all day because of that girl dying.”

No-Good nodded and smiled with his eyes closed, leaning back, and melting.  Inside his head he began to laugh in complete and utter madness.  As he did so, darkness caught my eye in the back seat.
There were papers, coats, and a few hard helmets made of iron, probably.  I don’t know what hard helmets are made out of.   He was a construction man, no doubt.  I could smell it on him.  Perhaps he was deeply disturbed, and didn’t want to think about construction anymore.  Nobody that day would think about construction.  So I let the topic go.  It was alright.  Shiri was being born anew in my man-womb.      

We stayed in the car probably about an hour and just talked, until the horizon, blue as night, closed in.  I was so at ease in the presence of No-Good that I had taken off my shirt, and we leaned on either side of the station wagon, smoking a fatty as one.  His blazer was on the floor somewhere, his bolo tie of a cactus-woman dangling before my face.  

We asked each other questions sometimes but mostly talked about nothing.  He did once ask me:  “Brotha, have you’z ever seen Caligula all the way though? And I mean all the way.”

“Nah man, I don’t like exploitation flicks.  They’re stupid.”

“You sure you're not scared, little man?”  No-Good inched a little closer and slapped my arm.  Our skin was cold and flabby.   

“Nah.  Ever seen Cannibal Holocaust?”  

“Yeah, man!  Yeah!  S**t, that scene with the wood thing going through the lady’s body?  S**t, man! “

“Yeah, well, I saw that and I swear, I wasn’t squeamish or anything.  I just thought it was kind of a pointless and mean movie.  They actually killed animals to film it, man.  That wasn’t fake.  Remember when the explorer’s killed the tortoise?  That wasn’t fake man, the actors actually killed it, I’m not f****n’ around.”  

“They really killed the animals--”  I felt the graveness of nuclear war in No-Good’s lyrinx.  

“Uh-huh.  Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.”  

No-Good then began to stare at me with those bug-eyes; big white/red saucers faded in the shadow of nighttime.  I said nothing, but I became afraid. He looked like he wanted to assault me, in the sexual way, and then choke me.  Not in that order.

“There’s nothing like the real thing, is there, Robert?”  He murmured.  I began to worry if he was a veteran or something.  The veteran’s I’ve met disturb easily.  One even tried to drown his wife in a tub full of eggs.  It was a beautiful kind of violence to me, poetic in a gross, existential way.  Thanks to the big man upstairs, we have people like that.

“Nothing like the real thing.”  I mumbled.  I shifted a bit and saw that my shoe had caught a bit of towel, revealing a deep red crustiness.  I gasped a woman’s gasped and ripped off the few towels, No-Good even lifting his a*s so I could so so.  
There before me was a massive blood stain so deep and concentrated it was almost black at the center.  It was so massive that it was bigger than me and No-Good combined, running from the carpet and all the way up to the passenger's seat like a blob monster.   No-Good even did the honor of flicking on the overhead light in order for the reds and rust colors to shine through and suffocate me.  The smell was so metallic and bodily that I began to hear the buzzing of one million flies inside my head.  The glorious smell of weed was gone and now it was just the smell of iron and fluid so potent that I began to get the dry heaves.  

“Hey, don’t worry, it’s menstrual blood.  I had a young lady friend back in the day.”

I couldn’t utter anything but a trembling throat noise.  

“Oh lord, Robert, calm down, it’s just menstrual blood, I swear.”  

“I know.”  I said as the iron in the air began to sit me upright at the wheel.  Everything was tinted red now, and it would remain that way for me for several weeks.  “I know.  Holy s**t,”  I didn’t dare turn my head and look at it again.  “That’s a lot of blood.”              

“You’re tellin’ me.”  Quoth No-Good.  He covered the stain back up and we sat in silence again until his yellow mouth made words.  “That’s not why I gotta run away, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

‘Uh, God, that’s a lot of blood, man.”  It was real blood, too.  Everything was real.  To my right I felt No-Good shifting closer, his sad eyes on me.  Sour breath ran down my neck like a smoke dragon.  

He spoke to me in a slow fashion, but I wasn’t afraid anymore. “You’z gonna buy the damn car, or not.”

“I don’t know.”  I caught a glimpse of the man’s legs, like a hearty cow’s, or a muscle-y woman’s.  But all I could tell him was, “You have big legs.”  

“Robert I’ll tell you what,”  No-Good’s face was getting ever closer to mine, and warmth and peach-fuzz were radiation on my skin.  “Take this thing for a test drive, and take me to the Texaco station so I can buy supplies.  Then tell me if you want the car.”  

“The one on route 7?”

No-Good’s words hung in the air.  “Yah.”

“Okay.”  

As I pulled out of the baseball field it began to rain very softly.  I tested out the wipers and they worked great, wiping away God tears.  When we drove onto route 7 just outside of Dangbury lines, and evidence of human beings were finally on the rise.  The dark highway was alive with red and white car lights reflecting against the slick asphalt.  The roars of 18-wheelers zoomed by my ear, ready to crush me if it was necessary.  Most of the land beside the roadway were empty lots, scattered about with the occasional motel, Buick dealership (because Dangbury loves Buicks),  halfway house and trading post.  One of which had a giant indian head illuminated in the night time, under the menacing white and red cell tower; the king of all bee killers.  

“How do you like it?”  No-Good was very close to me, so close our thighs touched.  Occasionally the b*****d pointed out of the windshield as if I couldn’t see.  I’ve driven before, dumbass.  

“It’s smooth,”  I said, because that’s all I could say.  

“F**k yeah it’s smooth, man, f**k yeah.”  

“Man, are you crying?”  I thought he was.  There was desperation is his aura, but I had to focus.  The lanes were moving upward in a sudden slant, and I saw the sea of cars making their way up this titlewave of a hill.  God be with all people with sticks, this day.  God be with all who have flat tires this moment.  I could smell burning rubber.  

“I’z stressed out man, I’z stressed the f**k out.”

“Do you want me to help you?”  

“F**k yeah.”  He said.  Just then I felt fingers on my neck; cold sausage fingers.  

“What are you doing?”  

No-Good gently grazed his teeth against my neck skin, then kissed the same place the way a little girl kissed an auntie.  He rested his face there on my shoulder, and I kept driving, feeling Shiri swelling in my intestines.  It hurt, almost like if your appendix explodes, but I had to keep driving.  I pretended I was Zoro, because Zoro never backs down.   

Under the flourescent light of the Texaco station I stopped the car.  Someone had spray painted a large schlong on the side of my pump, and the face of Shiri was stapled all over the door of the convenience joint.  The minute the ignition fell dead, No-Good fell into me, and I wrapped my arms around the man.  

“Ooh, you’z sweet.” his hands were massaging my collar bones as his meaty face was in my sternum.  “Very sweet.”

“You’re sweet too.”  I said.  “But you’re not alright.  Holy s**t man, what’s the matter with you?”  He lifted his face and we met eyes.  “What’s wrong with you?”  

Somewhere on a gas station stereo, disgusting saxophone was playing.  “Have you ever held somebody's brain before?” No-Good said.  

“No I’m afraid not.”  

No-Good’s eyes were glazed like marbles and I held him, my space gone forever.  I now smelled like the human body and cologne samples.  No-Good smiled at me. “I killed somebody with my shovel last night.”  

“What kind of shovel, man?”

“A big diesel runnin’ shovel, man.”  

I was swallowed by the madness in his eyes.  The redness was staring at me.  In the white of his eyes, I saw his veins take the shape of little stick people, holding each other and patting each other.  Little red stick people coming to touch me and bleed on me.  I distanced my face from his, but he only came closer until the back of my head hit the window, and his lips talked on my lips.  

“Man, I’ve never had to clean meat and s**t out of my shovel-- s**t-- man--”  His speech was getting spotty and strained.  “I held part of a brain last night and oh God, I don’t know what to do now.”

A burning feeling was welling up in my stomach, through the back of my neck.  My head became light and I knew what was coming.  

“I held the pieces of it and I almost puked, man.”  Said No-Good.  “I held a life from beginning to end, and I held everything it’s body had done and felt and everything it saw and thought and got scared of.”  His eyes were shut tight, and he bit his own mouth, crushing the vein-people running loose in his eye balls.  “Man, I held everything they ever did.”  

“No-Good,”  I said, holding back my heaves.  “Was it a girl?”  

He didn’t answer me.  “I just want you to tell me that I’z a good man.  I’z still a good man no matter what awful s**t I do.”

I nodded as the heeves were spazzing into my gullet stronger than ever. Drums were beating in my ears and I tasted bile.  I had to close my eyes and turn my head away as No-Good leaned forward and planted his face against mine.  “Robert, I’z a good man, I is!  I swear!”

“Mm.” I nodded and held my breath when the lights began to flicker over the car, and that’s when I felt it coming.  Shiri was coming up, the gasses in my stomach pushed her forward and back like a patriarchal nightmare.  
I fumbled for the lock on the door behind me, and as the door open both I and No-Good fell back onto the pavement, the smell of rainbow gas sneaking into our nostrils.  I lept to my feet and ran to the edge of the highway, the wetness from all those tires and trucks flinging up into my face.  I knelt like an animal and began to vomit.  I vomited like an engine, there I went.  I made a cartoon about it, but I didn’t draw myself.  

“Robert!”  No-Good called to me as my insides spilled out onto the asphalt into a black iridescent pool of gasoline.  He ran to me with his big legs, and held onto my back.  “Robert, am I really that gross, man?”  

I finished and my hands began to tremble as they always do after I vomit, because throwing up always fills me with terror.  I wiped my mouth and spit on the ground, and No-Good turned me around to press my body on his body, and held me at my waist like a lady.
Suddenly, he went stiff, and pointed to the mess I made at our feet.  I turned my head and saw I had thrown up under a wasps nest, hovering probably 30 feet above us on a branch.  Big, red hornets began to calmly and slowly descend like angels to the pink liquid I spit up.  They hovered and danced above it all, getting closer and closer until they bathed in it’s sourness.

“Oh s**t,” I said as an image formed in my vomit.  The image of Shiri was now in one piece, black and white, smiling at me as the pile from my guts surrounded her like a halo.  On her face, the hornets began to crawl and gently kiss her, their bug-feet getting sticky and pink.  They were tender, self aware, playing and hovering like naked Victorian children.  

“S**t!”  I held No-Good by the shoulders as he began to collapse under the weight of everything in God’s domain.  “That’s her!  Mother f****r that’s the girl!”  He crowed as he began to weep into my collar bones, my tremor not willing to subside.  I pat him on the back, and looked towards Shiri.  “Robert, mother f****r, look at her!  Look at her!  That’s what she looked like, and now she’s stuck in my machine!  I saw her, I saw her!”

She was nothing but teeth, meat, and hair now.  The foam in her mouth was out there somewhere, dripping into the dirt, becoming brown.  I told Shiri this with my mind, and asked her if she knew what was happening, but she only laid there as a piece of paper in my sick.  
A hornet landed on her cheek, feeling the wet fax paper with it’s feelers.  Her eyes stripped me naked, as did the eyes of the hornet.  I heard them buzz by my ear and stood completely still, holding a massive crying man, and I heard a message in the humming of their wings.  It was a voice, a young voice that I never knew before, and it whispered like magic: “I’m free”.  

No-Good told me that the both of us needed drinks.  So back down the highway I drove to the outskirts of Redfield where a historic tavern nested.  I found new peace inside my ribcage as I drove with No-Good’s head resting on my lap.  At one point the station wagon began to hum as we drove under a vast stretch of sky, right by an airport, and a blank lot of Dangbury topsoil.  Silhouettes against the orange, light polluted sky were the open mouths and long necks of shovel machines began to appear as we ventured on.  One after another, passing by like dinosaurs, looking like they were gasping at us.  “Don’t look.”  I told No-Good.  They passed overhead until the trees enveloped the sky again.  The last piece of sky we saw was illuminated by a twirling green searchlight, looking for nothing.   

The tavern was renovated into some sort of motel way back when, but even farther back it served as a meeting place for revolutionary war heroes in their powdered wigs, shapely male legs and loud southern voices.  Some of them said the “N” word without shame, it was a terrible, strange trail of a time.  It was a grey house-looking building, from the colony era and all that.  The shrubs were brown, devoid of leaves, but cut like catholic crosses.  On the red porch and all over the windows, Shiris face was stapled under pink ribbons.  There was no wood or paint to be seen anywhere at the entrance, but Shiri and the pink ribbons.  It went on for miles, and they scattered on the floor with holes in the paper when the staple grew weak.  No-Good covered his eyes and I led him inside by the arm.  
He asked me if I was his friend under his breath as I did so.  I told him I was.       

Inside the tavern was a hell of red, brown and darkness.  It was so dim the world became static before my eyes.  There were a few high school kids in black kissing and biting each other's necklaces amongst one of the many empty white clothed circle-tables.  The others were a fat man in a black leisure suit, shaking his hips to the soft music playing.  There were also a boy and a girl sitting on each other and necking to the point where their faces were being consumed; I assumed they were f*****g.  There was also a tired, hook-nosed technician, managing ten, maybe more big clunky black cameras on rods, all connected to our local public access station, their lights glowing red like eyes.  They were scattered about in various places, all shooting the same thing.
The bar was empty, without a tender, like a ghost.  The wooden ceiling was so low I could reach up and touch it.   

No-Good and I sat in the way back, and ordered a big lime margarita to be shared between the two of us.  He laid his head on the table as I ran my fingers through his grey hair, and I watched the spectacle on a shallow stage all the way up front; what all the public access camera were recording.  It was a man like me, a man like No-Good, a man like all men.  He was sweating in his white suit up there, sporting a mullet and Jeffery Dahmer glasses.  He swayed back and forth like a sailboat creature, and shakily sang some sort of Christopher Cross song into the dusty microphone to very faint karaoke music.  Sailing, that’s what it was called, with the flamingo on the album cover- Sailing.  
There were flamingo salt and pepper shakers on every table, so sad.  I wanted them to feel better so I could feel better.  No flamingo should live in darkness, pink is not for darkness.  Pink is for light.  Pink will live forever, amen.  
We waited for our drink, and I made a cartoon about it on a napkin.  A flamingo holding the ten commandments in a ray of holy light is what it was.  I gave it to No-Good and the laugh he returned filled me entirely.  

“You’re drawings is funny.” He said.  

“Thanks.”

The man can’t sing like Christopher Cross, he can’t.  His eyes were getting heavy and his consciousness was fading fast on the tavern stage.

No-Good and I both laid our heads on the table, looking at each other, examining each other’s faces with our fingers like blind ladies.  He grabbed my nose one with his thumb and forefinger, making a sound like “honk”, and I discovered that was all I wanted.  I smiled at him and beckoned his knuckles against my lips so I could graze my teeth against them, kiss them and what not.

“Robert,”  he said.  “Am I a murderer?”  

I held his gaze and spoke as earnestly as I could, as that was the right thing to do.  “Yes.  You are a murderer, and you shouldn’t run from your court s**t, man.”  
No-Good made a face like I had shot him.  “Don’t run away, man.  Do it for her mama and papa, any body like that.”  

No-Good’s red eyes opened to reveal a profound depression that all human beings feel.  The floor dropped from under me, as it is in all of our instincts.  That is it, I knew that look.  That look all mammals have out of fear and certainty of death.  Maybe it happened to Shiri, in that mound of dirt as No-Good’s shovel ate her up and swallowed her.  And it still lingered as flashing orange lights came and let up the blue night.  

“Robert, are you gonna buy the car?”

“No.”  I said.  “I want you to stay here and have it-- It’s for your own good, man.”

He grabbed both of my hands, and put them up to his face, as if praying with them without my permission.  

“Will you do me a favor then?”  

“Anything that’ll help you, bud.”  

We sat up, and No-Good placed my hand on his breasts; a man breast.  Small, deflated, triangular.  I squeezed a little, and smelled the good and bad cholesterol in his heart.

“Robert, I want you to kill me.”  

There it was, I thought, that was it.  I could feel the atoms in the air telling, screaming at me not to.  I knew I didn’t want to, I knew that the mama’s and papa’s must be avenged, but his gaze was making me tired.  I was tired, almost as tired as he was of everything.  “How.”  

“Robert, I want you to tear me up into teeny tiny pieces, that’s how I want you to kill me.”     

“Please don’t make me kill for you, No-Good.”  

“You’z not a murderer.  I want you to kill me, it’s different.”  

The man on stage’s voice began to tremble, and the high school kids took the necklaces out of their mouths.
We reached out and cupped each other’s faces like women do.  “I won’t kill you, I’ll just swallow you up, that okay, man?”

With tears in his eyes and a smile on his mouth, he nodded to me with great enthusiasm, mouthing something like “please”.  I nodded back to him.  I told myself I would never kill, and I’m not killing now.  I would be pregnant with him, which was okay with me.  I would carry him in my man-womb until everything was over.    

“Okay.”  I said.  “If that will help you.”  Anxiety sets in on both parties.  

No-Good sat back in his chair, his arms out, taking deep breaths and contemplating what must have been an exciting life.  A life that must have been filled with beer guts, great cartoons, thoughts about Hitler, etc.  I watched him think about his life, and I thought of my own, but saw nothing except for the present moment, because overall that was it.  I wanted to dance in his brain waves, hold it in my hand, feel each little meat wrinkle inside of it; a life from beginning to end in my hands, glistening with wetness under a laboratory light.  

No-Good sighed and opened his eyes, nodding at me, loving me probably, as I was the last face he saw.  

“You ready?”  I asked.  

His smile faded and there was no turning back.“Yah.”  

I kissed his lips once, and then I sat myself down with the poise of a carpenter, I gingerly grabbed his shoulder with two fingers, and ripped it down like a piece of paper.  He was a piece of paper, I could see the white fibers between each tear, and his flatness.  With that I swallowed his arm.  I ripped down the center of his face and his body as his eyes were closed, peaceful, sleepy.  I swallowed it.  I ripped the other half, and I swallowed.  Then, the remaining arm holding many class rings, I crumpled into a ball, chewed with my teeth and I swallowed.  

Suddenly in the wooden chair across from me held nothing at all.  My gut jolted out and was heavy like machinery.  I turned and put my hands on the table and loneliness began to bite the hairs on my ears, but I knew this time, I wouldn’t throw up.  I would never throw up again.

I believe they forgot about my margarita, because it never came.  Probably because it was for two, but no more.  I tore up the cartoon on my napkin and watched the man on stage stagger and strain his voice as his tribute to Christopher Cross finished.  The man collapsed on stage with a thud and disintegrated under his suit, and behind me the camera’s turned their faces down, their red lights going dim.  
Suddenly all the lights and candles had blown out, and I was left alone in pitch darkness and dead silence, all alone.  The only light was the window, displaying the orange street lamp outside.  
I sat waiting for signs of life, waiting for a light so I could make my way to the door, and take the station wagon that was now mine, but nothing happened.  It was silent like the end.  
I sat still for hours that night and felt pink ribbons slowly falling from the ceiling and onto my lap like feathers.  This is what everything had been like all along, and I still feel it.  

It’s been five years, and I haven’t eaten, yet I still live.  I'm still pregnant with him, and he sustains me.  Sometimes I do worry that I killed him, and I think he knows that I do.  When I do worry, suddenly clouds and curls of pot smoke rise out of my mouth.  I’m certain it’s a sign.        

END    

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Author's Note

Most recent short story, written for a class.