Reason

Dust muted sunlight, bits of specs of motes spinning maddeningly along the shafts of light.  Suddenly, they ride a spiraling wave of smoke blown from far in a corner where the sun won’t touch her.  Like tiny surfers, the bits ride the smoke waves along the shaft of light from the row of broken windows to the left of a row of abandoned hulks of metal and the forlorn carcasses of rats.  An artistic display, too perfectly wretched to be mundane and she acknowledges this as proof of the hand of god.  She can even make out the warts on the ring finger, the little hairs along his knuckles. 

 

The constant thump of pigeon’s kamikaze runs into the high walls for lack of brains to find their way back to the row of windows…Christ…she inhales another cigarette.  A pile of dead butts built into a pyramid before her crossed legs.  The smell of the far corner where the last batch of grizzly squatters chose to make their ‘bathroom’ peels back the lining of her sinuses but she refuses to move.  Something is supposed to happen. 

Right

about

                        now…

 

Or not, just the constant thump of kamikaze pigeons and the wire-wisp scratch of spider’s legs up and down the old cement walls.  Once upon a time men and woman marched in through those broad steel doors at the tolling of the 1^st shift bell, then stood at parade rest with one hand on a bright red button and the other turned so they could see the lunch hour fast approaching on their watches.  Once upon a time those metal hulks all in a row roared forth with noise and heat and belched out a steady if modest income for more than 85% of the town.  Now they just hulk, belching only in their staid and rust-addled dreams while the town evaporates into more hulks of abandoned doublewides and honky-tonk bars.  She couldn’t give a s**t, aside from her soul-dehydrated constipation, about the source or the soon to be settled misery of the town in which she was born.  That her mother died, eaten alive by the third machine down from the main doors where the rat carcasses seem most prevalent, is of only passing interest.  She is waiting for something to happen.  It’s going to.  It has to.

 

Soon.

 

A new sound intrudes—even the pigeons begin to circle, wondering—but she recognizes it for yet another wanderer, coming in for a rest before tackling the less than amiable passing vehicles for a ride north south east or west.  Glass shattering, then shuffling rubber souls over the crushed remains on the concrete floor.  They always break the glass, even though the glass is already broken.

 

 She doesn’t bother to turn.  He’ll reach her peripheral vision soon enough—a speck of soot, growing larger as he nears.  A blob of organic indistinguishable shades of gray and black, then finally a man with no hair on his face, short cropped jailhouse hair, and a sleeveless T-shirt several shades darker than its original white.  He watches her as if she might turn suddenly and rip his throat out with her bare teeth.  She considers it, never looking away from the dancing dusty shafts of sun.  There’s a pack on his back, small, not enough to sustain a bum.  A kid?  He’s just a kid.  Peach fuzz on his face, juvenile hall short-cropped hair.  Runaway.  He won’t have a bottle.  It’ll be drugs.

 

He looks off down the long wide dusty room, right through the shafts of light and the hulks of dead metal like they weren’t even there.  He is trying to figure out what she is staring at.  He can’t see god.  Not the warts, not the tiny hairs on his knuckles.  Satisfied, at least, that hers is a non-violent sort of crazy, he ventures a greeting:

 

“Hey.”  He says, pulling off nonchalant like a rookie.

 

No response.

 

“This your place?  Mind if I crash here?”

 

No response.

 

Something is happening.  Ozone grows thick along the dead wiring of the old factory and static raises the stunted hairs along her neck and shoulders.  She turns to look at him but isn’t sure she’s seeing him.  All the world has gone sunlight and dust mites, like some over-bright, over-exposed day at the beach where the sounds suddenly become muted and you know—know—that shark in the water is about to bite. 

 

“Come here.”  She says.  Her lips feel like slabs of dead weight.  Dust blows off her voice in clouds.  He looks excited, she wonders if it’s part of the movie…the scene where the stupid kids go ahead and f**k, even though they know the killer is loose.  He has that let’s go down the cellar and find out what made that noise look.  “Come on over here” she says.

 

“I got some coke…” She doesn’t give a s**t about his coke.  Come here.  She thinks. It’s happening.  The hand of god…she can see it.

 

He scoots closer, but not close.  The static has reached him too.  She can see the freshly mown lawn of his hair bristling.  Ozone shrieks.  Lightning somewhere, she thinks, but the sunlight continues to spotlight the filthy concrete floor and pool over the death and senselessness of this place.  He has his hand in his lap, rubbing.  She cracks a smile that feels like glass breaking.

 

“Come on.  Please.” 

 

He comes.  She lets him put his hand on her face, scraping away a layer of soot.  He won’t kiss her, they never do.  Just start digging with their hands into her dark places.  They knead her breasts like bakers, bruising.  It’s starts to feel good.  Electricity builds up in dead wiring, blasting out in bursts of searing ozone.  He takes her without a word, thrusting into her nightmare and pounding the nail until she allows a moan.  She can see the warts on his ring finger, the tiny hairs along his knuckles. 

 

With his eyes closed she can imagine him as a soapstone statue, hard and unreal and more glorious than real and too much art to be an accident.  A reason…she knew it was here, somewhere, not in the rotting corpses of rats or even the stain of her mother on the concrete floor but in the shafts of sunlight and the hated hand of god.  She wraps her arms around his shoulders (who ever he was) and bites down hard into his neck.  The blood flows too freely, is too warm, to be the body of christ.  There is too much aroma, the feel of it covering her, running over her lips and dripping onto her hardened n*****s is too real.  Too mundane.

 

His screams are lost in hers.  He tries to pull away but she clasps him tight, hoping to catch the spirit before it flees, to see the truth before it abandons the shell of the pathetic child it has inhabited.  But she is lost again, fooled, outplayed.  He bucks, he screams, trying to free himself but only piercing her more deeply and she is angered to discover it still feels pretty good.  She sets her teeth to the wound and chews until the stink of ozone passes.  Bits of flesh catch in her teeth and she spits as his struggles weaken.

 

“…why…” Or maybe it was wait, or what, or any of a million things they say when they are dying.

 

“THAT’S WHAT I WANNA KNOW!  THAT’S ALL I WANNA KNOW!  YOU F**K!  YOU GODDAMN CHEAT!” 

She lets his body fall beside her, his penis slipping out of her spent, leaving a snail-trail of god along the floor.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Deidre A. H.]

Whoa. This is... definitely creepy. Your attention to detail is unnerving, in the way you can describe certain things so grotesquely and paint the scene, and yet you don't touch every little detail in the scenario, only the ones that matter. THAT takes some serious skill, in my opinion.

The entire story is just dark and, by the end, frightening. The last line in particular gave me shivers, and I do believe they were also of disgust. But that's a good thing--it means your story got to me. I felt every word and line of it. It was disgusting and dark and just plain damn sick.

But I can appreciate that. Believe me, I can.

Absolutely awesome. Good luck in my contest, and thank you for writing something that appealed so intensely to my sick, twisted mind.

[Damian Alan Gray]

An astounding example of the macabre at its best! Great work, my friend! This will surely bring on a few nightmares this evening. Beautifully written. Bravo!

[yinseriv]

The story is in the details. Yours are flawless. The suspense was built with loving care. I am glad she got to see God at the end. Perfection.