"Shutting an Open Wound"
Dec. 21st, 2005 03:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ateolfthat story i finished last night and worked on and (mostly) off over the past several months...the first thing i've finished in 14 months...i'm sure it's pretty rough so if you actually feel like reading it feel free to criticize it harshly...i guess that's it...
She wouldn’t stop bleeding no matter how hard I touched her. I couldn’t even tell from where it came. Her soft, cumulonimbus flesh showered up into my pounding arms. The thunder came in the guise of screaming. I grabbed and groped and pushed but could not stave off the torrent. My hands were everywhere. I squeezed the nape of her neck, clenched her breasts, held down her hips, fingered her vulva, pressed her thighs, stroked her ankles, hooked her lips, pulled her ears, beat her arms, flattened her stomach, grabbed her ass, pinned her shoulders, clawed her back, and kissed her forehead. . . Nothing worked. The tempest shook and roared beneath me.
A long stretch of moments wore my trepidation down to a semblance of composure. I ran into the bathroom and tore the first aid kit apart. I went past the mere band-aids and shrouded her in gauze: painting a red mummy over her skin. This too was an empty gesture. Within minutes the cloth hung down in clumps and crumbled at the weight of the blood.
When she tried to sit up, I imagined her to look much like Lazarus with tits as he emerged from the tomb to be embraced and kissed by the Christ. My thoughts began to skim farther back through That Book to Exodus. I prayed to be Moses, my cock his serpent/staff raised with divine providence to part the Red Sea and have just a moment’s peace with her, alone in the valley before God sent back the walls over me: Pharaoh in wish and disposition. But this is the end of these religious metaphors. Sure, I could go on about dipping loaves of bread in her flesh puddles, but that’s not what happened.
This is. I pulled her close to me gazing deep into her slick, sticky face. Eyeballs darted wildly. I almost couldn’t see them but for the stirring of the current. “What can I do?” She could only respond in the same, ongoing scream. I listened for some shift in pitch or modulation of tone trying to decipher any meaning that might be coded by pain, but there was nothing. The screams maintained the same, stable pattern––a monotone of repetition.
What could I do? What could I do? What could I do?
I could pick up a phone and dial 911.
“911 operator. Police, fire, or ambulance?”
Nothing about the weather!? “I. . . I’m sorry, I. . . I must’ve dialed wrong.” It gave me the suspicion I was being led into a trap: following the wire right where it led me. I dropped the receiver and ran back to her side.
Her skin glistened in the current, waves of red streaming past every follicle, freckle, and pore. I could imagine her a lake or reflecting pool. I was a monument erected in her tribute, staring back at me on her uneasy surface––a storm in the capital. My fingers met their image and split the flow around them. New eddies formed and merged against the surrounding stream. Tides shifted. The balance of blood redistributed itself across the course of her rivered body. The tips of my fingers could feel her skin; but if I didn’t concentrate, the sensation was lost to the warm gushing above.
The constant screams suggested her need for help, even if they began to reek of mere habit. I wrapped her in tarpaulin, sealing the loose ends with duct tape. I stuffed her in the trunk (to minimize damage) and drove to the nearest hospital. I did get a bit upset to find there had been considerable leakage but didn’t let this minor concern interfere with my handling the real problem at hand.
Not wanting to have to answer a bunch of questions I wouldn’t even know where to begin with, I decided it’d be best to dump her body before the doors of the emergency room and quickly get away before anyone saw me. Three steps back towards my car, this plan proved a failure.
“Hey! Get back here! This isn’t a fucking landfill. Take your goddamn trash someplace else!”
“But. . . Wait. . . That’s not trash. She needs. . . She’s a girl. She needs help. She. . . She’s hurt. . . She. . .”
“Hey, asshole, don’t fuck with me! This is a hospital! I don’t know what sorta sick impulse makes you dump that shit here of all places, but this ain’t the fuckin’ place, okay? Get the hell outta here!”
I started to unravel the cocoon, but the metamorphosis was premature: there was no butterfly, only blood. “Please, she. . .”
“Jesus, man! You’re getting it all over the place! That’s disgusting! Clean this shit up! There’s a dumpster around the corner, just get out of here! There’s sick people trying to get by here!”
A man on crutches ambled past.
“I’m serious; she needs a doctor! She’ll die. I. . . I don’t know. She needs your help. She. . .”
“Shut up! If you don’t get the fuck outta here now, I’m calling security! And take that garbage with you, you prick!”
I quietly dragged the half-shrouded body back to the trunk, streaking one giant blood-angel across the ambulance thoroughfare. I paused, almost wrapping her back up, but I could see so much blood in thetruck trunk already that it hardly mattered if it soaked up any more.
Back home I didn’t know what to do with her so I just left her in the driveway for a few hours. She didn’t stop bleeding. I worked hard to clean the mess from earlier; but, as everyone knows, bloodstains are the worst. When I checked back outside, I saw the concrete supporting a solid system of confluences––congruent in their infintesimatude. Tributaries and rivulets swallowed their parent. I traced them all back to her, wading upstream, my back facing the mouth of the driveway.
She was a mess, and she was extending her reach down the block. Out in the open I could feel the eyes tearing me apart––the common spectacle: too shocked yet to make a move, too horrified to pull away. I quickly moved her inside, in fear for my carpet and furniture. I stuffed the body (still generously giving) into the hall closet––its former contents cast into a desperately constructed mound, toppling in its fluidity as it migrated into the living room where it awaited dispersion to loci of future designation (never received).
Closeted in this new tomb, she evaded all sight but met all sound. I believe the word “help” was repeated, but the source [mouth] was choked and the mouth [ears] was confused, disjointed / shards of paranoia. In this state I waded the cast mound and sat down on the sofa. Time dematerialized (an oxymoron only until it’s been lost and its form is traced by the dissolution fading from the air). At some indeterminate point the phone rang.
“Unh. . . Oh what? . . . Oh, hello, sir. . . No, no, I haven’t heard from her lately. . . Oh. . . Uh. . . I’m. . . No. . . I’ll, I’ll tell her you called if. . .when I talk to her. . . Yes, well. . . I’m, I’m sorry. I. . . No, sir. I understand. . . Yes, sir. . . Okay, uh. . . Oh. . . Um, bye.”
It was the first of several phone calls from her father that were to occur over the next several days. Each one took me by a greater surprise even though I’d come to expect them more and more. I never knew what to say, and as time wore on my feigned ignorance glared an insincerity so gauche as to even put me at dis-ease.
It was the day after––early morning demisted a cloud nebulating sleep and manic unrest––that I noticed the blood seeping from the cracks of the door. I opened the closet; the reservoir surged against my thighs and I slipped. I reached out grasping for some theoretical buoy as instinct was certain I’d drown, but I only managed to fall on one knee. She leaned against the back wall oblivious to her own, continual spray. Thus began my hourly marches on the back garden, armed with bucket and blood: overflowing an extension of the box in the hall.
My last telephone conversation with her father ended in the words “you fucking sneak, you lying fucking piece of shit.” I did not say them. The next day his fist was pounding against my front door.
“Where is she?”
“Wh. . .what?”
“Where the fuck is my daughter!?”
“I. . . I don’t know. I still haven’t heard from her. I. . .”
“Bullshit!” He shoved me to the floor and made his way inside––the hall carpet squishing beneath his feet. He called for her in the living room. He stormed into the bedroom, knocking things over, smashing objects against the wall, tearing apart the dressers and drawers. Then began his inventory of doors: closets, rooms; flung open; contents examined––opening every one until he made his way back to the start. I stared up from the floor having not moved a muscle as he opened the hall closet and stopped. He stood there in [presumed] amazement––eyes fixed inside the closet for what seemed an hour (more likely a minute). His head slowly turned about his rigid body and he looked at me with the same, blank astonishment before turning abruptly back to the closet’s interior. Another pause.
“Oh, christ! This is not right. This can’t be right. This can’t be right at all. Oh, christ! This is disgusting! You. . . I don’t even know what I can say to you anymore! I knew you weren’t right. Not at all! No goddamn wonder she don’t talk to you anymore. You’re a mess. This place is goddamned filthy! It’s disgusting! You. . . Clean up and get your act together, boy! Frankly, I don’t even wanna talk to you no longer, myself. You’re a real piece of work, boy! You’ve got some serious thinkin’ to do! If you don’t get your shit together real fast, I wager you’ll be out on the street on your ass before the year’s up. Oh, christ! All I know is I better get out of here before that stench gets me sick!”
He left making a face that suggested it was all he could do not to vomit as he stepped over me. The door was slammed shut and I lay there with no sense of time or consciousness until I felt the first tickle of blood trickling against my skin. Routine and duty surfaced. I fetched the bucket.
As the mist of reality diffused across the smoking embers of what I still considered my life, the days became hours and the hours stretched toward eternity. Routine patterned into commandment handed across aeons. All else turned strange and foreign. Superstition grew and clashed against even the mundane. Knowledge and intuition were replaced by blood, bucket, fear, and sound––the drone. . .scream. Consciousness nubbed to a beam. I’d become a zombie––the living dead in servitude to the dead living.
Then one day I found myself at the base of the fountain, dipping the bucket against her cascading waters. Yawning, I muttered the last words I can remember saying, “I love you.” I had been crushed by my overwhelming helplessness in her wake. I dropped the bucket letting its contents spill into the hallway, letting it all spill and move away from me. The backs of my fingers met her cheekbone and I cried in cheap imitation of the tears spilling from her every pore.
A limit had been reached. We exchanged a glance of understanding, perhaps for the first time ever.
I dug my fingers into her chest and pulled it open, the soft tissue giving easily: her fabric soaked and rotten. Stretching the two edges back wide, I stepped my feet in slowly, wishing at first I’d worn boots but quickly dismissing the absurdity of such a thought. I lay down inside her and quietly shut the door. Her screams were more intense from this vantage, but sound became muted as the liquid dripped into my ears. My eyes fell shut against the red darkness. My elongated form stretched into the sepulchral tenderness and warmth of her own self––a fervent rushing to match the exterior. I lay still, yet felt a rising current bringing me closer. My lungs slowly filled and I drowned: now not reaching but at rest.
She wouldn’t stop bleeding no matter how hard I touched her. I couldn’t even tell from where it came. Her soft, cumulonimbus flesh showered up into my pounding arms. The thunder came in the guise of screaming. I grabbed and groped and pushed but could not stave off the torrent. My hands were everywhere. I squeezed the nape of her neck, clenched her breasts, held down her hips, fingered her vulva, pressed her thighs, stroked her ankles, hooked her lips, pulled her ears, beat her arms, flattened her stomach, grabbed her ass, pinned her shoulders, clawed her back, and kissed her forehead. . . Nothing worked. The tempest shook and roared beneath me.
A long stretch of moments wore my trepidation down to a semblance of composure. I ran into the bathroom and tore the first aid kit apart. I went past the mere band-aids and shrouded her in gauze: painting a red mummy over her skin. This too was an empty gesture. Within minutes the cloth hung down in clumps and crumbled at the weight of the blood.
When she tried to sit up, I imagined her to look much like Lazarus with tits as he emerged from the tomb to be embraced and kissed by the Christ. My thoughts began to skim farther back through That Book to Exodus. I prayed to be Moses, my cock his serpent/staff raised with divine providence to part the Red Sea and have just a moment’s peace with her, alone in the valley before God sent back the walls over me: Pharaoh in wish and disposition. But this is the end of these religious metaphors. Sure, I could go on about dipping loaves of bread in her flesh puddles, but that’s not what happened.
This is. I pulled her close to me gazing deep into her slick, sticky face. Eyeballs darted wildly. I almost couldn’t see them but for the stirring of the current. “What can I do?” She could only respond in the same, ongoing scream. I listened for some shift in pitch or modulation of tone trying to decipher any meaning that might be coded by pain, but there was nothing. The screams maintained the same, stable pattern––a monotone of repetition.
What could I do? What could I do? What could I do?
I could pick up a phone and dial 911.
“911 operator. Police, fire, or ambulance?”
Nothing about the weather!? “I. . . I’m sorry, I. . . I must’ve dialed wrong.” It gave me the suspicion I was being led into a trap: following the wire right where it led me. I dropped the receiver and ran back to her side.
Her skin glistened in the current, waves of red streaming past every follicle, freckle, and pore. I could imagine her a lake or reflecting pool. I was a monument erected in her tribute, staring back at me on her uneasy surface––a storm in the capital. My fingers met their image and split the flow around them. New eddies formed and merged against the surrounding stream. Tides shifted. The balance of blood redistributed itself across the course of her rivered body. The tips of my fingers could feel her skin; but if I didn’t concentrate, the sensation was lost to the warm gushing above.
The constant screams suggested her need for help, even if they began to reek of mere habit. I wrapped her in tarpaulin, sealing the loose ends with duct tape. I stuffed her in the trunk (to minimize damage) and drove to the nearest hospital. I did get a bit upset to find there had been considerable leakage but didn’t let this minor concern interfere with my handling the real problem at hand.
Not wanting to have to answer a bunch of questions I wouldn’t even know where to begin with, I decided it’d be best to dump her body before the doors of the emergency room and quickly get away before anyone saw me. Three steps back towards my car, this plan proved a failure.
“Hey! Get back here! This isn’t a fucking landfill. Take your goddamn trash someplace else!”
“But. . . Wait. . . That’s not trash. She needs. . . She’s a girl. She needs help. She. . . She’s hurt. . . She. . .”
“Hey, asshole, don’t fuck with me! This is a hospital! I don’t know what sorta sick impulse makes you dump that shit here of all places, but this ain’t the fuckin’ place, okay? Get the hell outta here!”
I started to unravel the cocoon, but the metamorphosis was premature: there was no butterfly, only blood. “Please, she. . .”
“Jesus, man! You’re getting it all over the place! That’s disgusting! Clean this shit up! There’s a dumpster around the corner, just get out of here! There’s sick people trying to get by here!”
A man on crutches ambled past.
“I’m serious; she needs a doctor! She’ll die. I. . . I don’t know. She needs your help. She. . .”
“Shut up! If you don’t get the fuck outta here now, I’m calling security! And take that garbage with you, you prick!”
I quietly dragged the half-shrouded body back to the trunk, streaking one giant blood-angel across the ambulance thoroughfare. I paused, almost wrapping her back up, but I could see so much blood in the
Back home I didn’t know what to do with her so I just left her in the driveway for a few hours. She didn’t stop bleeding. I worked hard to clean the mess from earlier; but, as everyone knows, bloodstains are the worst. When I checked back outside, I saw the concrete supporting a solid system of confluences––congruent in their infintesimatude. Tributaries and rivulets swallowed their parent. I traced them all back to her, wading upstream, my back facing the mouth of the driveway.
She was a mess, and she was extending her reach down the block. Out in the open I could feel the eyes tearing me apart––the common spectacle: too shocked yet to make a move, too horrified to pull away. I quickly moved her inside, in fear for my carpet and furniture. I stuffed the body (still generously giving) into the hall closet––its former contents cast into a desperately constructed mound, toppling in its fluidity as it migrated into the living room where it awaited dispersion to loci of future designation (never received).
Closeted in this new tomb, she evaded all sight but met all sound. I believe the word “help” was repeated, but the source [mouth] was choked and the mouth [ears] was confused, disjointed / shards of paranoia. In this state I waded the cast mound and sat down on the sofa. Time dematerialized (an oxymoron only until it’s been lost and its form is traced by the dissolution fading from the air). At some indeterminate point the phone rang.
“Unh. . . Oh what? . . . Oh, hello, sir. . . No, no, I haven’t heard from her lately. . . Oh. . . Uh. . . I’m. . . No. . . I’ll, I’ll tell her you called if. . .when I talk to her. . . Yes, well. . . I’m, I’m sorry. I. . . No, sir. I understand. . . Yes, sir. . . Okay, uh. . . Oh. . . Um, bye.”
It was the first of several phone calls from her father that were to occur over the next several days. Each one took me by a greater surprise even though I’d come to expect them more and more. I never knew what to say, and as time wore on my feigned ignorance glared an insincerity so gauche as to even put me at dis-ease.
It was the day after––early morning demisted a cloud nebulating sleep and manic unrest––that I noticed the blood seeping from the cracks of the door. I opened the closet; the reservoir surged against my thighs and I slipped. I reached out grasping for some theoretical buoy as instinct was certain I’d drown, but I only managed to fall on one knee. She leaned against the back wall oblivious to her own, continual spray. Thus began my hourly marches on the back garden, armed with bucket and blood: overflowing an extension of the box in the hall.
My last telephone conversation with her father ended in the words “you fucking sneak, you lying fucking piece of shit.” I did not say them. The next day his fist was pounding against my front door.
“Where is she?”
“Wh. . .what?”
“Where the fuck is my daughter!?”
“I. . . I don’t know. I still haven’t heard from her. I. . .”
“Bullshit!” He shoved me to the floor and made his way inside––the hall carpet squishing beneath his feet. He called for her in the living room. He stormed into the bedroom, knocking things over, smashing objects against the wall, tearing apart the dressers and drawers. Then began his inventory of doors: closets, rooms; flung open; contents examined––opening every one until he made his way back to the start. I stared up from the floor having not moved a muscle as he opened the hall closet and stopped. He stood there in [presumed] amazement––eyes fixed inside the closet for what seemed an hour (more likely a minute). His head slowly turned about his rigid body and he looked at me with the same, blank astonishment before turning abruptly back to the closet’s interior. Another pause.
“Oh, christ! This is not right. This can’t be right. This can’t be right at all. Oh, christ! This is disgusting! You. . . I don’t even know what I can say to you anymore! I knew you weren’t right. Not at all! No goddamn wonder she don’t talk to you anymore. You’re a mess. This place is goddamned filthy! It’s disgusting! You. . . Clean up and get your act together, boy! Frankly, I don’t even wanna talk to you no longer, myself. You’re a real piece of work, boy! You’ve got some serious thinkin’ to do! If you don’t get your shit together real fast, I wager you’ll be out on the street on your ass before the year’s up. Oh, christ! All I know is I better get out of here before that stench gets me sick!”
He left making a face that suggested it was all he could do not to vomit as he stepped over me. The door was slammed shut and I lay there with no sense of time or consciousness until I felt the first tickle of blood trickling against my skin. Routine and duty surfaced. I fetched the bucket.
As the mist of reality diffused across the smoking embers of what I still considered my life, the days became hours and the hours stretched toward eternity. Routine patterned into commandment handed across aeons. All else turned strange and foreign. Superstition grew and clashed against even the mundane. Knowledge and intuition were replaced by blood, bucket, fear, and sound––the drone. . .scream. Consciousness nubbed to a beam. I’d become a zombie––the living dead in servitude to the dead living.
Then one day I found myself at the base of the fountain, dipping the bucket against her cascading waters. Yawning, I muttered the last words I can remember saying, “I love you.” I had been crushed by my overwhelming helplessness in her wake. I dropped the bucket letting its contents spill into the hallway, letting it all spill and move away from me. The backs of my fingers met her cheekbone and I cried in cheap imitation of the tears spilling from her every pore.
A limit had been reached. We exchanged a glance of understanding, perhaps for the first time ever.
I dug my fingers into her chest and pulled it open, the soft tissue giving easily: her fabric soaked and rotten. Stretching the two edges back wide, I stepped my feet in slowly, wishing at first I’d worn boots but quickly dismissing the absurdity of such a thought. I lay down inside her and quietly shut the door. Her screams were more intense from this vantage, but sound became muted as the liquid dripped into my ears. My eyes fell shut against the red darkness. My elongated form stretched into the sepulchral tenderness and warmth of her own self––a fervent rushing to match the exterior. I lay still, yet felt a rising current bringing me closer. My lungs slowly filled and I drowned: now not reaching but at rest.
